Coolest thing ever

OK, that's a big statement to make, and an award I don't give out often. ("Coolest thing ever, that I've seen so far today" would probably be more accurate, and that's an award I give out at least once daily.)

Anyway, by now you should know that it's important to take time to tag your stories; however, keeping it simple is sometimes hard, as tag discipline falls apart in the face of long, wordy articles.

If you want to get to the meat of the story in a cool way, you could do a lot worse than working with Wordle. This tool, created by IBM researcher (and ex-They Might Be Giants drummer) Jonathan Feinberg, shows you exactly what your story is about.

For example, here's a Wordle-generated tag cloud of a recent story I wrote about Intel's green business practices.


Kind of easy to see what the highlights are, no?

(FYI Wordle works for resumes too. If you want to get a quick snapshot of your career, post your entire resume into the "create" box -- and be prepared to be boiled down to a set of meta-tags!)

Hello to Everyone In The Cleveland Area

Hey everyone,

A thank-you to Brad Kenny for recruiting me to be the new local ASBPE president. Still getting my feet wet, to be honest, but will try to make the most of the opportunity. I look forward to talking with all of you!

Brian Sparks

Azbee Regional Finalists Announced

The list of finalist publications in the Midwest-South Region competition of the Azbee Awards of Excellence has been released; exactly which publications won which awards will be announced at the regions awards banquet, to be held July 17 in Washington, D.C.

The national awards ceremony will take place the evening of July 24 at the ASBPE National Editorial Conference in Kansas City. Names of national finalist publications will be posted soon at www.asbpe.org.

Aggregating the Aggregators and the "Editorial Layer"

Just read an interesting post on the future of media consumption from Matt Dickman, digital marketing guru at Fleishman-Hillard and author of the Techno//Marketer blog. They've got a group of trendspotters that have taken a stab at what the future of the media business might look like (available as a downloadable .pdf here).

Of course, he's talking cutting-edge consumer culture, so it's a little trend-forward for the B2B world, but couple of things stood out for me as applicable to where this market we inhabit might be in 3, 5 and most definitely 10 years. Definitely worth a read, especially for gems like these few sentences about competing with your own "newsmaster" readers, and how media companies might adapt one of our advantages -- putting news into proper context -- to stay relevant.

RSS and the Growth of ‘Newsmasters’
As content floods the Web, RSS has made youth ruthlessly efficient media consumers. They are much better synthesizers of information than older generations and can handle many more information streams per day. However, many young people still desire editors to trim away the fat and give us the skinny on what’s cool, important, and newsworthy. As a result, RSS-based services with an editorial layer are beginning to emerge. RCRD LBL, a collection of free, exclusive tracks by handpicked artists gives access to tour dates, new tracks, artist information, and editorial content — all via RSS.
RSS will ultimately enable newsmasters to “set their preferences” and hone their feeds to perfection so they no longer have to do the work of combing through all news. This can only happen once they’ve specialized and refined their niches, or become hyper-aggregators (aggregating aggregators).

Sure, you might not be there yet. You might be nowhere near being an aggregator's aggregator. But it's about time to start that conversation.

Digital tutorials, this time with rhythm...

I know there's been a lively debate, on Paul Conley's blog and elsewhere around the B2B community, about how journalists are supposed to acquire the training we need to compete in a WWW world.

A simple Google search is a good place to start; we've also posted some links on the ASBPE Cleveland tools page. That said, even a dedicated searcher might miss this gem -- m0serious, AKA the Poetic Prophet, AKA the SEO Rapper, has a YouTube channel that, if it doesn't help you learn everything about anything, at least will teach you how to talk about Web design and search engine optimization etc.

One quick example of the m0serious flow, on W3C (Web coding) compliance standards, and how they differ from common text formatting terminology:

"Don't use 'bold' -- please use 'strong' -- 'cause if you use 'bold' that's old and wrong."

Genius...