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For only $18 a month, you can build your own user-generated news site at Instant Journalist. Journalism.co.uk interviewed founder Scott Durham. Is this the future of news?

“When Vannevar Bush first dreamt of hyperlinks back in the 1940s, surely he envisioned something tidier than the link riots that erupt on many of today’s Web pages, ” writes Jack Shafer for Slate yesterday.

Shafer rails against useless links, but his own is worth checking out.
Links that Stink: Grumbling about the misuse of hyperlinks on news sites.

The Chicago Tribune has rolled out Chicago’s Best Blogs, a collection of local- interest blogs organized by topic and profiles of local bloggers. The feature is run by Daniel Honigman (MSJ ‘07).  Check it out for inspiration and links for your own blog roll.

In his latest article for The New Yorker, Eric Alterman charts the decline of the American newspaper as we know it. He finds some reason for journalistic optimism in the work of the more successful news blogs including The Huffington Post. But, he posits, where would such blogs be without the traditional news outlets to feed them material? Will blogs and other news Web sites step up to fill the gap in serious reporting or will they continue to play off the work of others? Some other interesting ideas here, too. Post your comments by noon, April 7.

In 1945, The Atlantic Monthly published an article by Dr. Vannevar Bush, director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development. Bush called on his fellow scientists to develop new tools to record and organize the wealth of their knowledge.

Bush wrote: ” The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.”

What do you think of Bush’s ideas? What technologies did he anticipate with accuracy and which would be useful inventions today? Have we developed adequate tools to access and evaluate new scientific developments? Or is our world closer to what Bush saw in 1945, too much information, poorly organized.

This article is available for student access in Blackboard/Documents/Week One. Please post your comments on this article by noon, Monday, April 7.

In his article, “The History of Online Journalism,” David Carlson traces the roots of digital news from Britain’s “teletext” system of the 1970s through the dawn of Yahoo!, AOL and the rest. What were some of the keys to success for those technologies that survived? Did Carlson leave out any key developments?

Much has happened in the field since 2003 when the article was first published. If you were to continue the history from 2003-2008, what would be the highlights? How do you see online journalism changing in the future?

This article is posted on Blackboard. Post your thoughts here as a comment and aim to play off the ideas of those who post before you.

Welcome to the class blog for Techniques: Interactive Storytelling (Medill, Edit 405-0). This blog will serve as a forum for reading discussions and a repository for links related to the class. This is your class blog - feel free to post material your classmates may find useful or interesting. To your right, you will find links to news blogs created by former TIS students. Once the new student blogs are up and running, we will archive the former blogs and link to the new blogs here.

Here’s an excellent five-part guide for promoting your blog from Darren Rowse of ProBlogger. In his week-long series of posts, Darren covers guest posting, networking, advertising, social media and viral content. Thanks, Rich for passing it along.

Harvard Business School professor John Deighton says that consumers are approaching privacy from the wrong angle. Instead of focusing solely on efforts to protect their identity, they should consider their identity a commodity they can sell to companies for better services based on their individual buying habits and preferences. A company that pays for your information will be more inclined to treat your information with care, Deighton reasons, because they’ve established a relationship with you. What do you think of this idea? How might it work in practice? Would you sell your identity in exchange for better services? Do you already?

In these chapters, Edward Samuels reviews the history of copyright in the U.S. How do recent developments in copyright law affect the way you handle audio, video and photos in your work as a journalist? Where do you think things are heading in the near future, toward greater protection for copyright owners or greater freedom for consumers?