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Data visualization resources While I was shamelessly picking the brain of Matt Waite in recent weeks, he advised me that if I don't have more than three to five weeks to spend on "data" (sort of akin to what we used to call "computer-assisted reporting"), what I should focus on is teaching the students something about data visualization.

Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) Post-Oprah and apres-Ashton, Twittermania is definitely sliding down the backlash slope of the hype cycle. It's not just the predictable wave of naysaying after the predictable waves of sliced-breadism and bandwagon-chasing. We're beginning to see some data. Nielsen, the same people who do TV ratings, recently noted that more than 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month. To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it. When I started requiring digital journalism students to learn how to use Twitter, I didn't have the list of journalistic uses for Twitter that I have compiled by now. So I logged onto the service and broadcast a request. "I have a classroom full of graduate students in journalism who don't know who to follow. Does anybody have a suggestion?" Within ten minutes, we had a list of journalists to follow, including one who was boarding Air Force One at that moment, joining the White House press corps accompanying the President to Africa.

Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) Post-Oprah and apres-Ashton, Twittermania is definitely sliding down the backlash slope of the hype cycle. It's not just the predictable wave of naysaying after the predictable waves of sliced-breadism and bandwagon-chasing. We're beginning to see some data. Nielsen, the same people who do TV ratings, recently noted that more than 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month. To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it. When I started requiring digital journalism students to learn how to use Twitter, I didn't have the list of journalistic uses for Twitter that I have compiled by now. So I logged onto the service and broadcast a request. "I have a classroom full of graduate students in journalism who don't know who to follow. Does anybody have a suggestion?" Within ten minutes, we had a list of journalists to follow, including one who was boarding Air Force One at that moment, joining the White House press corps accompanying the President to Africa.

Business Tips for the Freelance Photographer By Ira M. Gostin, MBA, © 2008 www.gostin.com This article, and the others in the series, will provide you with tips for establishing, building and growing your photography business. Like any consultant, opinions are presented based on my own experiences and a great deal of research gleaned from 25 years of running a photography business along with an MBA education. Collect data from multiple sources and make decisions that are best for your individual business. The smarter you operate your business, the more opportunity to be creative and have fun. I hope these articles help.

"Timeline Web Widget for Visualizing Temporal Data With this widget, you can make beautiful interactive timelines like the one below. Try dragging it horizontally or using your mouse-wheel. Click on each event for more details. "

I've given many presentations on crisis mapping over the past two years but these were never filmed. So I decided to create a video presentation with narration in order to share my findings more widely and hopefully get a lot of feedback in the process. The presentation is not meant to be exhaustive although the video does run to about 30 minutes. The topics covered in this presentation include: * Crisis Map Sourcing - information collection; * Mobile Crisis Mapping - mobile technology; * Crisis Mapping Visualization - data visualization; * Crisis Mapping Analysis - spatial analysis.

Pro-Ams - people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards - are an increasingly important part of our society and economy. For Pro-Ams, leisure is not passive consumerism but active and participatory, it involves the deployment of publicly accredited knowledge and skills, often built up over a long career, which has involved sacrifices and frustrations. The 20th century witnessed the rise of professionals in medicine, science, education, and politics. In one field after another, amateurs and their ramshackle organisations were driven out by people who knew what they were doing and had certificates to prove it. The Pro-Am Revolution argues this historic shift is reversing. We're witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organisation and the crude, all or nothing, categories of professional or amateur will need to be rethought. Based on in-depth interviews with a diverse range of Pro-Ams and containing new data about the extent of Pro-Am activity in the UK, this report proposes new policies to support and encourage valuable Pro-Am activity.

"Instead of media organizations always playing catch-up, the objective should be for them to incorporate data in new and different ways from the very beginning,"

Searching By Looking Elsewhere Published May 11, 2009 BBC , Data , Infoskills , SEO , Search 4 Comments A couple of weeks or so ago, I got an email requesting a link to something I'd spoken about at a department meeting some time ago (the Gartner hype cycle, actually). Now normally I'd check my delicious bookmarks for a good link, or maybe even run a Google web search, but instead I ran a search for 'gartner hypecycle 2008′ on Google Images… …which is when it struck me that searching Google Images may on occasion lead to better quality, or more relevant, results than doing a normal web search, particularly if you use a level of indirection. In particular, it can often lead to a web document or post that provides some sort of analysis around a topic. (Remember, Google image search links to the web pages that contain the images that are displayed in the image search results, not just the images.)

World is Witness, a new "geoblog" from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiatives, in partnership with Google Earth, documents and maps genocide and related crimes against humanity. The initial entries are from a Museum visit to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to learn about the legacies of Rwanda's 1994 genocide, and the most recent entries are from a Museum visit to South Sudan and a return visit to the Congo. Visit us again soon for more posts from the field.