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

Down with portals

News websites should aim to "build a network, not a destination," inserting themselves "into the clickstream" whenever possible. Amen, Rich Gordon!

Daft patron? Don’t blame the bartender

Quote of the week from NPR's Bob Garfield: "Editors are like bartenders, who must serve up what's ordered provided they know when to say, 'Sorry, bub, you've had enough.'" This explains why I like bars: They must remind me of newsrooms.

Something everyone working on the web should see

If after watching this you aren't convinced that we're living through the biggest revolution in the history of human communication... watch it again. ;-)

Your personal annual report

Wow. This guy made an annual report, à la some Fortune 500 company, except it's an annual report of his life. Scary, but it got me thinking: A lot of the data he uses to compile this is stuff we all amass — through airline tickets, credit card ...

latimes.com’s most searched-for people in 2006

Indulging my fascination with tag clouds and text mining, I dug through our traffic stats for 2006 to create a fun little visual representation of search terms used to find stories on latimes.com.

Which file extension are you?

(Note: If you are not a geek, do yourself a favor and skip this entry.) If you were a file extension, which file extension would you be? Take this quiz to find out. I, apparently, am a GIF. Who knew?

So long, Clare!

On Thursday we bid our art director a proper farewell (and by proper I mean tequila-infused). Add your congrats and good wishes below. a photo gallery... ...and a short video

Digg and other cutting-edge stuff

OK, I may be the last person to discover the wonders of digg, but that doesn't mean I can't write about it. Digg is essentially a link repository coupled with a user rating system. It does certain things very well — namely, collecting and filtering links to interesting ...

Buffet: Print is dying

The Oracle of Omaha has spoken, and he minces no words in predicting the newspaper industry's declining fortunes. I hope newspaper owners will take this as yet another sign that they ought to be rapidly beefing up their websites (via BankStocks.com): If you were looking at newspaper publishers as possible ...

Google Earth — Live!

This is the coolest thing. I am aboard a Lufthansa 747 en route to Germany, and I am seeing my 3-D flight path in real time in Google Earth. The yellow line is our flight path. It begins in the place where I started up Google Earth -- so ...

January 25th 2011
Category: News No Comments

Back to the newsroom, off to Seattle

When I left the Los Angeles Times in the depths of the 2008 financial crisis -- a time when the newspaper industry's future looked particularly bleak -- I wondered wistfully if I was walking away from my last newspaper job. I'd worked for newspaper companies my entire career, and despite ...
January 23rd 2011
Category: Views One Comment

Libraries: An appreciation

If I couldn't be a journalist, I think I'd be a librarian. I decided this after spending a lot of time in libraries in the last couple of years and interacting with some very smart (and completely unstuffy) librarians. Maybe it's because, as it turns out, journalists and librarians have a ...
August 20th 2010
Category: Idea file 3 Comments

Flash in the pan?

I am an ex-Flash user. I uninstalled the Flash plug-in on my primary browser about a month ago, and I haven't looked back. Here's how it happened: Back when Apple announced that its forthcoming iPad would lack Flash support, it sounded to me like a boneheaded move. If a device built ...
March 21st 2010
Category: Events No Comments

Continue the discussion here

Thanks to all who turned out today at UBC Robson Square for my workshop on online tools and techniques for journalists. I'm creating this post as a way to continue the discussion online. If you have questions or comments on the topics we discussed, please share them in the comments, ...
March 6th 2010
Category: News No Comments

Checking in from Canada

In the four months since my last post — yes, I'm a terrible blogger — I've moved to Vancouver and started teaching at the University of British Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. Among other things, I'm coordinating the school's Integrated Journalism course, required of all first-year students, and advising some ...