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ulken.com · Eric Ulken’s adventures in online journalism

Posted here and there

The problem with writing for several outlets is that your stuff lacks a home on the Internet. But it’s nothing that a little aggregation can’t fix. In case you missed it, here’s some of what I’ve been writing in the last few months:

  • Today at De Nieuwe Reporter, the Dutch online journalism blog I write for, I posted a piece on InfoCamp, a terrific unconference I attended last month in Seattle. It’s about what online journalists can learn from information scientists. (And yes, it’s in English.)
  • I’ve been enjoying using TwitterTim.es, an aggregator that lets you build a personalized “newspaper” featuring the posts tweeted most frequently by people you follow. (Here’s mine.) Intrigued, I interviewed Maxim Grinev, the site’s tech lead, for Online Journalism Review.
  • I weighed in on the question of whether SEO practices make for dumb, boring headlines, also at OJR. (By the way, I’m working on an online course on writing headlines for the web for the Poynter Institute’s NewsU. If you have some instructive experiences to share, please let me know.)
  • Finally, I wrote about recently launched redesigns at Germany’s Spiegel Online, where I worked this summer, and my alma mater, the Los Angeles Times, also for De Nieuwe Reporter.

Also, as I’m doing more writing and consulting in various places, I’ve updated my about page with the customary disclosures.

October 2, 2009 | 12:20
Category: News

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What would you teach aspiring journalists about the internet?

It's officially official: I'm headed to Vancouver in January to spend a semester as the Canwest Global Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. I will be teaching online journalism as part of the school's integrated journalism course. I'm looking forward to helping students think critically ...
September 2, 2009 | 3:49
Category: News

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Police radio play-by-play lands German Twitterer in trouble

I did this online journalism-related write-up last week for Spiegel International. It didn't run there, so I'm posting it here (with permission, of course): When a 71-year-old pensioner killed three people and wounded a fourth in a shooting spree last month in North Rhine-Westphalia, the police response unfolded in real time ...
August 22, 2009 | 9:16
Category: Idea file

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Search trends and geography

I know it's been around for a year or more now, but I still can't stop playing with Google Insights for Search, that small window into the universe of data that Google collects on user behavior. It's a trend-spotter's dream, and — particularly with its geographical filters — a potential ...
July 16, 2009 | 16:05
Category: News

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Breaking the silence here

I haven't gone totally off the grid. I just stopped contributing to it for a while. I needed to recharge my mental battery. Now I'm back and playing catch-up. Here, briefly, is what I've been up to the last few months. April was "conference month" on two continents: International Journalism Festival, ...
April 16, 2009 | 23:50
Category: Links

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How BusinessWeek measures user engagement

How do you get past those squishy pageview and unique visitor metrics and instead measure how users actually respond to the content you produce? My interview on this topic with BusinessWeek Online editor John Byrne (whom I met in Perugia at the International Journalism Festival a couple weeks ago) is ...