First Friday: by day, by night

A bit belated, I figured I should post a small project I finished last week for my Digital Media Entrepreneurship class — a geotagged map of the monthly First Fridays art walk in downtown Phoenix.


View First Fridays: by day, by night in a larger map

The rationale behind this assignment was to have us experiment with the new potentials of tagging, the act of labeling or categorizing content online. Dan Gillmor, one of the two professors for my course, believes online tagging could revolutionize the Internet. It has disrupted the traditional taxonomy of content organization — he calls the new system a "folksonomy" in reference to its origin through crowds of people from the bottom-up — opening up new possibilities for arranging and finding content. Geotagging represents just one unconventional form of tagging information.

First Friday has become a main-stay of journalism projects for Cronkite School students — it's a really easy subject to cover and provides fairly engaging content — so I had to come up with a slightly different angle. While going through my photo library, I found a bunch of daytime images from the downtown area that I shot when I first bought my newest camera (a Canon Rebel XSi). So, using Google Maps, I paired shots from the day with shots of the art walk to illustrate how spaces change every first Friday of the month.

Blogging for School

As part of my Digital Media Entrepreneurship class this semester, I'm starting a blog on e-readers and digital publishing. Here's the link.

Composing a good blog post takes time — more time than I can sometimes spare from my day. There are too many steps and worries — developing a topic, finding sources, writing, linking, editing, tagging, organizing — but then, I guess the fact that this blog is graded should be sufficient motivation.

I'm lucky my professors were completely on-board with my topic. At least I can become an expert on something interesting. E-readers seem to hold a lot of emotions for people, especially people in the media industry. Also, I never have to worry about running low on material; the Web is absolutely percolating with news and opinions about e-readers. I'm excited to dive in.