Eason Jordan, former head of CNN was forced to resign in 2005 due to pressure from right wing bloggers.
He was reported to have said (off the record) that journalists were being killed in Iraq by the American Military on Rony Alboritz' first ever blog for forumblog.org.
It was pointed out that the mass media, presumably because the comments were made off the record originally let it slip but had to take notice when numerous bloggers started calling for Jordan's head.
It goes to show how blogs can make a huge role in how the news media look at a story and was perhaps a turning point for the impact of online news.
Friday 30 March 2007
Thursday 22 March 2007
Feeding Me Information
OK, so over the last week I have been asked to use Rojo and Google News to see benefits (if any) and just generally compare how I got on with them both.
Rojo... well initially I made a big error by ticking the boxes for feeds that I'd be interested in, giving me something in the region of 100,000+ posts/news stories to read... I've only got a week and it updates as well! So I had to go through all the feeds I had subscribed to and narrow it down which took AGES. It now has just 5 categories, yet still about 15,000 to read. In hindsight (what a wonderful thing) I would ave skipped the automatic feeds that Rojo chooses and selected them individually, but this may also have been time-consuming... On the time front Rojo doesn't score too highly.
As far as the feeds shown are concerned it was OK, they are displayed most recent first so if you use the site regularly you'll catch the latest ones. There is also an option to display by 'relevance'... huh? Relevant to what? How would it know what I think is relevant?
When all is said and done, I did find some more blogs about my interests and so in tat way it was a useful tool.
One more thing which I haven't found so I'm assuming it's not a feature - it would be nice if there were links to the respective sites where the feeds have come from... Not that hard
Next up is Google News..
I must say out of the two I probably used Rojo more this week, although Google did start to become more useful as i went on. Basically, I customized my Google Page and cut out all the irrelevant stuff (like most US news..) So my top 4 links to news were: Sport(UK), Men's Style (I'll come back to this), World News, and UK News. This helped to just check things that I wanted to find out about and I'm not quite sure how the top results were calculated but it seems to be a 'most popular' sort of thing - possibly a problem if I need the most up-to-date news.
OK, now back to the men's style part, there is the option to add a custom news section, and I went for men's style. This ended up being pretty much a Google search and there really wasn't much about style, apparently I want to find out about basketball...
All-in-all, this was helpful for finding out news, but not so much for interests.
So there we have it, my experiences with Rojo and Google.
Rojo... well initially I made a big error by ticking the boxes for feeds that I'd be interested in, giving me something in the region of 100,000+ posts/news stories to read... I've only got a week and it updates as well! So I had to go through all the feeds I had subscribed to and narrow it down which took AGES. It now has just 5 categories, yet still about 15,000 to read. In hindsight (what a wonderful thing) I would ave skipped the automatic feeds that Rojo chooses and selected them individually, but this may also have been time-consuming... On the time front Rojo doesn't score too highly.
As far as the feeds shown are concerned it was OK, they are displayed most recent first so if you use the site regularly you'll catch the latest ones. There is also an option to display by 'relevance'... huh? Relevant to what? How would it know what I think is relevant?
When all is said and done, I did find some more blogs about my interests and so in tat way it was a useful tool.
One more thing which I haven't found so I'm assuming it's not a feature - it would be nice if there were links to the respective sites where the feeds have come from... Not that hard
Next up is Google News..
I must say out of the two I probably used Rojo more this week, although Google did start to become more useful as i went on. Basically, I customized my Google Page and cut out all the irrelevant stuff (like most US news..) So my top 4 links to news were: Sport(UK), Men's Style (I'll come back to this), World News, and UK News. This helped to just check things that I wanted to find out about and I'm not quite sure how the top results were calculated but it seems to be a 'most popular' sort of thing - possibly a problem if I need the most up-to-date news.
OK, now back to the men's style part, there is the option to add a custom news section, and I went for men's style. This ended up being pretty much a Google search and there really wasn't much about style, apparently I want to find out about basketball...
All-in-all, this was helpful for finding out news, but not so much for interests.
So there we have it, my experiences with Rojo and Google.
Friday 16 March 2007
Old People Links (Well they try)
For today's lesson we were asked to research for a fictional article about elderly people using the Internet... Brilliant subject matter I agree but hey, I don't get the luxury of choosing.
Personally, the thought of my grandparents surfing brings a smile to my face, it's bad enough when my dad tries, but I guess I'm all for trying new things and all that.
Now I'm sure you are all well aware of the old cliche that old people enjoy rambling (not hikes) and the first thing I found proves this... for example the epic quote: "Is it me, or is it becoming more difficult to understand what people are saying?" Yes my friend, it has nothing at all to do with your hearing deteriorating.
BigJohn, if that is his real name has a fairly regularly updated blog, with a new post every three or four days which is a quite charming 'old guy's' take on the world... "During the war" I hear you say. At age 68, without trying to sound patronising it is a rather impressive little blog.
Another thing I found was a document which is basically statistics and market research from Age Concern about how many elderly people use the Internet. Not the most interesting read but stats and figures are all useful in the grand scale of this fictional assignment.
Personally, the thought of my grandparents surfing brings a smile to my face, it's bad enough when my dad tries, but I guess I'm all for trying new things and all that.
Now I'm sure you are all well aware of the old cliche that old people enjoy rambling (not hikes) and the first thing I found proves this... for example the epic quote: "Is it me, or is it becoming more difficult to understand what people are saying?" Yes my friend, it has nothing at all to do with your hearing deteriorating.
BigJohn, if that is his real name has a fairly regularly updated blog, with a new post every three or four days which is a quite charming 'old guy's' take on the world... "During the war" I hear you say. At age 68, without trying to sound patronising it is a rather impressive little blog.
Another thing I found was a document which is basically statistics and market research from Age Concern about how many elderly people use the Internet. Not the most interesting read but stats and figures are all useful in the grand scale of this fictional assignment.
Back Online
Well now I've decided to switch to the Online group it's about time I created a new blog, so here it is...
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