Mobile Journalism: class blog

Final Projects: Expectations for Next Week

sinker — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 21:27:08 +0000

You will be turning in your final projects next week. If you’re building a site, map, etc, please link the URL in the comments on this entry. If it’s a hi-rez prototype or something else that exists offline, bring in the finished work to class. We will transfer it to the projector computer.

In addition to your project, be prepared to talk for 5 minutes about your project. Walk us through it, talk about your approach, your strategy, etc. Prepare slides to accompany your presentation.

And, your final project should be accompanied by a 500 word report documenting the concept and the implementation, including trouble spots, and ideas on how to grow the idea outside of class deadlines. This will be turned in in class.

Final Project Troubleshooting

sinker — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:04:35 +0000

Got problems? Questions? Ask here!!

Building a mobile site with jqtouch

sinker — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:04:11 +0000

This week we’re going to use a wonderful Javascript framework that has the ability to transform very simple HTML markup into a fantastic mobile experience for an end user.

We’re going to turn this into this with just a few pieces of code and some smart workflows.

We’ll do it using the JQuery Javascript Framework and the Jqtouch plugin.

There’s a very minimal “getting started” guide for JQuery, but a lot of the learning is going to happen by looking at source code.

We can do this!

Final Project Q&A space

sinker — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:17:05 +0000

Ask away!!

Don’t forget: out front tomorrow!

sinker — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:24:17 +0000

We’re meeting at exactly 3:30 out front of the 33 E Congress building. If it’s raining we’ll meet just inside the lobby.

We’ll be taking the El to EveryBlock. Be sure you’ve visited the site and thought about a number of good and engaging questions for them. This will be a great visit, made better by your participation!

Lecture Links 11-11-09

sinker — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:11:48 +0000

Mobile Journalism tools in public hands: a debate
We listened to this discussion, between journalist Paul Carr and journalism-thinker Jeff Jarvis.

Guests
Today we heard from guests at BlockChalk and Wikitude.

Questions of Location
Geocoded photos: too far?
A Flickr search for Chicago photos shot by an iPhone 3G
GPS Lat & Long converter

Google Latitude: too soon?
Google Latitude

Google Latitude updates

UPDATED: For class 11-11-09

sinker — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 04:47:24 +0000

We’ll be joined via Skype by Stephen Hood, one of the founders of BlockChalk, a geolocational site that promises to be “the voice of your neighborhood.” BlockChalk takes an innovative, mapless approach to geolocation and will be a great addition to our talk tomorrow. Please familiarize yourself with their site: http://blockchalk.com/

UPDATE: We will also be joined by Philipp Breuss-Schneeweis, the founder of the Wikitude Augmented Reality Browser. Please familiarize yourself with this powerful tool as well: http://www.wikitude.org/

Mapping links for today

sinker — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:24:31 +0000

Today we’ll be doing both mobile reporting and building a database-driven map. We’ll use a few different tools to pull this off. I have linked to all of them, though for this assignment, the heavy lifting of hooking bits and pieces up is done already. This is entirely something you could do yourself for other projects.

These two are the bare minimum to get started (obviously, to do this on your own you’ll need a Google Docs account as well, but we’ll all share a spreadsheet):
Creating a custom map from a Google Spreadsheet
Get lat & long coordinates for addresses.

Then you’ll need a few different things to embed various content into the map:
Drop.io: to collect all the mobile reports, and to embed audio
Photobucket: Free image hosting & editing–to resizing and hosting images
YouTube: For hosting and embedding video.

The Drop.io site that we’ll all share for today’s map is: Drop.io/oneyearlater
The Google Spreadsheet we’ll be working with is here (but you’ve all been invited as editors)
You can see the actual map as it progresses at: j-incubator.net/oneyearlater.html

In addition to our work on the map in class today, continue to add to the data points. You are responsible for reporting and listing 15 additional points by next Wednesday. We should have a *huge* map by then. Go for diversity of location, people, media, and opinions.

your maps go here

sinker — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:56:30 +0000

Stick ‘em in the comments.

lecture links 10-28-09

sinker — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:26:04 +0000

Google Latitude plays with geolocation

How GPS works

Google Maps

Very good help for My Maps