I got a few requests to explain the flowchart in my previous post a little more, to give a few details as to how I integrate everything I do on the Internet.

So here goes nothing.

Let’s start with the central point of my Internet adventures: Gmail. Everything happens here. Everything. Gmail isn’t just my email client, it’s a very good record of everything I do on the Internet.

I primarily use Google Talk for chats, so if I need to remember a conversation, it’s usually there. That’s the beauty of Gmail. It’s a personal database. Search Gmail from Firefox.

I have 5 email accounts filtered into one central Gmail account that I’ve had since the second week Gmail launched. I’m only using 20% of my storage (though, that percentage is growing quickly as of late, and you’ll see why in a bit). Chances are, if you’ve ever contacted me, it’s sitting in a Google server somewhere.

But Gmail itself is a little unruly if you wish to dump tons of data into it. I’m one of those weirdos that likes to have his inbox empty at the end of the day, so I find myself constantly labeling and archiving messages, even though I had several prefilters set up. That’s where Lifehacker’s Better Gmail firefox plugin comes in handy.

I had previously been using a smattering of Greasemonkey scripts I found on Userscripts.org, but it was difficult (and a serious pain) to keep everything up to date.

This customizable plugin helps increase work flows and I’ve installed it on every machine I use. But there’s two features that make it a killer plugin: Google Calendar and Google Reader integration within Gmail. Say goodbye to Outlook.

It gets better. Using RSS and a little trick with Yahoo! Alerts where I email myself RSS feeds, everything I share in Google Reader gets emailed back to me. I filter it out of my inbox, tag it and when I have a vague recollection of some obscure blog post, I just search my Gmail account.

And that link blog from Google Reader gets pushed elsewhere too. A few recent reads end up on my link blog, but they all also get pushed onto my Facebook profile via Mario Romero’s Google Reader application.

I use the same Y! Alerts trick for just about everything with RSS, including but not limited to del.icio.us and flickr. And I can push information back out to flickr, Facebook and Backpack using Quick Contact emails set up in Gmail.

Most of this communication happens in the background as I passively push a button or two to bookmark items for future reference. I hardly use Gmail to actually make one on one (or even one to many) communications.

That’s where Facebook comes in.

After much wrangling, I’ve finally convinced all of my friends to join Facebook. All of them, and quite a few acquaintances too. I think of Facebook as a media hub. Where I use Gmail to collect massive amounts of data I think is relevant to me, I use Facebook to push that media saved in Gmail I think might be relative to at least one friend. I do this through a fairly simple series of Platform applications:

Note that I have Facebook send me a ton of email (all of it processed and filtered before it reaches my inbox) and so the cycle begins anew.

Saw this via Romenesko this morning:

Journalists produce the news that search engines such as Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. seamlessly and freely make available to anyone with a computer, Zell said during a presentation on corporate governance at Stanford University. “If all the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content for nothing, what would Google do, and how profitable would Google be?” the Chicago real estate maverick mused.

His answer: Not very.

Steal?

Indexing is now theft? That’s a bit ridiculous. I’d like to see if news Web sites could survive without referral traffic from search engines. I’d speculate all newspapers get on average of 15% to 25% of their traffic from search engines. Which could result in huge losses in value of Web sites in the eyes of advertisers, if these sites were suddenly cut off from the traffic generator.

But to call links with headlines (which is all Google uses) and with briefs (like Topix or Yahoo!) stealing is beyond gall. It a blasphemous misunderstanding of Internet basics.

There’s been a lot of fawning chatter the past few days about how Zell is going to save the American newspaper. Well, with that kind of attitude I’m going to have to assume his plans are actually to run it into the ground.

Google Maps released a new feature Thursday, My Maps. The service lets you draw lines and shapes over the Google maps, add markers, add whatever HTML you want to the marker bubbles and then you can spit out into a KML file. You can then dump the
KML data into Google Earth or another Google Map for your Web site, with a little knowledge of the Google Map API.

My Maps makes drawing on a map dead easy, and as soon as Google adds features to let you easily geo-code tabular data and then embed My Maps into your Web site, it will be the killer map app for Web journalists.

This got me thinking about a few things.

First, programmers that understand journalism, and journalists that understand programming are few and far between, which causes a problem for news outlets looking to expand their Web operations.

Second, I’ve said it before, programming takes time and it’s never a finished product, which causes a fundamental problem for those who work on tight deadlines.

Lastly, where does the value of information lie for news gatherers?

First things first: Journo-programming

Ask a programmer to make something by a certain time and they’ll tell you it can be done. Eternal optimists, most of them, they often don’t know how long something will take to build. Building to a quality standard journalists need might not be an option on a Friday afternoon whim for an 12 p.m. deadline Sunday.

That’s a fact of life behind a computer.

The developers I work with like to ask “why build something new, when it has already been done?” They “steal” code from each other frequently, but they make a point on a grander scale.

Page designers don’t change their styles every week and they certainly don’t create their own fonts. So why should programmers start from scratch with every product?

The Internet does two things well: It organizes and displays data and it creates efficiencies.

When creating something that will only be used once or a few times by the news, why build it all from scratch if you don’t need to?

Time wasters

Obviously building something new and populating it with data takes longer than populating something already created with data.

There are hundreds–thousands even–of Web products out there. Many of them can be leveraged, for free, to suit journalistic needs without having to build the product from the ground up.

Check out the Bakersfield site. Their map section isn’t built from coders manipulating the Google API. They’re leveraging sites like Zeemaps and Quikmaps to quickly create their maps. They even use YouTube for video on occasion.

They hand over the information they gather to these services and in turn, basically wrap their sites around the embed codes or iframes the services kick out.

Which brings us to:

The catch

Just what the crunk is the value of journalism? Is controlling the final product and copyright or the actual news gathering process more important?

I’m starting to lean more towards the latter. Data is usually freely available to anyone with the motivation (or gall) to ask for it.

Journalists basically just gather information, parse it and put it in a relevant context for their readers. That’s why we read newspapers. That’s why we watch the 6 p.m. news. We’re not particularly interested in the fact that you control the information you gather. We care about the context and relevance of said information.

Traditional media has this weird fascination with controlling the information it gathers. News gathering organizations rarely offer full-text RSS feeds for this reason. They want eyeballs on their sites; Withholding all the information from your feed reader gives them some semblance of control.

So handing over data to third parties drives news business people up the wall. They see it as giving their property away.

I’d argue that information is hardly the property of news media. Their value is the context and analysis of the information. Many YouTube videos are pointless. Clicking around the site, many Zeemaps don’t make much sense either. But that’s because you’re not seeing them in the context of their creation. They are created with the mindset that context will be divvied somewhere else.

Sure, there’s the greater catch that third party Web services often fall by the wayside, which can hurt the value of archived news behind pay walls. I don’t think its enough of a problem, though, considering the money saved from having developers work more on projects with higher returns on investment than news.

News has a terribly short shelf life to spend working on projects that peak in views in a day or two.