Jared W. Smith

This promises to be an exciting week — I’ll be going to my first-ever ConvergeSouth conference in Greensboro, NC on Thursday. I’ll be with a ton of my fellow bloggers as well as my good friend Patrick O’Keefe, who I will finally get to meet “in real life” after I’ve worked with him and chatted with him over the Internets for several years. I haven’t yet pinpointed what I’m going to do from the schedule yet — one of the many trip preparation things I need to be doing.

Saturday was supposed to be BlogHer Greensboro, which Patrick and I were also going to attend, but they pulled out. Thanks to the power of FriendFeed, a couple folks named Kelby Carr and Dave Slusher, and Converge’s organizer Sue Polinsky, the lost Saturday was reclaimed with some fresh new independent sessions.

I’m extremely stoked for the Saturday sessions, as I’ll be talking about what I do to make Charleston Weather, my streamed severe weather show, tick. I’m also excited to be able to talk about the broader implications for something like Charleston Weather as it relates to hyperlocalism in media, which is a topic that’s getting more and more attention as news outlets race to become more specialized and serve a narrower segment extremely well. That afternoon, I’ll be leading a hands-on session to show just how easy it is to put together a reasonably professional-looking live presentation using mostly free software and Ustream.tv (not necessarily just a weather show). It’s going to be quite a bit of fun.

Patrick will also be leading some talks, so be sure to check those out. He’s on at 10:30am, and I’m on at 11:15am.

I absolutely cannot wait — this is going to be quite a good time. I’m planning on filing some video updates throughout on Serious Business, as well — keep an eye out for those.

I’m sitting here with a terrible case of selective writers’ block. I can write stream of consciousness in the blog all day long — which is what this is — but I’m struggling to write a movie review for my editing class. It’s due Wednesday but this is the only time I really have anything resembling energy for homework, which is surprising considering the emotional rollercoaster the NFL has been for the first two weeks. (I don’t want to say much about Week 2 beyond “the Cardiac Cats are BACK!” and “isn’t robbery illegal in Colorado?”) read more »

Something that might get lost in the larger story of Hurricane Gustav and (to a lesser extent) Tropical Storm Hanna is how the “old” media started looking towards — and, dare I say, embracing — “new” social media tools. read more »

Tonight’s Serious Business was a resounding success. Thanks to everybody who stopped in and really made it something great. Here’s hoping next week is just as good.

Here’s the recorded show, in case you missed it — and it was a good one. We went in-depth on PR practices with bloggers, new vs. old media, and you’ll even find out what my baseball bandwagon is this year…

Remember that, for now at least, we’re doing this every Sunday at 8:30 over on Ustream.tv. Check out the show’s website for links to the show as well as a link to the Facebook page. Fan the show if you deem it worthy. I’ll have more at the show website soon; it needs a WordPress install, I just need time.

I got my replacement anemometer in yesterday…and of course, during the only real time that I’ll have to get it all set back up, the rain will be here. I’m going to try to see, weather permitting, if I can get things going again on Sunday. That’s going to be a fairly big job, though — we’ll see what happens.

The rain is definitely inbound. NWS has it pegged for “after midnight” — here’s hoping it holds off for at least a little while so I can get to work reasonably dry. I have an umbrella there, which is a plus. So far, the rain does not look like it’s moving all too quickly, but we’ll see what happens. Don’t think I’m going to activate the radar for this one — makes the main PC somewhat sluggish at times, especially when I need to dive in and do analysis of my own.

If you haven’t already, I urge you to read Brian Goode’s blog about the Tuesday weather non-event. It’s a great explanation of why broadcast meteorologists reacted the way they did to the threat — the data was pretty solid. I certainly appreciate the perspective and transparency Brian brings to the process through his blog time and time again. I do find it hilarious how people get all up in arms when the weather is less worse than predicted — isn’t that a good thing? As Brian put so well, the media did not tell the schools and cities and stuff to start closing up shop. They just reported what they saw as the situation, and the situation evolved and changed throughout the day to end up being very much in our favor.

So Tropical Storm Barry kicked off the season at about 5:00 last night, and I joked that now that the rain will have a name, The Weather Channel will send crews and stuff and cue up the hurricane themes and stuff.

Well, I’ll be damned if they don’t have the radar inset going (once reserved for really rough weather) and they have Mike Bettes on location at Punta Gorda, FL. Sigh. Folks, it’s rain. It’s named. The Southeast sure as hell needs it. There’s no need to send a crew to a rainstorm with a little wind that happens to have a name because it got itself together enough to spin up to 40 mph for a few hours.

The crying wolf factor is something that the media really has to guard against, and it looks like their lesson has not been learned…

…and so are you. Big responsibility, huh? It’s a neat piece, and almost a startling admission that user-generated content is increasingly driving the agenda of the media. Good read, I recommend it.

The momentum of this phenomenon you and I are caught up in sure seems unstoppable, but a Gartner report seems to foretell otherwise. I’m not going to argue too much with the basic premise of this, really — the honeymoon will inevitably end. The blogosphere will settle down a bit and work out its kinks like a good system should; these ‘kinks’ are personal websites that may or may not have much influence that eventually are abandoned. Chances are, if a blog is abandoned, it either wasn’t that great or wasn’t being read much, or perhaps it had simply run its course. This is normal, though; this has happened since the Web came to fruition. It’s not a sign of a giant Web 2.0 meltdown; rather, it’s a sign that Web 2.0 is robust; far more robust, I think, than the initial 2000 dotcom bust. People will come, people will go, but the system is in place more firmly than ever, I think.