I surf through a lot of music blogs in my spare time, so I decided to try and compile what each of them are covering at AggRockBlog. The site focuses on NYC rock music. It's a little busy, but I wanted to get all of my favorite sites on there.
-B.Miller
This somehow became more of a homepage than a blog. I'd been wanting to make a site to put up a list of my husbands publications, and I thought I'd combine it with the class project. Let me just say in my defense that I am not one of those people who goes nuts and sends pics of their kids all over the place. BUT I find that people seem to think they have to ask me to send pics of my son, and then I have to bother sending them, and then they feel obliged to say something nice about how he looks. And worse: my mother-in-law has threatened to come and visit more often because she wants to see how her grandson develops. So I decided to make a blog where the family abroad can follow him along in his development. Since I just got a Mac I used the iWeb program, which turns out to be very Web 1.0 - it wouldn't really allow me to do anything fancy like cool widgets, voting, etc. But I did include a Google Ad to see if that would make me easier to google...
My blog is Green Yard Escape and it's inspired by my efforts to make my suburban yard more "green." Let me know what you think.
NYU’s Continuing Education and Certificate Program:
Highlights of the 2007-2008 Academic Year
This spring, the Continuing Education and Certificate program at NYU’s Center for Publishing is offering leading-edge courses designed to prepare you for a fast-paced industry in which traditional and digital media are rapidly converging. In addition to integrating digital publishing into our curriculum, we have created many "how to, hands-on" courses that will give you the practical knowledge you need to further your professional development.
Explore Editing, Marketing and Branding
Publishing has never been so captivating—and so complicated—as editors take on expanded roles creating brand extensions for their core products. The following new courses will help you refine and expand not only your editing skills and mindset, but grasp the latest print and online marketing and promotional tips from the pros.
Delve into Digital
Worried that you don’t have all those digital skills everyone says you need to succeed? There’s a whole new world of digital publishing and we invite you to explore it in these courses.
Find Your Way Freelancing
Writing is the cornerstone of publishing careers. Develop your skills and discover additional opportunities for your career in these exciting new courses.
These new offerings are just a selection of our full roster of more than 40 courses. For a complete listing of our courses and to register, please visit the NYU website at http://scps.nyu.edu/publishing. If you have specific questions, please call 212-998-7171 or email pub.center@nyu.edu.
Build a Certificate
You can register for individual courses or start building a Certificate in Editing or Publishing. This valuable credential, recognized by the publishing industry, requires you to take at least five courses over a four-year period. Each of these new courses directly applies to the Editing and Publishing Certificate Programs.
Master of Science in Publishing
Interested in making an even stronger commitment to the publishing industry? If so, you may want to consider NYU’s M.S. in Publishing. This 42-credit graduate degree provides an extensive and in-depth look at all aspects of the industry, including editing, marketing and branding, finance, sales, advertising, law, management and new business development—as well as all the digital skills needed to succeed in this era of multi-platform publishing. All classes are in the evenings and are taught by major leaders in the industry. You can mold the program to your schedule and needs, taking from one to four courses a semester. This valuable degree, recognized by the industry, is designed to educate a new generation
Great News! I just received the following word from NYU:
At NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies, students in our non-degree program can register for individual courses or start building a Certificate in Editing or Publishing. This valuable credential, recognized by the publishing industry, requires you to take at least five courses over a four-year period. Introduction to Interactive Publishing (X59.9221) directly applies to the Publishing Certificate Program in either the book or magazine concentration.
For a complete listing of our courses and to register, please visit the NYU website at http://scps.nyu.edu/publishing. If you have specific questions, please call 212-998-7171 or email pub.center@nyu.edu.
My blog on home museums is at floortoceiling.blogspot.com. I'm hoping I'll get to find a few more cool features for it before class, but that might be wishful thinking. If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Thanks!
You're all invited to visit my class project blog One Poem at a Time. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
The Ethical Blogger is a site dedicated to the issues surrounding authoring and editing in the blogoshere. According to the site description it "a joint project of Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies, the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, Demos—The Think Tank for Everyday Democracy, and Oxford University's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism." Good stuff. Worth a look.
Refdesk is an umbrella search site encorporating all the usual search engines, such as google and yahoo, lesser known search engines, and a host of tools that are great for editors. Links to dictionaries -- technical, medical, legal, and regular -- include the option of downloading software such that one need only highlight a dubious word in a piece of script to connect directly to its dictionary definition www.thefreedictionary.com/add2ie.htm.
There are also language translation apps., currency converters, quotation resources and a wealth of news feeds. Again, users can subscribe to free software that dynamically supplies a preferred type of quotation, specific currency conversion, or news item type, e.g. what happened on 'this' day 20 years ago.
Community users can bookmark refdesk and other favourites on del.icio.us.com. They are also invited give back to the free, educational resource -- the PBS of cyberspace -- by making an online donation to the site.
Who are Leon and Noel? I'll let you try to figure that out after looking at my blog. I look forward to discussing it tomorrow!
Here is a link to Best Tennis World, the blog I put together for the final project.
I hope you all enjoy it. I may add another item or two before class tomorrow night.
I had an idea that data mining had something to do with tracking users' navigation histories to figure out who was coming to a given website, where they were coming from, and what products or paths to suggest to them while they were there. But on further consideration, and after consulting Wikipedia's intimidating article, I realized I wasn't quite sure what data mining actually was. I tried consulting some of the websites of some of the companies that actually provide data-mining services; and while I still feel a little vague, that was helpful, particularly when I looked at Megaputer's site.
Megaputer Intelligence gives a rundown of the various different uses to which companies might want to put data-mining services. Even more specific are the actual solution packages they sell, which encompass survey analysis, cross-sell analysis, complaint analysis, and so on.
In addition to data mining, Megaputer also offers text mining, which it defines as a way of "[automatically] eliciting knowledge from unstructured text. . . based on a combination of linguistic, semantic, statistical and machine learning techniques." If text mining is able to "understand" or categorize a text semantically, I wondered if it might evolve into an interesting online tool for book publishers.
Justia Blawgsearch is a search engine for legal blogs. Blawgsearch also tracks and ranks the popularity of the blogs, search terms and blawg post tags. While going through the site, I also noticed that Justia recently launched a free database of federal district court cases that they put together using Google's hosted Business Custom Search Engine for the full text search. This is one of Google’s many search apps. The blog entry about this (http://onward.justia.com/ on 9/30/07) mentions that “Google is now OCRing PDF image files, so even PDF files that have images of scanned documents will be, in most cases, full text indexable and searchable (just like the OCR of Google's Book Search).”
Just a reminder about the class schedule.
Session 7 - Thursday, November 15
Session 8 - Friday, November 29
I look forward to seeing you there!
An interesting new search engine is being developed based on natural language processing. The following is from their Press Release of September 17, 2007:
Powerset is building a consumer search engine based on breakthrough natural language processing technology licensed from PARC and developed internally. Unlike other search engines that index keywords, Powerset does a deep linguistic analysis on every sentence it reads. Powerset extracts and indexes facts about every sentence in every page, making its index the first truly robust semantic index of the web. Powerset will offer a transformative search experience, with better, more relevant results. Powerset Labs is an online community that will contribute to the development of Powerset and allow the company a direct line of communication with consumers to better understand the potential, possibilities, and challenges of building a large-scale search engine.
Some related articles:
Here are two interesting articles about the new Facebook model of advertising that came up in our class discussion this week:
http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/08/technology/facebook_ads.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2007110908
http://techland.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2007/11/06/big-advertisers-are-facebooks-new-friends/
A scholarly edition that lets you "construct" or read your own version of the text based on your choices of theme, character, image, or section. This wouldn't work for me in IE, but did work for me in Firefox. Start by selecting an excerpt from the left-hand column, then scroll over the characters or themes in the center (sword) column and you'll see the relevant sections of the text are highlighted in the right column. Click on a center column link and you're given a selected group of excerpts to work with on the left.
For books, I usually go to Barnes and Noble or Amazon, but this assignment prompted me to look around at some of the big book publishers. Penguin has a good site with a blog (doesn't look like a popular feature) and podcasts. They list 'top 5's' as well, but it isn't clear if this is from any rating system or not. I don't see a way to vote for them, but perhaps it is accumulated from what people buy from the site.
Random House also has blogs and podcasts, but the blogs again look like news clips written by staff to sell the books.
http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/2007/08/three-columns-dots-template.html
offers fairly simple directions for editing the XML code of several standard blogger templates to add a third column. I had no success trying to get downloaded non-blogger templates to work before I discovered this option.
I just signed up for an account at Audible.com after seeing an ad on the Subway train for it
Audible specializes in providing digital audio editions of books, newspapers and magazines, original programming, and TV and radio subscriptions. Consumers buy and download audio content from http://www.audible.com/
It's 14.95 a month to be a member ...but every month you get a FREE download of an audio book (most books run between $20 to $40 so it's a pretty good deal to go and get the audio version from audible dot com)
I downloaded 2 audio books:
I Am America (And So Can You!)
by Stephen Colbert
Hollywood Hulk Hogan
by (wrestler) Hulk Hogan
Most people download audio to their PCs and Macs and then transfer the audio to MP3 players, personal digital assistants (PDAs), or to smart mobile devices (SMDs) for listening on the go. Others "burn" the content to audio CDs.... many howevere simply listen at their computers.
The first thing you do is download the template from the website. Go to http://www.google.com/ and type in keywords like "XML, Blogger, Templates" (This is just one sample... feel free to try others) ....
This will lead you to webpages that offer "Templates" to download... after choosing one you like.... download and save the file to your desktop.
Once you’ve done that your file will be in a .xml or .txt format It’s not necessary to open the file though, you can use the automated file uploader built into Blogger’s control panel.
This makes it easy to install a new template.
BY THE WAY..... when building the BLOG... loading up the template should be the first thing you do... because as we saw in class that day... when you try to change the template ...you may loose some widgets in the process.
Hope this guide helps... I had a tough time with this last week.... looking foward to class on NOV 8th ! :)
Session 6 is on for this Thursday!
Please remember to post any interesting "Book Publishing" sites that make use of interactive publishing techniques.
I look forward to seeing all of you there.
This site convinces would-be authors to stop procrastinating and just write something, anything that totals 50,000 words, in the month of November. It's kind of competition, but everyone who completes the word count wins the prize... which is, not really anything except the respect of your fellow NaNoWriMo'ers. I'm sure a lot of people have heard of this already, but the website has developed into its own community where you can read excerpts from users and check out who's been published, etc.
Roughly related—but not really relevant until February—is the RPM challenge where people attempt to write and record an entire album of music (10 songs or 35 minutes) in the month of February.
-B.Miller
