Links for my URMA talk

On Wednesday, May 17, I'll be giving a talk at the annual conference of the University Reseach Magazine Association (URMA). They seem like a fun group of media professionals. (Seriously -- their conference agenda even features the Creature from the Black Lagoon!)

The topic of my talk is: Invasion of the bloggin’ pods: The new media – ready or not, they’re here! (So whatta we do with ‘em?)

I already warned URMA: I don't do lectures, so the people attending this session had better be ready to get involved.

Here are some links I plan to mention in my session...

News Portals and Syndication:

• Google News
• Yahoo News
• Are Portals A Growing Threat to News Sites? My May 10 E-Media Tidbits posting.
• Science Daily
• Physorg

Content Management Systems:

• Wikipedia's definition includes lots of good links to get started and learn more.
• CMSwatch - news, trends, reports

Blogs and Blogging Tools:

• What's a Blog? Bag the Stereotypes -- my May 2005 article.

Feeds (RSS):

• What are feeds and why should you care? (My Oct. 2003 tutorial)
• Yes, feeds can look ugly. Not meant to be read by people.
• Feed readers -- a list from HeBig. I recommend starting out with Bloglines
• Feedburner: Free service to make your feed look nicer and augment it with handy services.
• Feed aggregation services: Like Technorati and Icerocket
• Pingomatic: One-stop shopping to notify all major feed aggregators about your latest content. (Feedburner's Pingshot tool includes this.)

Get connected to venues like:

• RealClimate.org (respected group blog on climate science)
• Environmental Health News
• Slashdot
• WebMD communities
• Start contributing constructively to Wikipedia (not spamming)
• My article on how to do strategic commenting

Podcasting:

• Science@NASA podcast
• Podzinger and Blinkx multimedia search services
   
• O'Reilly Pocket Guide to Podcasting
   

Examples for discussion: Sites from selected URMAns:

• Research in Review, Florida State University
• Medicine on the Midway, Univ. of Chicago Hospitals (feed -- press releases, but where are magazine stories?)
• Dartmouth Medicine magazine (includes some multimedia)
• Explorations, from Vanderbilt University (Flash-based feature navigation, feed, e-mail alerts) Syndicates stories for wide reach (Science Daily, Topix, Physorg) Flash accessibility info.