Ulken.com http://ulken.com/blog/ en-us 2008-06-06T16:46:47-08:00 New at latimes.com: Electoral vote map http://ulken.com/blog/archive/000150.html Now that the primary season is over and the general election campaign is heating up, it's time to introduce a fun little electoral vote map built by my colleague, Sean Connelley. What's unique about this one is that you can create your own scenario here and then grab some code to embed it in your website, like so:


]]> Online journalism Eric Ulken 2008-06-06T16:46:47-08:00 The audacity of meme http://ulken.com/blog/archive/000149.html meme.jpg

Whether or not you believe Barack Obama is Mr. Wonderful, this percolating politics meme is kind of a hoot: Jason Kottke is aggregating tweets that start with "When Obama wins"...

]]> Leisure Eric Ulken 2008-05-13T07:59:06-08:00 What anger looks like http://ulken.com/blog/archive/000148.html AngryJournalist.com. Seeking some aggregate wisdom from the 2,794 comments posted to date, I captured all the venom and slammed it through TagCrowd (omitting various forms of the words "angry" and "journalist"). The result (click a tag to see where it appears in comments):

created at TagCrowd.com

Glad to know the web doesn't figure as large in people's anger as I might have guessed, but I'm not encouraged by the relative sizes of love and hate.

Update (2008.04.02): There aren't enough posts at HappyJournalist.com to turn out a good cloud. C'mon, people!

]]> Online journalism Eric Ulken 2008-04-01T23:34:49-08:00 Where I'll be later this month http://ulken.com/blog/archive/000147.html I'm looking forward to attending the Journalism 3G symposium on computation and journalism at Georgia Tech Feb. 22-23. If you're a news geek, I can't imagine a better place to be. If you're going, ping me.

]]> Online journalism Eric Ulken 2008-02-11T20:53:12-08:00 The Globe jumps the gun http://ulken.com/blog/archive/000146.html 51PBEqYnFyL._SS500_.jpg

For sale on Amazon.com: 19-0: The Historic Championship Season of New England's Unbeatable Patriots, by The Boston Globe.

Guessing the Giants might quibble with that title.

(via E&P)
]]> News & views Eric Ulken 2008-02-04T01:47:56-08:00 Technical skills in journalism jobs http://ulken.com/blog/archive/000145.html The students in my online media class at USC are looking for the technical skills that will help land them jobs in journalism, and I want to help them identify what those skills might be. I have a pretty good idea, of course, but I thought I'd be more quantitative in my assessment. So I took all the online job descriptions on JournalismJobs.com from this year, omitted the non-technical words (like "editor", "seeks" and "self-starter") and built a tagcloud out of the rest. Here's what it looks like:

created at TagCrowd.com

Update (2008.02.04): This post drew a lot more notice than I would have guessed. My favorite response comes from fellow Mizzou alum Chris Heisel, now at the AJC, who built his own tech skills tagcloud. I have a feeling Chris' wish list comes a lot closer to nailing the critical skills than most of the postings on JournalismJobs do.

Update (2008.04.02): The tagcloud is hopefully more useful now that the tags link back to keyword searches in JournalismJobs.com's online job listings. I was linking keywords for my post on AngryJournalists.com and I thought I might as well do it here too.

]]> Online journalism Eric Ulken 2008-01-20T23:21:21-08:00 Why does Pinkberry prohibit photography? http://ulken.com/blog/archive/000144.html pinkberry.jpg

Seriously, guys. WTF? Yet another reason to boycott Pinkberry and patronize yummy Cefiore in Little Tokyo instead. Who's with me?

]]> L.A. Stories Eric Ulken 2008-01-06T12:03:29-08:00 My early Christmas present http://ulken.com/blog/archive/000143.html OK. So, I know these are supposed to be for underprivileged children and all, but I just had to get my hands on the OLPC XO laptop, quite possibly the coolest tech gadget of the year. Sure, my BlackBerry probably has more processing power, but an afternoon spent playing with the pint-sized XO leaves me with the feeling that this little wonder could really change the world.

I am sure the machine's intended users will find it even more compelling than I do. Still, I managed waste about two hours playing SimCity (the original version I remember from my childhood!)

I took the photo above with the XO's built-in camera. Not great, but certainly adequate. I am also writing this entry in the device's web browser.

The keyboard and trackpad are way too small for my fingers, but again, I'm not the target audience. Plus my Mac keyboard and mouse worked just fine when plugged into one of the device's three USB ports (that's one more than my PowerBook has).

On the whole, I have to say, I'm really impressed. Good thing I got two of these, so I can give one to a deserving kid in my family and keep one for my less deserving self.

P.S.: If you now have gadget envy, you should know that OLPC's Give One, Get One program has been extended until Dec. 31.

]]> Technology Eric Ulken 2007-12-22T18:42:21-08:00 Visualizing the primary season http://ulken.com/blog/archive/000142.html primarytracker.jpg

Our latest interactive data project, launched today, is the 2008 Primary Tracker. It's a visual guide to next year's crazy presidential nominating season, which begins earlier and culminates faster than any in U.S. history. Check it out.

]]> Online journalism Eric Ulken 2007-12-10T21:05:40-08:00 Competition in local data http://ulken.com/blog/archive/000141.html News websites are starting to see some competition on the local data front from niche players that do one thing very well. Witness SignalMap, which maps users' reports of cellular reception, and CleanScores, a database of restaurant health inspections in L.A. and San Francisco (credit to Joe Murphy for pointing these out).

SignalMap is nationwide -- its concept scales easily because doesn't require any cooperation from local governments -- but CleanScores has to ingest health data from umpteen jurisdictions if it wants to expand to every major market, which it says it intends to do. I see this as a challenge to local news organizations. We have the relationships and the local know-how to do this kind of thing better than anybody else. What we still lack, in many cases, is the technical sense and the will.

]]> Online journalism Eric Ulken 2007-11-18T13:24:03-08:00 Bringing "dudical!" back http://ulken.com/blog/archive/000140.html Dudical! is an expression I remember hearing in elementary school. A clever combination of "dude!" and "radical!", it clearly suffered an untimely demise, because a Google search on it returns a paltry 523 results. I consider it my duty to rescue this '80s linguistic gem from obscurity. Who's with me?

Unfortunately, somebody's already registered dudical.com, but if you use this word in your writing, post it on del.icio.us and tag it "dudical". Let's see if we can bring dudical back.

Update: My ex-friend Neil has one word for this crusade: dorkical. (Good news, Neil: dorkical.com is still available!)

Update: Props to the Saint Pete Times for using dudical in a headline. The story's about how their '80s blog won an Online Journalism Award.

]]> Leisure Eric Ulken 2007-11-12T09:23:18-08:00 Rethinking the Merc http://ulken.com/blog/archive/000139.html Kudos to the San Jose Mercury News. After a series of demoralizing cuts that seemed destined to precipitate the newspaper's slide into oblivion, the remaining staffers have refused to write their own obituary. They're fundamentally rethinking how their organization should function — and, more importantly, they're doing it out in the open.

My favorite recommendation (so far): "Our newsroom structure is flopped: 70 percent of our resources are dedicated to online, while the remaining 30 percent work to create a print experience that focuses on doing one thing on each section cover better than anything else. The rest of the paper is culled from our online report."

Mark Glaser over at PBS has a nice summary of the Merc's effort.

]]> Online journalism Eric Ulken 2007-11-05T23:25:09-08:00 L.A. is the nation's 10th "bloggiest" city http://ulken.com/blog/archive/000137.html Here's the list of cities with the most blog posts per capita, according to outside.in, and an interesting discussion of the results:

  1. Boston
  2. Philadelphia
  3. Pittsburgh
  4. Washington, D.C.
  5. Portland, OR
  6. New York
  7. San Francisco
  8. Seattle
  9. Chicago
  10. Los Angeles

(If you haven't heard of outside.in, it's a cool local blog aggregator that's well worth a look. Here's my neighborhood's feed.)

]]> Online journalism Eric Ulken 2007-10-11T18:59:45-08:00 Come work with me http://ulken.com/blog/archive/000136.html OK, if that headline didn't totally scare you away, read on:

My employer, the L.A. Times, is looking for some hybrid journalist-techies to help us build our interactive concepts team. This group will be the glue that binds our graphics, editorial and tech teams and takes the lead on building innovative projects such as the Homicide Map. The role of the interactive team is so important to my bosses that they're creating a new space for it in our online newsroom:

newsroom.jpg

(It's the area behind the plastic in my blurry photo, and when they finish building we're going to deck it out with all kinds of cool stuff.)

Two positions are open right now, and we're tweaking the job description on a third:

If either of these gigs looks interesting to you, don't hesitate to apply. We want to move fast to fill them.

Also, the Times has a bunch of other web jobs open. Check them out.

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]]> Online journalism Eric Ulken 2007-10-10T14:57:50-08:00 Recently dugg on latimes.com http://ulken.com/blog/archive/000135.html Just testing out Digg's widgetizer, which can generate all kinds of custom widgets that you can place on your site. Here's a list of recently popular stories from the L.A. Times:

]]> Technology Eric Ulken 2007-10-02T22:14:23-08:00