November 26, 2009

Happy Thanksgiving!

May all your turkey be cooked to perfection.

May all your family drama be kept to a minimum.

May you be thankful for everyone you love, and may the all be thankful for you.

May you have more to be thankful for than you did the year before, but less than what you’ll be thankful for next year.

From all of us here at The MagaBlog,

Happy Turkey Day *gobble gobble*

November 26, 2009

The Daily Do: Eat Lots of Turkey

Happy Thanksgiving from The MagaBlog!

November 20, 2009

The Grapevine: New Additions, Streamlining, Expanding Our Range, and Information

- By Eden Phoenix, Nov. 20th, 2009

There is so much to write about today! Where to begin…

I’ll just go in the order suggested by the headline.

1) New Additions

There are going to be some pretty exciting new additions to The MagaBlog in coming weeks. Truly!

First of all, as you know, we are expecting a contribution from a News21 journalist any day now. I know we keep teasing with the promise of this article, and (on behalf of The MagaBlog), I apologize for the long wait. The lesson learned by us here is that we shouldn’t post information on specific contributors until we’ve finalized all the dates involved.

Second, we are extremely excited to announce a new permanent contributor will be joining us within the next month or so! We’ll share more news as it arises.

3) Streamlining

We are still experimenting with finding the sweet spot between efficient journalistic convention and the informality of a blog. Bear with us. We are striving to develop a system of tagging, posting, citing, and linking. Some aspects of this are easier than others.

We also have some ultimate “streamlining” goals that we know it will take a while to achieve.

  • Allow you to begin following us on twitter from our homepage
  • Provide tabs that will take you to specific posts, sorted by category. We want to do this in the same way that the homepage would, not like pages would. Think sections of a newspaper.
  • Create our own “Theme.” I know: that was vague.
  • Set up a system that would allow temporary contributors to contribute an article, without having the same level and permanence of access to The MagaBlog as the permanent contributors.
  • Purchase a domain name that would allow us to remove the ” .wordpress” from our URL.
  • (Our most fun, and difficult goal) Be able to @reply people from within the text of a post. How fun would that be!?

3) Expanding Our Range

We definitely want to add more types of posts to The MagaBlog. We would love to be able to post critiques, political analysis, etc. without losing our focus as a blog about social media.

I know we’ve written a lot about Twitter, but we have been studying up on many other social media-related topics. We’re looking into Digg, YouTube, Facebook Video, LinkedIn, various blog sites (WordPress, Blogspot, etc.), The Huffington Post, Del.icio.us, and more. While we have been aware, we are observing and analyzing tradition and innovation regarding the qualities they posses and  how they are used. The reason these posts take so long is due to the wide array of topics we can explore rather than a lack of suitable topics.

4) Information

The “Broadway (R)evolution” article will be up just as soon as we can possibly get it up. It may take a week or so.

Feel free to post responses or help to us regarding anything in this post or in any other.

As a side note: Please don’t think we’re being prissy if you see that we’ve typed “theatre,” and please don’t think we’re poorly edited if you see the words “theatre” and “theater” within the same post. “Theatre” signifies the dramatic arts while “theater” denotes the physical structure that serves as a venue for the dramatic arts. Theatre is probably going to become a large sub-focus of The MagaBlog in some way. You learn something new every day, I suppose. Kudos to those who knew already!

November 18, 2009

Daily Do: Vote on the Open Web Awards

The nomination period is over, but here is your chance to vote for who and what you think has been influential on the web this year. You can vote on your favorite tweet, the best political use of social media, best web-series (we chose The Guild) what on the web is best for journalists, and much more. You can also vote for @FeliciaDay for the best actress to follow!

Just visit this page and start voting! http://mashable.com/owa/categories

November 16, 2009

MagaNotice: Doing Our Homework

-By Eden Phoenix Nov. 16, 2009

The article “Broadway (R)evolution” should be up again shortly. We’re just being responsible citizen journalists and making sure we avoid copyright infringement on the images in the article. All should be right as rain shortly.

November 16, 2009

MagaNotice: News21 Presentation a la Twitter

–By Tobie James, Monday, November 16th, 2009

Every Monday night at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, a guest speaker talks to students in the First Amendment Forum about journalism related topics and programs at the school.  Tonight’s speakers will be Jason Manning, the managing editor of the  Carnegie-Knight News21 project and students with News21.   The News21 program  is a remarkable program created to discover new forms of in-depth, investigative reporting and new ways to report the news to the audience (for more information, visit their website here).

Highlights from the lecture will tweeted in real time from The MagaBlog’s Twitter page, so be sure to take a peek tonight at 6/7c!   If you send us a tweet with a question for the speakers, we might be able to get you an answer :)

November 12, 2009

The Grapevine: New Feature Story Up by Later Tonight!

-By Eden Phoenix, Nov. 12, 2009

Expect to see a new feature story posted to The MagaBlog by midnight tonight (Mountain Standard Time). Will notify via Twitter and Tumblr when posted. Exciting topic!

November 11, 2009

MagaNotices: We’re on Del.icio.us!

By Tobie James Wednesday Nov. 11th, 2009

The MagaBlog is now on Del.icio.us!

What is Del.icio.us you may ask? Well, it’s what’s called a “social bookmarking” site that lets users bookmark, tag, and share web pages all from one place.  It’s extremely useful and easy to use.  Simply create an account and start sharing.  Not only can you share bookmarked pages with friends, but you can also subscribe to other people’s Del.icio.us pages if you like what they’re bookmarking.

Another great feature of this site is that you can see the most popular pages by looking at the tags.  You can also browse the tags to find topics you want to read about.

So, if you want to see what MagaBlog is bookmarking, head on over to our page!

November 10, 2009

MagaNotice: Lots of Views

Best Day Ever…so far

- By Eden Phoenix, Nov. 10, 2009

Last night, Tobie and I logged on to find that we had had more hits on The MagaBlog than we had ever had before. Thank you all for being so loyal to our budding project! Keep it up! :)

November 10, 2009

Daily Do: Follow Felicia Day

Felicia Day Headshot

A New Kind of Celebrity

-By Eden Phoenix, Nov. 10, 2009

This “Do” specifically asks you to follow @FeliciaDay on Twitter, but we hope that you’ll become one of her fans.

Who is this person? Why should you care?

She is one of the coolest actors/people to become popular in a very long time. If you have not had the pleasure of discovering Joss Whedon yet, then you would probably know @FeliciaDay as “that red-head” in the Best Buy commercials. If you are a Whedon fan, then you would know her from her work as Penny in the Emmy Winning “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog,” or (more briefly) as a potential in the final season of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and Mag in the brilliant 13th episode of “Dollhouse,” titled Epitaph One (Click here for Felicia Day’s IMDB Page).

Dr. Horrible LaundryMat

Felicia Day and Neil Patrick Harris in Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog

She is relevant to The MagaBlog and its readers, because she’s also a self-proclaimed “New Media Geek.” Day’s knowledge of New Media, and her personality is what makes learning from her so interesting and fun. She writes, creates, and stars in “The Guild,” an award-winning web-series about a group of internet gamers. In fact, the style and humor of “The Guild” helped inspire the creation of “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog.”

If you remain unmoved, Felicia Day’s Blog reveals that several others are truly impressed by Day and her work. Not only techno-centric media promote and applaud Day, but much more mainstream ones as well. A guest appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,  news articles in The Wall Street Journal and Forbes, and interviews with PBS and MSNBC make Day an increasingly powerful powerful figure in the entertainment world.

Felicia Day The Guild

Click this image to go to The Guild's homepage!

Her witty humor and vast knowledge of topics that celebrities don’t usually discuss (New Media, technology, Sci-Fi novels, etc.) set her apart from most of her fellow actors, in the best way possible!

Also, in researching this article, an important aspect of Day has become tremendously apparent: she’s an honest, good person. Her effort to form a relationship with her followers that goes beyond self-promotion (but thankfully doesn’t cross the line into creepiness) and the unique application of ethics to her use of the internet justify this claim.

For example, Felicia Day’s Website begins with a short paragraph concluding with “I’d love to hear from you in the comments.” Skimming her blog posts and tweets reveals that these are not empty words. In one post she wrote:

I guess having over 300,000 followers on Twitter can be a good and bad thing.  The bad is I can’t possibly follow or know each and every person who follows me, but the good is that when I get so many insanely smart and wonderful responses to things I tweet.  I would love to RT (ReTweet) them all and share them on my Twitter feed, but sometimes I get so many awesome responses I can’t give credit where credit is due.  So I decided, based on a Twitter I did this morning, to share some of my favorites…

She then went on to post her favorite responses to a tweet about slugs, organized by category! One rarely sees that kind of interaction between a celebrity and her fans unless the celebrity is promoting a new movie, TV show or perfume.

She clearly cares about humanity at large and takes the time to make that known. Three particularly impressive posts are worthy of note:

1) Finding People to Follow on Twitter.

The introduction of this article speaks for itself…

I have had a big influx of followers on Twitter the last several weeks, in some part due to being on the “Recommended” list for new users. I’m excited to meet so many new people, but my heart broke yesterday when I asked how people liked it, and I got many responses to the effect that they felt like they were “talking into a vacuum.” :( Well, I aspire to be a good hostess, so I’ve compiled a list of how to build your Twitter community.

2) Highland Hunk Fantasy

In this article she explains how, in a drunken tweet, she wrote about a disproportionately large amount of kilted men appeared in the romance section of a bookstore. Surprised by and in apology to @replies defending the Scottish romance-novel archetype, she vowed to read this genre before forming judgments. Few people probably believed her promise and fewer still remembered it by the next day. But Day had made a promise. She then read not one, but five romance-novels in this genre of which she did not care for a single one. This illustrates an admirable level of follow through and a respect for her fans that rarely, if ever, finds a home in successful actors and industry professionals.

3) Sad Internet Story

Here, she writes compassionately about mean comments on a YouTube video involving a woman and a cat. She reminds readers of her blog of the harm of hyper-critical comments and expresses her feelings that the internet should be a community. This post in particular displays a noteworthy moral compass. You should probably read this post regardless of whether or not you plan to follow Day, because her message is very valuable.

Finally, from marching with the writers during the most recent Writer’s Strike to promoting charitable organizations and causes, Day proves to be a woman of substance.

Felicia Day Writers Strike

Felicia Day in solidarity with the Writers Guild of America during the strike

If you’re interested in supporting an intelligent, moral, compassionate person while you learn more about the world of New Media, then you should definitely follow @FeliciaDay.

(As an aside: If anybody with the authority to cast actors or get them auditions happens to frequent The MagaBlog, here is a link to Felicia Day’s Reel.)