John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot

My tiny bit for the dogs

I don't own a dog, but many of those close to me do, and I admire those who devote so much of their time to helping dogs who have been in distress.

To help out, I'm putting aside some space on Dot Dot Dot to help an online effort to raise food for dogs in shelters. If you run a blog yourself, please read through and continue adding yourself to the blog hop. 

What follows below is material that I'm passing along. 

Here’s how it works:

• The Write a Post, Help a Dog program is aimed at raising awareness of the more then 4 million dogs that wind up in shelters and breed rescues each year. As well as to help get them all food (our goal is 10,000 lbs of food in the next two weeks) for the more than four million dogs that wind up in shelters and breed rescues each year.
• For each blog post mentioning the Pedigree Foundation from now until midnight ET on September 3, Pedigree will donate 20 pounds of its new dry Pedigree recipe food for dogs — its best recipe ever — to a shelter, because every dog deserves leading nutrition.
• Feel free to mae your post more visually appealing by using either or both of the two images seen in this post.
• The Pedigree Foundation — a 501 (C)(3) nonprofit organization is committed to helping dogs by providing grants to shelters and rescues and encouraging dog adoption. This year the Foundation has already raised more than $376,570 against its goal of $1.5 million to carry out its work to fund grants that not only help shelters operate, but to further shelter innovations.

The Pedigree Foundation depends on charitable contributions from individuals to carry out its mission to help dogs find loving homes. In addition to writing a blog post, here’s how you can help:

• Donate online at http://pedigreefoundation.org/donate.aspx
• Apply for a shelter grant from the Pedigree Foundation by completing a form atwww.pedigreefoundation.org
• Purchase Dogs Rule Gear at www.dogsrulegear.com where the proceeds go to the Pedigree Foundation to help loving dogs find a home. SPECIAL OFFER: Get 10 percent off Dogs Rule Gear by using the promo code BlogPaws10 from August 22 – September 30.

Once you get your post up and ready please feel free to grab the link code to include it in your post and add your link to the list so it is easier to keep track of all the posts plus it makes it so easy for your friends to learn about the event and see the progress we are making towards our goal of 10,000 lbs of food.

 

 

 

HuffPo and economics

In Saturday's NYT:

 

When The Huffington Post announced earlier this week that it was being acquired by AOL for $315 million in cash and stock, one group felt slighted: a set of unpaid bloggers for the site, identifying by the Twitter hashtag #huffpuff, which claims that The Huffington Post has “built a blog-empire on the backs of thousands of citizen journalists.”

via fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com

Fair enough. But let's be realistic.

When Huffington started, part of its cachet came from the enlistment of celebrities, often movie stars, to write blog posts. Part of *that* cachet came from knowing that the stars were unpaid: that is, no one was sponsoring what they said, which raises the credibility quotient.

Mixing in with the celebs were countless ordinary folks. I can see why some of them feel aggrieved, but let's be realistic. Expecting a slice of the inevitable HuffPo sale is like expecting Facebook to issue dividends to the people who post a lot of status updates or photos.

Gone Saturday morning

I showed Martha something I've noticed week in, week out, in terms of how this blog attracts an audience. Without question, I get the lowest traffic of the week on Saturdays.I get it: it's the weekend, and the readership for this blog (plus the many people who land on it accidentally or via search) peaks during the work week. The funny thing for me is that Saturday is often a good posting day for me: I have more time on the weekend to read things, notice things and explore. (A bit of a secret: I put away blog posts on the weekend that appear during the weekdays, when I'm far more likely to be swamped.)

I've been at this blog for the better part of seven years, and in the earlier phase, I thought more carefully about timing posts and generating traffic. These days, I don't much care. I do fine for numbers, and I'm still having fun. I might have once decided to counter-program on Saturdays by holding back content, but I don't care about that either. After all, there's nothing wrong with Monday's reader scrolling back over Saturday's posts.

 

Traffic trends and Google image search

A funny thing happened with the traffic on my blog in July: it went up, and a lot. And it's stayed there, it seems. A typical day before would be 1,100 page views and 800-odd visitors (not to be confused with 800 odd visitors, although that may be true also). Now, a low day has fewer than 2,000 visitors.

Which has been interesting, because as regular readers have probably noted, my posting activity has been scattershot lately, owing to some other projects and commitments.

So, is the lesson here something like "Post less, and get more traffic"?

Um, no. It's much more simple than that. I owe the vast majority of the traffic to a design change with Google's image search. If you've noticed, Google now presents a large array of images when you search for any word or phrase, and this has been the trigger, it seems, that pushed the traffic up.

If you've landed here because you were looking for, say, Banksy, welcome. Look around. And come back often!

Feedly groovy: A splashy way to control your reading list

Surf’s Up, as published in the St. John's Telegram on Thursday, July 22, 2010. Click here to read more Surf's Up.]

Sometimes you know something so well that you can’t imagine it could possibly be different. But when you’re shown a new way, and the benefits are instantly obvious, it can be a bit thrilling.

We’re all creatures of habit, but our online patterns are hardly cemented. You may prefer, say, the same type of breakfast cereal through your life, but your online preferences are going to change sooner or later. (Still using Alta Vista to look stuff up?)

A few weeks ago, my eyes were pointed to a service that has breathed new life into a service I’ve been using for years, and for which I now have a whole new appreciation.

Feedly
I’ve been using Google Reader for the better part of five years, and was practically an apostle for it after I first set it up. Reader is what’s called an aggregator, and it was the first tool that managed my RSS feeds that was a genuine pleasure to have.

RSS – really simple syndication, to use one definition – is a workhorse of the web, pushing out content to the people who want updates. It’s not obvious, but it’s integral to many news sites, but is used for many other applications, from news releases to newsletters to personal sites.

Google Reader allowed me to synthesize all that data into one central place. Best, I could toggle to it while using other Google apps, like Gmail or the family calendar.

The hitch? Well, being a creature of habit, I got accustomed to the same look and feel … and got, well, a little bored. I just haven’t been using it nearly as much as I first did.

Enter Feedly, which takes your Google Reader feeds and hands it back to you, looking fantastic.

“A fun, magazine-like start page” is how Feedly pitches itself in bold print, to visitors who’ve come to kick the tires. Fair description, to say the least.

Like a good magazine, Feedly knows that design is as important as the content itself. Thus, some images are given a notable display, the fonts are clean and sharp, and columns are put to sharp use. It’s a lesson that makes perfect sense to me, almost three decades since I first learned the basics of composing a page and falling in love with typography, and learned that how something is presented is absolutely key to how it is understood.

After a quick install, my categories all moved over, including all my feeds and preferences. But this is no duplication: it’s a completely new, and better experience

In an instant, Feedly made skimming through my daily news diet a pleasure.

Getting started

So, if you don’t use Google Reader (or Feedly), you might be scratching you head, and wondering if you’re missing something. Bottom line: you are.

I’d recommend giving Feedly a shot. After all, if you’re reading a column about online culture, and have made it this far, I bet you spend enough time looking at screens that you could use some help organizing things.

So, let’s say your interests include headlines about Boston’s sports teams; releases from your alma mater; newsletters from the company that handles your investments; social-media mentions of the company where you work; a few political blogs; and, um, reports about your favourite rock band.

Or, maybe you’re into mountain climbing, hand-crafted sweaters, Italian football stars and gossip magazines. 

It doesn’t matter. The range of interests is enormous, and can be as customizable and unique as you are.

Like something you see? Copy and paste the URL into a field to add it to your menu. Set it up in a particular category that you can name and edit. Twitter feeds, by the way, are easy to add, and exploring for new content is a slice.

Give it a shot. I hope you get half as excited as I am.

Elsewhere this week

Netflix comes to Canada
Well, not yet. But soon, and how, this is going to mean something major for countless thousands of Canadian movie-watchers, not to mention the video-rental stores that have relied on their business. Netflix has built a solid business model south of the border since the late 1990s with movies-by-mail, but everybody is more excited about where their business is rapidly going: online. Indeed, the Canadian business will exclusively offer on-demand content, particularly movies and TV shows, almost certainly at a flat rate like 10 bucks a month. Couch potatoes, you’ve been warned. 

 

John Gushue is an online editor with CBC News in St. John’s. Twitter: @johngushue. 

A new banner

If you look at the top of the blog, you'll see a new banner fixed into place. 

It's a crop of this photograph that Martha took this weekend in Eastport, or just outside, on the road to Salvage. I took a shot on my phone of the same sunset, which I posted here. The boy in the photo is our son Nicholas. (He wanted to pose so that he would look like Atlas, cradling not the Earth but the sun on his shoulders. Martha got this snap along the way; to me, it sums up his 10-year-old self.) 

 The font in the banner, if anyone is wondering, is the ever-Apple-friendly Skia. 

Nicholas was the featured element of the previous banner. Before even I forget what it looked like, here it is. (It's a shot of Nicholas looking out from a hill in Ferryland.) 

 

Going to blog? Do it for yourself, not for cash

[Surf's Up, as published in the St. John's Telegram on Thursday, June 10, 2010. Click here to read more Surf's Up.]

Several times over the last few months, I’ve received a few messages from friends or readers looking for a few tips about blogging. Two were wondering about launching a blog, while another was at that edgy area, where he’s been wondering about packing it in.

Blogs may not have the novelty or trendy appeal that they did six or seven years ago, but they’re more popular than ever. But it’s hardly unusual to find a once-active blog has gone dormant, or a blogger is stepping back from the fray. Why? There are several reasons, but as with other hobbies, I imagine that the fire just dwindles away.

This seems to be the case with one of my blogging friends. My advice was simple: take a breath, dial back your expectations, and park a note on the blog that you’re on break for a little while. I happen to like his blog a lot, and completely out of self-interest I’d like to see him keep it going. My pitch was this: you don’t need to post frequently, and that I’d rather read a good post once a week than nothing at all.

Many bloggers, of course, post far more often that once a week when they get started. It’s only natural: you’ve got something to say, it’s all new and exciting, and you’re clipping on the buzz of doing something new and exciting. But like a caffeine rush, it doesn’t last. Quite often, those blogs collapse or tumble into a virtual graveyard.

So, that may not be the most optimistic way to describe blogging culture, but it does bring a layer of reality to things. I’ve been publishing my own blog for six years, and I’ve enjoyed it because I make sure it doesn’t feel like work. I make a small commitment of time through the week, and although it’s an obligation to keep it updated, I never want to feel like it’s a chore. 

 

I wasn’t surprised to read in the most recent Technorati survey of the blogosphere that the most important thing that most bloggers gain from their sites is personal satisfaction. There are other reasons, of course, like networking, promotion, professional development and money. [On that last point, you may be curious to learn, though, that very few corporations use blogs as a revenue generator, as opposed to 40 per cent of part-time bloggers, who obviously have excessively optimistic expectations of the traffic they’re going to land.]

So, here are some tips I’d give to anyone thinking about a blog:

Pick a tone, and have something to say. In other words, what do you want your blog to look like? What do you want it to achieve?

Pace yourself. Don’t knock yourself out, but don’t let your blog be stagnant, either. (A blogging platform that lets you pre-program posts is a great idea.)

Don’t worry about getting it right, right out of the gate. Your blog’s personality will evolve as you move along.

Get involved in a network. Find other blogs you like, and link to them. Joining the Newfoundland and Labrador Blogroll is a smart move.

Don’t obsess over traffic, especially if your numbers fall or slip.

Learn how Facebook, Twitter, Feedburner and other applications can help you develop an audience. Send emails to friends to generate a base audience.

Have fun. If you’re not enjoying it, and you’re not being paid to do it, you’re going to have a really hard time keeping a blog going.

Elsewhere this week

Huge URL
Twitter and other social media apps have given rise to various apps that make it easy to contract a huge URL, or web address, into a tiny one. Huge URL is a great joke for our character-counting age. Try it and you’ll see why! 

 
Party Cat
If you’ve ever had a pet cat, and I’ve had a good few through the years, you know they keep their own schedules. More than that, they expect you to do the same. And, more than that, you have to wonder about what they do when you’re not around. Those thoughts come to mind when I see this hilarious set of comics, about a puddy tat that knows how to get its party on.

John Gushue is an online editor with CBC News in St. John’s. Twitter: @johngushue.

My other blog

 I haven't been posting much here, at least according to my usual pace ... but I've been busy nonetheless, and part of my work has involved what I think of as my other blog. 

I've revived What Odds, a blog I'm running as part of my job at CBC News in St. John's. 

The idea is this: there's plenty that we come across in the newsroom that doesn't (or shouldn't) fit in a conventional news story, but are all the same worth passing along. It's also a means to let our audience know about programming, catch up on a show they may have missed, learn about what's coming up, take part in our daily polls, and have a few laughs.  

It's up and running, with updates (thanks to the beauty of scheduled publication!) every day. Please stop by regularly. 

In the meantime, now that I've resolved some kinks with What Odds, I should be able to get a bit more posted here in the days and weeks to come. 

Notes from your friendly neighbour information curator

[Surf's Up, as published in the St. John's Telegram on Thursday, June 3, 2010. Click here to read more Surf's Up.]

A little over a year ago, I noticed I was reading the word “curated” an awful lot as I kept up with trends on the web.

At first, it sounded like a fancy way of saying another word: “edited,” or even just “chosen.” As in, “That feature included some material that was well curated.”

I’ve actually seen the word recently in plenty of other contexts, from retailing to manufacturing to design. But the web is giving it a new cachet. Part of it is social media, where a platform like Tumblr – which invites users to create virtual scrapbooks of the material they encounter online – gives a great big bear-hug to the curating concept.

Gradually, I’ve changed my mind about the whole idea of curating. I still think it’s a bit of a trendy word, and I wonder what actual curators (the people who choose what we see in museums and art galleries, for instance) make of it.

But here’s where I see things moving, and why I think the word is becoming appropriate.

“Editing” itself is a vague kind of word. For some people, it means correcting spelling or grammar. It can also mean reworking, revising and improving text, or assembling a sequence from film or video. In my line of work, of online news, it involves adding value, from background details to video to suggestions for further reading.

This leads to what curating on the web means … I think. It means managing the vast amount of information that surrounds us, and we all know that pile will never, ever get smaller, and help users make the most of the time they’ve decided to spend with us.

Years ago, we used to use words like “gatekeeping” to describe what media websites did. That is, they chose what was worthy of making the cut, and what was not.

That’s still true, but social media and the evolution of web technologies are offering plenty of opportunities – as well as demands to keep pace.

Let’s face it: the volume of information that passes before us can be overwhelming. Then there comes the tangle of trying to locate the information we want or need.

Clay Shirky, an American writer who inherited a name that makes him sound like a character on a show like Futurama, coined a phrase I quite like. Asked to respond to how to deal with “information overload,” Shirky (above) reframed the problem, looking instead at what he called “filter failure.”

We expect a lot from search engines like Google. We expect the web to deliver what we want, when we want it, and we want our preferred sites to anticipate what we need before we know it.

Many of us also operate on that very human fallacy: if someone hasn’t told it to me by now, it couldn’t be that important. In the news business, that fallacy – entrenched among younger adults who never picked up the habit of reading a daily newspaper, for instance – is a killer obstacle.

Thus, the need for curating. Smart, expansive, engaging, informed curating.

As web journalism evolves, expect to see far more than the traditional inverted-pyramid style of storytelling. It’s going to have to be much more than that; our audiences are demanding not just the key details (skimming will become more prevalent than ever), but also the choice to delve deeper, if they choose.

Helping that evolution move along will fall to the curators … and you can me in that number, as much as reluctantly take on the trendy description.

Elsewhere this week

Google Map Maker
For two years, Google’s Map Maker has been changing how we look at the world around us. Google Maps is the dominant online mapping application; this is the tool that anyone can use to customize results. It’s powerful, and not complicated.

How teens use phones
The majority of North American teenagers have a cellphone, or have used one. How do they use it? This presentation by Flowtown will make you think … and wonder about what’s next with the mobile revolution.

John Gushue is an online editor with CBC News in St. John’s. Twitter: @johngushue.

Should St. John’s get the Park Place treatment?

[Surf's Up, as published in the St. John's Telegram on Thursday, Jan. 28, 2010. Click here to read more Surf's Up.] 

If there’s on thing that Newfoundlanders love to do, it’s to root for their own. Consider Canadian Idol (when in season), various Facebook groups that have the arbitrary purpose of just gathering a bunch of Newfoundlanders, and – most recently – a campaign to put St. John’s on the next Canadian edition of Monopoly.

Monopoly Canada
You can buy Monopoly editions devoted to everything from the Simpsons to golf to even I Love Lucy. National editions abound, and for the next Canadian edition, the public has been invited to make the choices. Through the last couple of weeks, St. John’s has done well, but as I write this, has slipped from 6th to 10th place in a matter of a couple of days.

It’s not just getting a square on the board, of course, but which square. That is, the highest votes get the royal-blue colours that usually go to Boardwalk and Park Place, the next three get the deep green colours, and so on. In other words, a motivation for residents and/or supporters of various cities to keep voting (you can do it once a day), to get or hold on to a prestigious colour.
 
There are still more than three weeks to vote. Let’s see where the dice land. 
 
Elsewhere this week


 
A History of the World in 100 Objects
Earlier this month, BBC Radio 4 launched what’s already turned out to be a fascinating series: an attempt to tell the history of civilization, through a set of objects. I’ve been hearing some of the segments live through streaming radio; here, on the companion site, you can not only learn more, but contribute to the project – or, as they put it, “make history” yourself.
 
You can follow each day’s contribution through a podcast, the blog, supplementary information, and more, all in collaboration with staff at the British Museum. As host Neil MacGregor put it, the creators are passionate about physical objects, namely “things made by somebody with hands just like ours, for a purpose we can still hope to understand.”


My Parents Were Awesome
There comes a point when people – the teenage years, as young adults, maybe later – when people realize their parents are not space aliens but interesting, worthy human beings. My Parents Were Awesome is a collection of photographs that readers submit from years past (many, many years, on occasion) showing their parents. Some of the photos are hilarious, some are depictions of the time that taste forgot, and some are quite touching.
 
Bettween
It’s Bettween, not between, but that’s the point: this is a tool in which you can track conversations (i.e., replies) between two particular Twitter users.


Age of Persuasion episodes
Friends of mine, who have an evidently more pure ideal of what CBC Radio should be, were shocked the network started a half-hour program on advertising. For me, The Age of Persuasion with host and marketing guru Terry O’Reilly is one of the smartest, best produced programs on the network, with weekly insights that go well beyond how commercials work. If you miss the show, you can stream it here, plus past episodes; downloads or podcasts, unfortunately, are still off limits because of copyright issues.

Epic Win FTW
If the title of this site doesn’t make immediate sense, we’ll catch you up. “Epic win” is one way of saying “astonishingly cool,” and FTW stands for “for the win.” Which, um, kind of makes the title redundant. But don’t worry about that; instead, check in regularly for loads of cool things, especially hilarious pictures, often with a fanboy edge. 

John Gushue is a writer in St. John's, and is currently on leave from his job with CBC News in St. John's. John is on Twitter right here.

Sleevefacing

Sleeveface is a website that is consistently interesting, given that it's basically a one-trick outfit. The idea is that fans submit a photo, showing a record cover strategically placed next to a body. Above is a recent submission, featuring Gil Scott-Heron's breakthrough album, Pieces of a Man. The site has already led to a book; here's a video showing how they come together.

A win for Dot Dot Dot in the Bloggers' Choice contest!

The Newfoundland and Labrador Bloggers' Choice competition (or the first iteration of it, anyway) concluded at midnight, and my blog won first place. I'm thrilled to bits. Karen Chappell of Bitstop placed second.

You can read the results and more here at the Newfoundland and Labrador Blogroll page.

I hope to publish something soon about what I learned along the way during the campaign, particularly about social media. It was an illuminating experience.

Vote for my blog, folks!

For more than a week, the Newfoundland and Labrador Blogroll has been running a competition called the Bloggers' Choice. It's a runoff between 24 different sites that blogroll owner Stephen Eli Harris has chosen each week to highlight, and I'm one of them.

The competition has been fun, and has largely come down to a contest between my blog and Bitstop, Karen Chappell's majestic collection of photography. Barry Parsons's Rock Recipes was in the lead in the early days, and although he's well back now in 3rd place, I still feel he could have won it, thanks to a Facebook page membership of more than 3,800.

I'm currently in the lead - thanks to a lot of support I've garnered through social media. I hope to write more on that sometime soon. 

A purpose of this contest is to draw attention to the blogs of Newfoundland and Labrador. You can always find the blogroll on the right-hand side of my page; the little asterisk means a particular blog has something fresh to read. (The ones at the top are the most recently updated.)

As well, take some time to check out the blogs that are among the 24. I'm sure you'll be astounded by the variety.

Finally, thanks to Stephen Eli Harris for coming up with the idea - ideas, really, for the blogroll itself, the blog of the week, and now this competition. You can hear an interview he did with Angela Antle of WAM, aka the Weekend Arts Magazine, right here. Check out his blog, Understanding Eli, too.

For later viewing, the inside story of Fairytale of New York

A few weeks ago, when I was putting together a musical advent calendar (featuring some of my favourite music about Christmas), I posted this about one of my all-time favourite songs, Fairytale of New York, by the Pogues with a vocal assist from the late, great Kirsty MacColl (not to mention the aural support of her husband, producer Steve Lillywhite, whose own contribution to the Pogues' success is enormous).

I was really happy to see this afternoon that a local blog, Hey! What's Up With That!, posted the whole (albeit in segments) of an hour-long BBC documentary about the song and its considerable impact. I haven't had time to enjoy the whole thing yet, but will when some time presents itself.

One thing I've learned: while Shane MacGowan has led a lifestyle that can safely be called dissolute, I didn't expect him to grow old looking like a cross of Elvis Presley and Emperor Palpatine.

Babies and a rule of economics

Justin Wolfers, who contributes to the Freakonomics blog, posted this photograph of his partner and their baby daughter a few days ago, after waiting in vain "for a news story to come along to give me the excuse to post my favorite economics photo of the year." I'm glad he just posted the pic anyway; it's a keeper. 

Twas the Night After Christmas

From Robert Hiscock, who runs Product of Newfoundland, a riff on Clement Moore. Forget the Yankee milieu, however, this reading is closer to home.

Wicked Scoff goes to Mexico

One of the newer blogs with a local, um, flavour is A Wicked Scoff, which is published from New England (hence the "wicked" part - they use the term more fervently there than here) by an expat from Newfoundland (hence the scoff). Check it out, particularly this latest post with recipes for a salsa, guacomole, and grilled chicken with a lime rub. Yummy, indeed.