Jen Lee Reeves » blogger

Rethinking Blogger

Jen Reeves — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 17:36:05 +0000

I have mentioned many times that I have a thing for blogging. I spend time here, I spend time on my kid blogs and I spend time encouraging a lot of other people to use blogs to reawaken their conversational writing voice. A while back I used to encourage newbies to blogging to hop into Blogger. It was simple, intuitive and it helped people who have a fear of online tools get the job done without needing to ask me many questions.

But in the last few years, I’ve started encouraging more people to use WordPress.com and those who are willing to purchase server space of their own, I send them down the WordPress.org path. (The difference? The .com version is hosted by WordPress and it isn’t as customizable or as easily tinkered. The .org version gives you total control of the look and content you place inside the blog system.) I get a few more questions when my colleagues, students and friends use WordPress, but it’s become an industry standard in some ways. I don’t want my friends and students to miss out the knowledge of using a tool that is helpful in their careers.

But after SXSW, I’m starting to think a little differently. I was walking around the Google booth on the trade floor and started talking to the cool folks that work in Google-land. First I explained to the woman working at Google Voice how my whole brand (@jenleereeves) is based on the Gmail I picked up back in 2004. I also explained how Google Voice has changed my entire life workflow. (I actually return calls… I was terrible about that before that time.) Then I walked over to the Blogger guy thinking it wouldn’t be much of a conversation… but then he shows me this:

I looked at him and said: “When did Google start thinking about Blogger? I might actually recommend this again.”

Why is the new version of Blogger so cool? The design is customizable in ways I’ve never seen in a blog tool. You can change the width of the main section and the sidebars. You can choose how the widgets will look and where you can place the elements. You can even add static pages – which I really love with my WordPress sites.

I might have to answer a few more questions when someone builds a Blogger blog and uses some of the extra features, but I won’t mind helping. I’m curious to see what can come out of the new version. If you want to check it out, visit Blogger in Draft (http://draft.blogger.com). You can sign in with your normal old blogger accounts that you left a while ago and tinker around with those sites. That’s what I did!

Now I can’t stop

Jen Reeves — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:07:11 +0000

I’ve talked about social media here and in many different presentations at the Missouri School of Journalism, conferences and training seminars. I feel like all of my ramblings are a little more legitimate as more and more journalists debate on whether these trends are good or bad. Obviously I plant myself into the camp that this is good.

Feel free to view my PowerPoint slideshow.

A slide from my presentation

Twitter isnt the end-all be-all for journalism, but I do see it as a growing news tool. The trick, you need to be in there to understand how it works. For the first time, I recommended to all of my students that they should join a few social networks and learn how they work. I started out in Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Motionbox, Vimeo (I could go on) for my personal needs online and I’ve transitioned that use into ways I can use them professionally. You cannot jump in and think you know how it works. That’s how you end up finding reports like this one. It is so easy to fall into a culture of fear. Journalists shouldn’t allow themselves to do that. I think we should act like journalists, investigate these tools and see how they can be helpful. People are using them. Let’s see how we can use them to our advantage to deliver better news to our markets.

Now I’ll try to stop ranting.

When cool things happen

Jen Reeves — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 05:48:26 +0000

I think I have a blog that is really rolling for the Big 12 Championship. A group of students are live blogging their road trip from Columbia, MO to San Antonio, TX. It’s a blast and I’m finding great ways to help them chat with viewers and share the experience. The traffic is starting to jump and it’s great to see how a small news station can interact with cool behind-the-scenes information using free online products.Check out Chase for the Championship

A different way to report

Jen Reeves — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 06:27:19 +0000

One of my students came to me and said she wanted to engage the Autism community and get input in a major Autism reporting project. I set up a really simple Blogger blog so she could add content, offer viewers a chance to post comments or email thoughts (giving the student the chance to review the posts and then add them to the blog). She then gathered a team of researchers who documented the project every step of the way. They did first-person video blogs, they posted pictures and they blogged about what they saw and learned. The lead reporter asked questions of the online viewers and shared how the project was getting constructed every step of the way. It’s amazing.
I highly recommend visiting her website: Combating Autism From Within

We could have gotten fancier, but I think the simplicity of it all is why it works. Plus, she tagged each post so you can easily search by topic or researcher name. I love it. Plus, the traffic to the site has been pretty consistently high for a blog that’s only been “advertised” on other autism blogs and periodically on KOMU’s air. Congrats to Ashley Reynolds and her team!On air stories start on the 3rd… But online stories are already posting on the blog!