Friday, April 28, 2006

Free Austin WIFI!

It seemed pretty amazing to me when the city of San Fran started discussing a city wide free wifi system. Well, the same idea has planted itself in Austin. Granted it's not city wide and we are nowhere near the size of San Fran but this morning Mayor Will Wynn launched the wifi which spans from townlake to sixth street, and from Lamar to the interstate. In the coming months the system will be expanded to East Austin and Zilker Park. I wonder how this will change the digital divide on the east side.
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Thursday, April 27, 2006

College blocks Myspace


I'm posting this in hopes that that guy in the library who's always on the one computer with a scanner but he's not scanning he's looking at Myspace, will see this. A Corpus Christi community college blocked Myspace after students started logging onto it so much that it was slowing down the network. 40% of the daily internet traffic on Del Mar College's computers involved Myspace, and officials deemed it to be "interfering with legitimate instruction."

So hey guy....get off that damn computer..I need to scan something..you're preventing my legitimate instruction.
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Sunday, April 23, 2006

Show me the money

One of the most terrifying and exciting aspects of online journalism is that it's an evolving business model and no one knows quite yet how to manage it. I've been thinking about this a lot since one of the creators of blogburst came to visit my class, they basically syndicate the very best blogs and let news organizations cull through this content and use it as they please. Bloggers get little or no compensation from these deals, but they do get recognition. I just wonder how long good blog content can keep coming as long as "recognition" is the only compensation. More papers are asking their reporters to blog, or to multitask and make up online content (such as reporters taking video or audio) but they aren't paying them any more for doing this. I love the ideas of open source and citizen journalism, but I also worry that news organizations are seeing citizen journalists as a way they can cut back on staff; and that open source is just furthering that idea that the internet is a place where you can get everything for free. Talented, hard-working people should be paid for their hard work and talent, and the renegade spirit of the internet makes consumers believe that everything (especially good news and entertainment) should be free.
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Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Myspace on Tyra Banks Show

Tuesday's episode of the Tyra banks Show was entirely about Myspace and was a pretty interesting view of the site. Her main focuses were sexual hookups and internet celebrity.
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Former Baywatch star Jeremy Jackson (remember little Hobie?) was one of the most disgusting talk show guests I've ever seen, bragging about the hundreds of women he's screwed via myspace. He also talked about how he uses the site for club promotion, but mostly he talked about doing it.
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Her other guest was "internet vixen" Christine Dolce who has become just a huge giant star all based on photos of her in her "destroyed denim" jeans. Vanity Fair has called her the queen of myspace and she has 706,000 friends. It's such weird marketing where your customers or audience are called your friends.

Another part I found really intriguing and would like to write a story about in the future is myspace celebrity imposters. As Tyra was making her own page she looked at all the other imposter Tyra Bankses. It made me wonder what compels people to do that, who they are and what it provides them, if they correspond with people and who writes to them.

I was also impressed with the show's website. In addition to a synopsis of every show they also include hyperlinks out. Pretty cool.

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Sunday, April 16, 2006

Austin gossip blog

One of the blogosphere's mini celebrities has started a new Austin blog. Ellen Simonetti, or the Queen of the Sky, was the infamous Delta Airlines stewardess who was fired for hosting spicy photos of herself in uniform on her personal blog. It was sort of a precedent setter for how companies deal with employee's personal blogs. Anyhow QOTS is from Austin and has started a new blog that tries desperately to stalk celebrities and stir up shit. So far I haven't found out anything I didn't already know...President Bush likes eating at Jeffrey's, no way!? I think she struggles to write about things besides herself. I like how she includes herself as a celebrity in the "celeb sightings" entry.

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Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Blogging as a tool

One of the points raised this week at UT's Symposium on Online Journalism was whether blogs were really anything more than just a web publishing tool. After all, they're used for so many different things in so many different way that what defines a blog is getting looser and looser. I tend to agree with this statement and would like to share one way in which I use blogging as a tool. For my Women in the News class, my group will be posting our criteria, research and final conclusions in a blog in addition to taking in the comments and feedback of others, and communicating amongst ourselves. The blog format allows us to all publish, and all be able to access the information 24 hours a day. You can watch our project, focusing on the concept of modern feminism through the eyes of Cosmopolitan and Bust magazines, here. You can also view a past project on the gentrification of East Austin that I have also run through a blog here.
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Friday, April 07, 2006

My first flash mob: Pillow fight

A great pillow battle was waged on the grounds of auditoreum shores with small skirmishes continuing into the night in the crosswalks of south congress. This was my first experience participating in flash mobs. I know this isn't Austin's first but it did seem to draw a ton of media coverage. Most people I spoke to found out via myspace or craigslist and the turnout was about 200. You can find more images (and quite possibly the WORST photo of me ever) here.
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Thursday, April 06, 2006

SXSW text message

SXSW hosted this giant TV screen at one of the festival's biggest venues. It showed a phone number where people could send text messages and camera phone pics and have them shown on the screen within minutes. Such a great idea to find lost people, share your images or just be clever. Mind you they never did show my text message (maybe because it insulted the band on stage, "the Towers of London are a bunch of talentless haircuts"). I wonder if they were censoring? They also organized a service where you text messaged the name or club name to SXSW and they would send you the show time or band playing, respectively. Like I said in a previous post, SXSW is doing some pioneering in using wireless technology to make their event more fun and fluid.
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Monday, April 03, 2006

Photo Story

View my photo story of the Snook11 screen printing company
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