Sorry for not posting for a while, but I've been pretty fried. Between trips for conferences and looking for a house, while trying to sell our house in Columbia has kept me pretty busy. Plus there's also this dissertation thing going on, which still needs more responses. (Tell your friends!!)

So you can see that when we got back from Chicago Sunday, all I wanted to do was veg out. The kids were watching a movie upstairs, as if they hadn't seen enough on the 9-hour drive to Ohio, so I was stuck in front of the computer. Perusing through the category of mindless entertainment online, I skipped Hulu because I've seen almost all the SNL clips already (I still can't get Justin Timberlake dressed as an implant out of my mind. Good thing I can't find it on Hulu.) I decided against watching summer movie trailes on Apple.com because I've actually seen most of them in the theater. I settled on YouTube. I thought for sure I'd find some brainless stuff like dumb TV newsreporters messing up or toppling dominoes or Star Wars movies made with Legos.

Instead I ended up watching a compelling documentary about Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, the creator of Rat Fink. It was either that or SuperSize Me for the 10th time, or season 1 of Alf, and the best part is I didn't have to watch them in 10 minute pieces. YouTube now features full length movies. Now, you're not going to see Taken on YouTube yet, but I thought this was an exciting blog-worthy development because it demonstrates that YouTube is thinking about what its audience wants.

Flipping through the titles YouTube Movies offers reminds me a little bit of what NetFlix Watch Instantly looked like at the beginning. The list includes a bunch of cult films and TV shows that I probably didn't watch when they were first on, but I'm mildly interested in watching them now. It also has a lot of "fringe" content, such as anime that appeals to a pretty specific audience. My son, for example, will be stoked when I show him that all three incarnations of Yu-Gi-Oh! are available. Oh, and if you just caught the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie in theaters and you want to get all the references, you can watch the entire original series online, which I might actually do this summer because the only thing to watch is Wipeout.

Besides getting more free content, why do I applaud this effort? In other words, why is this smart for YouTube? First, YouTube is expanding its image. It's no longer just the place for viral videos. This could potentially establish YouTube as an entertainment player. But more importantly, it allows YouTube's to expand its advertising potential. Daisy Whitney writes in TV Week that pre-roll ads don't really work for short videos, but they work great on longer ones. Personally, I don't mind watching a 30-second clip before a TV show or movie. I do it all the time on ESPN.com.

The reason I like the changes at YouTube so much is it means more free content now, and hopefully, in the future. The flexibility YouTube offers gives entertainment companies a viable profit stream while also encouraging them to use online and in-demand platforms, which is where and how audiences are demanding their entertainment. No where is this more clear than in this Columbus Dispatch article about the battle between YouTube, Hulu, and other entertainment purveyors online.

The bottom line is I'm going to be spending a lot of time this summer with YouTube movies and relatively little on network TV. In fact, when the new season starts, who knows if I'll go back to the boob tube.

In other news:

On another YouTube related note , have you ever felt left out when a group of people are talking about a viral video? For example, do you have no idea who Bubb Rubb and L'il Sis are? Do you have no idea why Zombie kid likes turtles? Then go to Wikitubia, an ambitious project to compile all those buzzworthy YouTube clips in a searchable database. The site still needs work and contributors, but I applaud the effort. It's important to know the stories behind the videos, and I'm glad someone is trying to compile them. I might have to add my own research into the originators of Canon Rock .
A quick observation about classified advertising . I'm trying to reach average residents with my dissertation experiment, not just students or those who spend a ton of time online, so I put a short ad in the Columbia Tribune. It has run since Friday, and I have had three responses from it. At $42, I paid $14 per response. That's not really cost effective.
I pulled up Pandora again while I wrote, and I have to say my Ben Folds radio station rocks! Not only do I get a Ben Folds song every third song, but I also got to hear some classic Elton John and Beatles tunes. Throw in some new Keane, Guster, and Death Cab for Cutie and I'm all set. I'm still wondering why Summer in the City by Joe Jackson came up. Weird.
Finally, Junice is back!

If you know me or you've read this blog a couple of times, you know I have iPhone envy. I've wanted one of the sleek little gadgets for some time now, but it's hard for me to justify the expense. With that in mind, however, I'm glad I'm NOT an incoming freshman at the University of Missouri because the last thing I want is my school to recommend to me that I have to buy one (You can catch up on any of the 100s of blurbs written about this HERE. In fact, whether it's a requirement or recommendation notwithstanding, I think it's a strange course for the world's oldest journalism school (and one of the world's best) to take. It seems contrary to the principles I've tried to teach for the last three years of inclusion and diversity.

Again, don't get me wrong. The iPhone is a fantastic tool. It has impressive audio and video capabilities, as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Brian Brooks explained to the Maneater, a student newspaper on campus. Students at the school have also tapped into the phone's vast potential for news application development in a recent competition. In fact, the growing iPhone app store bodes well for news organizations that want to reach their audiences outside of traditional means. Mike McKean, convergence journalism chair and Information Technology Committee chairman, said he recognizes the importance of cell phones in the future of news.

"Truly, the mobile phone is going to be one of the key components for not only students communicating with each other, that's the obvious thing, but in terms of trying to reach audiences," McKean said. "It's probably one of the most ubiquitous means of reaching people with news and information if you know how to do it."

Despite the iPhone's power and customizability, I worry that requiring or even recommending it to incoming freshman will narrow their focus too much. I'd love to see them develop new iPhone apps that make news exciting for young people. I'd jump for joy if they created an app that allows the audience to interact with the news more easily and conveniently. But what I'd love to see most is for them to develop an app that works on all phones, not just the one built by Apple.

In Principles of American Journalism, the class I just wrapped up, I emphasized over and over again how much journalists need to diversify. They can't rely on the same sources and the same stories over and over again. They need to step outside of themselves to involve people in the news that don't normally see their pictures on TV or in the paper. They also need to write in such a way that more people, especially those that don't normally pay much attention to the news, become interested and maybe even involved. Suggesting a focus on the iPhone does not fulfill that goal.

The gadget, while impressive, probably eludes the reach of most people, and I'm not just talking about its sticker price. Technologically speaking, not everyone will be able to use its full capabilities. What I'd like to see the journalism school focus on is cross platform development. If I were in charge, I'd encourage students to find new ways to use old technologies to ensure the news reaches as many people as possible. For example, KOMU, the NBC-affiliate on campus, does a great job with KOMU mobile, a news service that works on any Internet-capable phone.

One of my colleagues wants to take mobile news delivery a step further. Fellow Cyberbrains contributor Dr. Clyde Bentley has been named a Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow for 2009-2010 and has privately told me his project will focus on finding new ways to make text messaging effective as a news delivery mechanism.

I can't wait to see what Clyde comes up with because not only am I certain it will be inventive, but more importantly, I know it will be inclusive. Even though Clyde recently joined the iPhone toting pack, he's worked with enough cell phones and carriers over the years to understand what people want and how they use technology. He was the first to tell me about cell phone novels in Japan.

I'd love to see the Missouri School of Journalism invest more in ideas that bring people together than ones that unnecessarily categorize them.

Just to keep people in the loop, and explain why despite my best intentions, all you get is one blog entry a week from me, I completed my dissertation experiment and it's now in the field. If you want to check it out, go to this link . You can take the study if you want. It's anonymous so I won't know if you did. I'm hoping not only to get good enough data to finish my dissertation but also something that will suggest a direction the industry can take when they consider asking their audiences to submit news stories. I've based it mostly off CNN's iReport, where I've spent a lot of time recently. I think the site has a good mix of the citizen journalism you'd expect - commentary, light news, lots of photos - but also has some serious journalism that exemplifies what citizen journalism can add to the industry.
I was particularly impressed with how New Yorkers covered the Air Force One photo op disaster. To me, a story like that one shows how journalists and citizens can come together to giver readers a clearer picture of the news. The opportunity CNN missed was compiling all the citizen reports with CNN.com stories to create a clearinghouse of information. Where was Eric Lanford when you needed him? Maybe that's the next step. It's not hard to do if you assign a dedicated reporter to it, With my dissertation and my future research, I hope I can steer r. But I guess I've got to get that degree first.

A post script to this blog entry: While I was perusing CNN.com for links today, I came across this story. My daughter is just getting into Sesame Street again and sometimes, before I get started working from home, I'll watch a little bit with her. I can't tell you how comforting it is to see Maria, Luis and Gordon still dealing with the muppets and teach valuable life lessons. She's a fond part of my childhood. I just wish Bob was still there. My brother still teases me about a picture I took with him when I was 7 or 8 years old.
To me, Sesame Street remains the epitome of good children's TV. They've responded to the critics adding new characters and increasing the length of segments, but the staff still create a show that's fun to watch and educational. And while I'm talking about Maria, one thing I've always appreciated about the humans on the show is that even when they are doing the silliest things, such as channeling DreamGirls to sing the alphabet, they don't seem put out or, on the other hand, unrealistically enthusiastic. (I'm not sure I can say the same thing about the First Lady in the clip I provided above.) They are just those old friends you've always relied on for a laugh, a smile and a little worldplay.

BTW, I couldn't find the right alphabet song, so I'm embedded Merilee's favorite instead. Here's a link to the entire video. This is just a preview.

I got busted the other day. I logged on my blog and noticed something was different. The garage sale picture I used had a green background all of a sudden. I thought this was odd because I just linked to it from another site, but then I looked more closely. Turns out, the picture also had a message just for me.

I'm a lazy blogger. I'm stealing bandwidth from bestbuffalohomes.com.

It was a shock to get called out like that. I really hadn't thought I was doing anything wrong, let alone stealing. But I took the link to the picture out of the post just to make sure.

The incident has made me question my policy of borrowing pictures from other sites. The only reason I do it is to spice up my pages, and if I learned anything from my newspaper design experience, it's the difference a good picture can make. But it has also made me wonder about the nature of ownership on the Internet, and what rules there ought to be.

The funniest thing to me about the rebuke wasn't that I was stealing the picture. I'm sure it was just a stock photo anyway that I could have downloaded for free if I had taken the time. (That's probably why he called me "lazy".)

The most precious commodity on the Internet might be bandwidth. This probably isn't a great analogy because I'm not much of a network administrator, but bandwidth refers to the size of the pipe you have chosen to control the flow of information in and out of your site. Most of us don't have to worry about it. We can make due with whatever little pipe our hosting provider gives us. My Bluehost site even advertises unlimited bandwidth, although I hear the admins ask you to upgrade when you start getting thousands of hits a day.

But larger organizations need more dataflow and, to extend the metaphor to its most absurd level, they zealously guard their pipes from encroaching roots or clogs. I guess that makes me a big wad of toilet paper then.

Honestly, most of the time, someone is not going to mind if you link to a picture or post on another blog. A lot of times it will drive some traffic to the site. But the lesson I gleaned from this, and something I'm going to do better, is askfor permission first. It's really the neighborly thing to do, even on the Internet where you'll probably never see your neighbor face-to-face. So thanks for the lesson, Best Buffalo Homes, and here's to keeping your bandwidth flowing!

I'm not sure if I can get IRB approval for this on short notice, but I'm thinking of running a little local experiment here Saturday. I've advertised my garage sale in the local newspaper (The Columbia Daily Tribune) and on Craigslist and a local Yahoo! groups - KwikSwapColumbiaMO. I'm going to hand everyone that visits a short survey that asks them where they learned about the sale. Then I connect their choice with how much they spent and keep track of it all. By comparing the groups (Newspaper, Craigslist, KwikSwap, and other) I will statistically suggest which method will predict sales. I'm a genius! I wonder if I can add this to my dissertation proposal.

Ok, I'm kidding of course (although the more I read this over, the more it sounds like a good idea. What a geek I've become!) But I think I will try to ask some people casually because I'm curious about which method will attract the most people. If I were really bold, I wouldn't have bothered with the Tribune at all and just counted on the Internet to drive traffic, but I'm a wimp and I still have a fair share of ink in my veins. However, my hypothesis is that the Web sites will account for more visitors than the newspaper. At least that's what I've heard anecdotally.

It makes sense too because Craiglist has really eaten newspaper's lunch in the classified business. The Yahoo! group theoretically gives me a captive and motivated audience because you have to join the group to see the listings. I don't think this is possible without the Web. Plus the Internet offers a wealth of other features that a newspaper doesn't such as an easy way to create a map to all sales. If I were really ambitious I could have even linked items in my description to images and reviews.

But I didn't because all I really care about is getting rid of stuff so we don't have to move it, and I think I have some things people can use. I can't help asking the questions and wondering if this is one of those moments when I need to test some of my wacky Internet ideas.

Now to be fair, the Tribune did give me a free Garage Sale Starter Kit with a couple of signs and some pricing stickers, I think. I don't remember and I don't really care. Who needs low tech signs when I can draw on the power of the 'Net to offload my stuff?