KMDK

I found two excellent posts on Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism blog that I had to share. (Unless you’ve already read them, in which case, great!)

In one post, he asks the £10,000 question: who benefits most from a tax threshold change? What wonderful real-life examples. Go read the article and see whether you can spot the difference in these charts. Take heed of his point about making the raw data available.

The other post discusses the means of presenting data. This builds on lessons learned from Dan Roam’s “The Back of the Napkin” and Stephen Few’s “Now You See It”. A rough summary reads: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Remember to think about the content. The content. What are you trying to tell the reader? What is appropriate or suitable for the situation? Are you actually trying to confuse them? Really??

Paul Bradshaw updated his article with this gem from a New York Times senior software architect entitled Word Clouds Can Be Harmful. It is a must-read. It includes the statement that you can whip out when someone asks you to make a fancy-schmancy visualization:

…if it obliterates the ability to read the story of the visualization, it’s not worth adding some wild new visualization style or strange interface.

Ah, to think that attending a lecture by Paul Bradshaw last year could lead to such delight in reading these valuable blog posts.

Takeaway links

• Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism blog
• Stephen Few’s “Now You See It” book
• Dan Roam’s site for “The Back of the Napkin”

A mini-vacation and some random negative tweets stirred some dusty brain cells this week. As a result, I want to make a constructive call to action.

Let’s work on constructive and positive approaches to spreading accessibility awareness everywhere.

This is not being cheesy and cutesy. I’m not bringing out the unicorns and rainbows, even though they can correct accessibility errors in one sprinkling of fairy dust.

The background

Somewhere at the end of 2008 or beginning of 2009, I saw Chris Heilman make a similar call. He said something about making positive changes. He proposed that we stop (negative) rants about some inaccessible something. Instead, he suggested taking constructive action. I took that to heart. I recall coming across a website for some spinal injury organization that had a useful-sounding brochure on exercises for people who had spine problems. The brochure was a PDF and it was inaccessible. I immediately wrote to them and suggested that they make the PDF accessible. I never heard from them. That didn’t stop me. Only time stops me, especially when I make such discoveries on a tangent to a tangent to what I was in the process of doing!

Since then, the marvelous volunteers in the Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) have produced a sort of fairy dust. They made templates for how to contact organizations about inaccessible websites. Just brilliant. (I wrote about the efforts of EOWG and several others recently.)

Now and then, discussions pop up in social media about negative versus positive in the process of making the web truly universal and accessible. Such a discussion popped up yesterday on Twitter and jiggled the memory of Chris’ old call to action. I sent a tweet to Chris yesterday, asking about the source of such a statement. Chris’ links led to some awesome resources I had forgotten. That man has a passionate way with words on technology and accessibility. That’s why I stalk him, uh, follow him on Twitter, even though I am not a web developer. (At least I can comprehend the funny videos he shares from time to time!)

Chris Heilman’s awesome must-read articles

I may not have found the exact quote I was looking for, but I found two articles that I hope people will read and ponder.

• July 2008: The biggest barrier to accessibility and inclusive design is us
• September 2009: Finite Incatatem – my keynote at Accessibility 2.0

The Finite Incatatem has a passage I thought worth highlighting here:

Our job now is to get out of our own little world and educate the world about accessibility and the issues bad web development and design causes. We don’t do a good job with this as we always try to excuse ourselves by saying that we don’t understand technology and its ins and outs. The point is though that as someone who advocates accessibility you don’t need to know everything but all you need to do is to listen, collaborate and communicate with the right people in the right format.

Last year’s Paris Web conference had a great example of Aurelien Levy and Stephane Deschamps showing and teaching accessibility by explaining the problems using magic tricks and making people from the audience experience the issues by blindfolding them or only allowing them to use one hand to use interfaces. This is what we need to do more – bring the human aspect into our presentations and trainings instead of banging on about guidelines and laws and minute technological solutions.

Note the phrase “all you need to do is to listen, collaborate and communicate with the right people in the right format”. Note that “listen” comes first!

We must also remember that teaching is hard, as Chris states elsewhere in that speech. That is because “it not only means transferring knowledge but also changing mindsets. And that is something we have to do if we want to make this accessibility thing work.”

That’s is why communication is on par with knowing code. Changing mindsets can be just as tricky, if not more so, than wrangling HTML code in any way, shape, or form! This communication theme continues from the 2008 presentation where Chris said that “the main problem is that we just don’t talk to each other the right way. AND we communicate with the wrong means in the wrong manner.”

This shouldn’t be the case for technical communicators, right? We know how to communicate correctly, right?

While digging through Chris’ old blog posts, I read a blog post somewhere else. I think it fits nicely into this discussion. Mark Baker discusses technical communicators and respect – a respect that many think is always just out of reach. He distinguishes between one-of-them respect versus one-of-us respect. Accessibility is about removing barriers, yet many of us are quite good at building and maintaining barriers in our work. Mark’s post provides an interesting and useful little wake-up call.

Do we want to win arguments or solve a problem?

A newer post from Chris continues some of his older posts and presents a challenge for 2012. He discusses a winter of discontent for web design, but I think his points apply to those preaching accessibility regardless of whether they code, write, or design.

What about my call to action?

I don’t have a spinal injury, yet I took action when I encountered a problem on that website I mentioned previously. I was professionally aware that there was a problem, and I felt that knowledge came with a responsibility. I think more of us can do this. If in doubt, discuss the issue with friends and colleagues, or turn to the resources I mentioned at EOWG. During elections, you always hear how your vote counts. Well, the same applies here. Your accessibility efforts do count.

Other people have bigger access barriers to the web than I do. Far bigger barriers. I can sympathize with their frustration. Realizing what they experience – well, I’d be outraged and furious. Especially if I felt I was all alone with my troubles. That’s why we need to work together. We can learn from each other and support each other in this project. I’ve done my share of mocking and scorning inaccessible sites. Nothing constructive comes out of that, however.

Write to a site when you discover they lack correct (or any) alt text on images. Bit by bit, we can fix this place. Let’s do it in a constructive and positive spirit. If they fight back and resist your suggestions, use intelligence to counter that. Fight back, but with honey and constructive ideas. Be kind and polite when you vocally take your business elsewhere. You who master words – you know it can be done! Let’s do this!

PS UPDATE: Obviously, I’m giving credit to Chris for his inspiration made-to-stick a few years ago. However, the tipping point or nudge to write this comes from Jennifer Sutton. Thank you, Jennifer!

Sometimes there is a bit too much oohing and aahing over the bling and not enough discussion of how the bling got there.

Hey, I like fancy gadgets and cool technology as much as the next geek girl. I know that fancy gadget didn’t just materialize out of thin air. There are no replicators around here, either. So how does cool tech get here? Where does bling come from?

It comes from the neurons in brains shooting messages back and forth around the brain at lightening speed. Brain activity, that is. Thinking. Wondering. Someone has to think up this bling and do so standing on the shoulders of those who have been thinking and wondering earlier.

If we want more cool tech in our lives, we need more people to gain knowledge about these things through learning, teaching, collaborating, and creating. And lots of hard work.

We need young children, especially girls, to look at the cool technology and not say “I want that”, but say “I want to know how that works and I want to make things like that, too”.

While there are women out there touting technology products, some women are aware of something more crucial – the need for some girls to help make that technology.

Dorte Toft is one such woman. As stated in the Danish wikipedia entry on Dorte, she is a Danish journalist. She blogs in Danish about many IT topics, including management, security, and investments. Apparently, she describes herself as a “devil’s advocate”. Her persistence in getting to the bottom of matters led to the downfall of Stein Bagger, a man you could perhaps call a Danish Bernie Madoff. She received a number of awards for her high-quality and excellent journalism. (What a shame that the English wikipedia article about Stein Bagger doesn’t mention Dorte at all.)

Her area of expertise is information technology, most likely coming from her first education as a developer. She knows what she is talking about when she writes her blog posts for technology and business blogs. She values knowledge.

A few years ago, she started a project to educate people in all the opportunities girls can have by getting an education in the “hard” subjects like technology, IT, and the natural sciences. You could say that she wanted to get at the heart of why more girls weren’t studying the highly technical subjects in school. Her journalism drove her and her expertise supplied the quality. The project resulted in a book, “Lykkelig i Nørdland” (literally “Happy in Nerdland”). You can explore her project, perhaps with the support of Google Translate, at the Danish-language blog Lykkelig i Nørdland.

The reason I admire Dorte Toft and chose her as my Ada Lovelace Day “tributee” is because she gets at the real heart of the issue of technology. It’s about education and stimulating an interest in technology, IT, and sciences. We shouldn’t be encouraging all our little girls to get 15 minutes of fame on some talent show or to fight for the spotlight in Hollywood or Bollywood with millions of others. We need to get them drooling over the thought of changing lives for the better through development of the technology that can develop our society, provide creative outlets, and improve lives.

Dorte Toft isn’t so much about the cool tech as she is about what’s behind the cool tech. I think that is a far more powerful a position to take. We have so many engineers and technicians and designers to thank for the technology that we enjoy every day. Their ranks will always need refilling and we need to encourage more girls to do that. We need diversity in the creators to meet the needs of the diversity of the world.

A big thanks to Dorte Toft for her constant reminders about the joys of nerdland as well as its importance in our lives. Education in science and technology is what puts the bling in bling!

18 Days in Egypt is “a collaborative documentary project about the revolution.” The co-founder of this project, Jigar Mehta, was in Copenhagen June 14th, and I was one of a handful of people who was privileged to hear him speak at Politiken’s Hus.

I was sad that so few attended this talk. He did tell his tale to a much larger audience the next day at another conference, but he had a valuable tale that deserved more listeners of the journalist variety. (News of this talk was circulated in journalist circles.) Here are my brief notes from his lessons learned about crowdsourcing “an interactive documentary of the events in Egypt” that occurred from January 25th to February 11th 2011.

My notes from the talk

Mehta describes how he watched the tale unfold on television. He noticed that many, many people were holding up their mobile phones to record the events. He thought that must be a rich source of material that could reveal many stories from those turbulent days.

Inspiration came from the Hypercities project at UCLA.

You have loads of content from all those who recorded what happened. How do you add context to that? Deep meta tagging is required.

You need to go to the streets to find the stories. In Egypt, only 25% have internet access and the internet quality is often poor. How can people who have content share it in those conditions? What about people who have tales and no devices for sharing?

The team behind 18 Days is teaching journalism to 30 students. Those people, in turn, can help collect the stories. They will learn how to approach people and how to encourage them to share their stories. They will make “pop-up shops” on Tahrir Square and elsewhere. People cannot afford the price of sending text messages (SMS). These pop-up shops are places people can stop by and tell their stories. The plan is to use raw material – nothing prepared. It’ll be all about the tagging. When you get context-rich material, the media will tell the story. The aim is also to highlight differences at various spots.

The goal is 5000 unique stories. Of course, the overall goal is to share this with the Egyptian people. Some people who were hesitant about sharing their experiences became eager when they realized that this could be a legacy to future generations – that they could one day tell their own grandchild “this is what I did during these important days in Egypt’s history”.

On the technology side, they are using Popcorn from Mozilla. Most of their software is open source, but they may have to build some parts themselves.

In the following picture, Mehta is talking about the site “I am Jan 25″ that is being displayed in the slide on the screen behind him. It is another example of aggregating information in one place.

My thoughts from the talk

I was very excited by the way they planned to engage people in this project. Those journalist-trained students will have to tell tales to get tales.

The entire process of collecting content and tagging it properly is a tale unto its own. I noted that they were creating a process that tells story and gives the whole thing a life of its own. “18 Days in Egypt” is the main tale, but a secondary tale is emerging from the entire process of making that main tale.

I picked up some new (to me) terms in this talk: transmedia and cross-media. (PS I also found an article that debunks some myths about transmedia that is worth a read.)

The stories from 18 days in Egypt are very important to tell the world. From a professional viewpoint, I think the process of producing this documentary is tremendously exciting. Anyone in journalism or communication or video/film production can learn a lot from the processes that are coming out of this project. I hope they document that as well.

How do you attend a conference from your desk and gain wisdom and insights?

Last year, I would have answered ScribbleLive. I followed the STC Summit 2010 using ScribbleLive, and I had a feeling I was at least having the conversations in the hallways. Tweets were drawn into the ScribbleLive setup, but people could also have accounts where they wrote more than 140 characters at a time. You got substantial tidbits directly from the event. I had a sense of the problems on the first two days of the conference (too much organizational navel-gazing that drove people batty), and the overall success of the conference when it was just about technical communication and its myriad of topics.

I felt like I attended the conference in person.

Real-Time is Exhausting

The STC Summit 2011 was far less enjoyable from my faraway perspective.

One problem was the distance. From Denmark, the Sacramento, California location was 9 hours away. They got going when I was heading home from work. I tried following the tweets all evening, but I needed to get dinner and I had other things to do (my so-called life). I’d come home and turn on the computer, but after making and eating dinner and doing non-Twitter-computer tasks, I was often too tired to bother checking up on any #stc11 tweets.

There was no ScribbleLive for easy viewing. The organizers tried a social networking tool called Zerista, which was used mainly as a calendar and coordinator for meetings. It was a walled garden given only to attendees, so if anyone did use it for chatting or sharing, outsiders like myself were excluded.

There was a CoverItLive widget on the Summit website. That showed tweets with the #stc11 hashtag as they rolled in. I didn’t use it because Twitter search was just as good for me, if not better for my nearsighted eyes. As of this writing, the widget is still active on the page, but I have no idea if a CoverItLive user can also grab a file of those tweets. Few seemed to know about using Lanyrd.

I suddenly found myself working too hard to follow events 9 hours away from me. I think I hit a mental timezone limit. What I did when the conference was in Dallas (only 7 hours away) was uncomfortable with a 9-hour difference.

How to Grab and Archive Tweets

I don’t have the perfect answer to this, but there are some methods – as long as the applications pulling the tweets don’t shut down or drastically change their business model, as WTHashtag.com did.

• If you use Google Reader, you can grab the RSS feed for a particular hashtag. You must do so before the event starts or else you miss tweets. After the event, it is too late.
• Search Hash can grab tweets and let you download a .csv file for offline viewing. This is how I collected tweets from the 2011 STC Summit. I collected them while the conference was on. When I try collecting them now, the results are incomplete. Perhaps they struggle with the “disappearing” of tweets at Twitter, too.
• I tried using The Archivist for Summit tweets. However… Over 5000 tweets were collected, but I cannot see them all and I cannot download them. Twitter’s Terms of Service do not permit this. (Commence wailing and gnashing of teeth.) Oh, and I’m irked the search is named for me and not the hashtag. Not sure how that happened, and I can’t change it.

What’s in These Tweets?

Do I really want to read all tweets? No. Some will be people tweeting about a lost item, where to meet for a shuttle bus, or the joy of meeting a virtual friend in real life. They are OK because they add color and life to the event. When there are hundreds or thousands of tweets, I need those types of tweets filtered out somehow.

This is where curation comes in. A tweet from @wion and supported by @annindk says it all: “I’m less concerned with live tweeting and more interested in the thoughtful write-ups during/after”. @Wion addressed his tweet to people attending the Content Strategy Conference in Minneapolis, which used the hashtag #confab. His comment applies to any conference.

@fionacullinan tried her hand with Storify where she curated tweets about Confab for FireheadLtd. Storify looks interesting as does a similar curation tool called Chirpstory.

But… maybe we should just go back to blogging after the event – or during, if we have the time, energy, and internet connectivity.

Some people are investigating and pondering this capturing events for posterity and for pondering. @annindk, a.k.a. Ann Priestly, shares her explorations and excellent insights on this very topic at Danegeld. Through one of her posts, I found two must-read articles on this very topic:

Ann led me to Real-Time is Burying History on the Web by Stephanie Booth.

And Stephanie’s article led me to Sacrificing web history on the altar of instant by Suw Charman-Anderson (yes, the @FindingAda Suw!)

Real-Time or History?

You think these posts talk less about the real-time experience and more about the history? Of course. Shouldn’t that be the aim of these conferences? Sure, you have some beers, you meet people, you laugh, you talk. In short, you get re-energized for whatever it is you do. However, isn’t learning or teaching an ideal goal for a conference? That means you need to collect this wisdom somehow. Some sort of curation is needed.

Why don’t we attend more conferences and stop whining about curation? They cost money and time, and not everyone has big (filled) pockets or a sponsorship at their back. Again, if goals are teaching and learning, then the conference should extend beyond the days at the physical conference site. STC has provided Summit@aClick for the past few years. (Free for attendees or at a fee for non-attendees.) This is a collection of most presentations where the audio is synchronized with the slides. Unfortunately, it is not captioned and there is no transcript, which is a huge drawback. It excludes anyone with hearing issues and those who have English as a second language and who like the support of captions or transcripts.

What Now?

There are automatic curating or collecting tools, but the best curation tool is inside the head of each conference attendee. More of them should expand beyond 140 characters when they get home. Two sources of inspiration are

• Jimmy Chandler (@uxprinciples) with his writeup on his own #IXDA presentation, which provides loads of background (and teaching!) material.
• Léonie Watson, (@LeonieWatson), who did a writeup of cognition and accessibility topics at Standards.next last September.

Now… What conversations do you need to expand?

I’d like to have the real voices of accessibility reverberate around the globe!

Back in March, I heard Mahmoud Salem, better known as @SandMonkey, speak about using social media in the revolution in Egypt. He gave a fascinating presentation, which was followed by a question and answer session. The person who asked questions was Solana Larsen, a managing editor at Global Voices.

I have a lot of respect for Global Voices and the citizen media movement providing a platform for voices around the world. These are voices that you normally do not hear in mainstream media for so many different reasons. I chatted with @SandMonkey and a group of my friends after the talk. Solana was there, and I said hi, because I follow her on Twitter. We started talking about Global Voices.

Solana asked whether I would be interested in writing for them. I was reluctant because I honestly didn’t know what to write and because I have been saying yes to too much lately! If I wrote about something, it would most likely be accessibility.

Then I had an epiphany.

Why not encourage people with disabilities from around the world to join Global Voices? They could tell their story and raise awareness about disability issues and the efforts to make changes for improvement in their country.

The Real Voices of Accessibility

It’s been said before (in casual tweets and on blogs) that many accessibility advocates are people who do not have major mobility, vision, hearing, or cognition disabilities. It’s implied that although they care deeply, they are not directly affected by inaccessible websites, buildings, gatherings, etc. There are people with disabilities who are active bloggers and presenters at conferences, and there are some who blog quietly in one corner of cyberspace.

Why not find more? Why not find people with disabilities – those who are not directly involved with web development and design and all the web accessibility discussions – and get them to blog about what is happening in their countries? What are their governments doing to be more inclusive of all its citizens? What legislation is being debated or passed? What grassroots initiatives are thriving and what seeds have been planted?

Global Voices has sections dedicated to geographic areas and topics of interest. Accessibility is a topic of interest. More blog posts on this topic would be joyfully welcomed by the editing team. The real voices of accessibility deserve to be heard by a larger audience.

Tell Your Story and Make a Difference

This is a shout out to people with disabilities everywhere. You in the wheelchair. You with the chronic pain. You with the signing hands. You with little or no sight. And you and you and you. You have voices, regardless of the state of your vocal chords. You who know the value of accessibility and the value of inclusion. Your voices are the really important ones.

Global Voices is a vehicle ready to drive your message to every home. There is strength in numbers. This is not a job for one person, but a job for many.

Let’s start discussing it in the comments or on Twitter, but if you are ready now, go talk to Solana and the people at Global Voices. Learn about the specific details for blogging, especially those of you who already have an active blog.

@SandMonkey talked about using social media in a revolution where people wanted to make improvements in their lives. I’ve read Oliver Sacks’ Seeing Voices and the part where he describes the strike at Gaulladet University and the rise of Deaf culture. Recently, many people with disabilities took to the street in London in the Hardest Hit march to protest the cuts in disability spending by the UK government.

Maybe it’s about time to take to the (virtual) streets and explain the importance of inclusion and rights for persons with disabilities. After hearing about the Hardest Hit campaign in London, I speculated what it would be like if there was a Million People with Disabilities March in Washington, D.C. (like other Million Something marches in the past).

The chat with Solana and my great respect for Global Voices ignited an idea in my head. Someone else fanned the flames. I want to credit @nethermind with something she said on Twitter. I believe she was making a direct or even an indirect call for action on spreading the word about accessibility. Anyway, the two ideas made me think that Global Voices would be a great channel for that call to action.

Globa11y

Let’s do this. Accessibility is an issue that is not confined to one country or to one language. This leads me to the odd word in my title. I have a great hashtag for this project.

#Globa11y

This is the word “global” plus the special abbreviation for accessibility called “a11y”. The “11″ stands for the eleven letters of the word “accessibility” found between the “a” and the “y”. (This technique has been used for the words “localization”, which is “l10n”, and “internationalization”, which is “i18n”, so it’s not a new idea.) Merge Global and a11y and you get globa11y.

As an aside, I believe the word “inclusion” is better than accessibility in many ways. I think some people are put off by the term accessibility, or they simply do not understand how it can relate to them. Inclusion may be far better. However, both terms are not recognized that easily outside the group of people who work with or are interested in the topic of accessibility. Hashtags do tend to defy grammar and syntax, and the word accessibility lent itself more easily to a marriage with the word global.

Whatever we call it, let’s give it a go and start a movement!

Each year, I swoon with delight at the scene in my backyard. After a long winter with bare branches, the tree in the backyard puts out tiny buds of a delicate green. If the sun is out and the temperature is warm, the tree fast-forwards to an explosion of white blossoms. No green is visible, just the white blossoms. I have never learned the name of the tree, and I have never tried to look it up. I don’t need to know its name because I know its beauty. Corny, but true.

Perhaps my delight comes from knowing the winter coats and boots can truly be packed away for a season. Or knowing that the days are longer with more sunlight to give energy to so many ideas and activities. It’s definitely a sign that this bear is coming out of hibernation.

Hello, glorious spring!

When the blossoms disappear, I settle in for a summer viewing of green. When the leaves disappear, I know the blossoms are only a few dark months away. Sometimes, those dark months drag on, but the blossoms always erase those memories and the cycle starts again.

A WordPress weekend should be covered on a WordPress blog! I spent the past weekend “geeking out” with WordPress. Once again, the online experience led to great real life get-togethers and discussions. I share tips, links, and photos in this post. You should try a WordPress get-together in your neighborhood to get the feeling of energy that I experienced. Here’s my report on two days with WordPress – first with the wordpress.dk group and then with the Geek Girls Meetup CPH group.

Saturday – WordPress.dk Meetup

Saturday was a gathering of the usual WordPress suspects from the WordPress.dk community in Copenhagen, thanks to Mark Gazel.

Oodles of Plugins

First up: Thomas Clausen, who walked us through a list of what he considers to be great and useful plugins. (I drooled because he did his presentation from his iPad.) I confess that I didn’t get all the details about each plugin. Never fear. Follow the links to get the details. I tried to capture the reason why Thomas recommended these plugins.

• Ozh’ admin drop-down menu – for increased back-end productivity – more “real estate”.
• Members – good for a WordPress installation that’s a CMS. Go beyond the usual roles available in the backend. Perhaps you want a role called Friends? You can even exclude some content for certain roles.
• My Snippets – adds widgets to widget areas.
• Widget logic – Uses conditional tags (if … else statements, such as “if this is a user, don’t show banner”).
• Comment redirect – can be a nice service for users – after making a comment, the visitor is taken to another page that says, for example, thank you for commenting and do you want to subscribe to my newsletter….
• Exec-php – very geeky – executes php code in your widget area.
• RSS Footer – If I understood Thomas correctly, you can use this code as a sort of theft protection because it is a bit of code that links back to your blog. You can use it on your own blog, but if someone steals your work, the built-in ping or trackback code would notify you about the theft. The details on the plugin site don’t mention this, so I hope someone comments to help clarify this for other readers.
• Gravity Forms – This is not a free plugin, but could be worth it for some people. It makes all the forms you need for your site as well as surveys and more. Don’t get it if you only need a contact form. It is a powerful plugin. The backend is supposed to be good. For those with needs above and beyond the usual. Learn more from the feature list.
• Comment reply notification – this is for readers of your blog – sends them emails about follow-up comments on posts where they have a left a comment.
• Query Posts – a very geek backend tool that is a bad example of usability (for you, the person installing it). Gives you control over the ways you can display pages and posts. I’m not 100% sure about the whys and wherefores of this one.
• Widgets Reloaded – a better way to handle all your WordPress widgets (according to their blurb).
• Series – a way to connect a, well, series of related blog posts. This was the most appealing plugin. Think 3-part series on installing something or a 4-part series on an event or a 5-part series on some process. You can place this in your widget logic (if you use that plugin) or not.

Cleaning Up My Blogs

This is a meetup and the perfect opportunity to work on your blog. You have a group of like-minded people all set to help you if you get stuck.

I used my time getting another blog “plugged in”. I had put together a site as a temporary help for a group. 3 years later, I am still the temporary webmaster, so I thought I should add some useful plugins. I tried adding one long on my to-do list: W3 Total Cache. It improves your site performance in a more powerful way than WP Minify. (I think WP Minify is a kind of subset of W3 Total Cache, but I’m not completely sure.) It required more tweaking than I had time for, so now it is installed on 2 sites, but activated on only one.

After lunch and lots of networking, Steffen stepped up to the projector to share some code snippets. Steffen collects good code snippets that he finds here and there and saves in Coda. WordPress.dk will post Steffen’s and Thomas’ material as soon as possible. He mentioned some more plugins that caught my attention.

• Custom Post Type UI – create custom post types and custom taxonomies with this plugin. I’ve long wanted to explore this area, so having a good plugin recommendation may be the tipping point for doing that exploring.
• Admin Thumbnails – when you are viewing your list of posts, you can see a little thumbnail of its image. I was under the impression that this was best for a blog that was picture heavy. Intrigued.
• Additional Image Sizes (zui) – The name says it – add more size options for images.
• WP Minify – compress those JS and CSS files in your source code to improve performance and avoid visitors leaving your sluggish site. (I mentioned this earlier in this post.)
• Google XML Sitemaps – helps to index your blog and make Google happy. Again, something to explore.

WordPress.dk plans a WordCamp later in the year. That will be for 2 days, so there’s more geeking in the pipeline. It’s good fun, so I hope to see a very full house at WordCamp. So many people can use the help that the community is willing to give.

A group of us ended up at a bar farther down the street, bravely sitting outside and pretending it was Spring. I didn’t pretend. I ordered hot drinks and tucked my scarf firmly around my neck. I wanted to be healthy for Sunday’s event…

Sunday – Geek Girl Meetup

A new day dawned. Sunday was a day of more WordPress, but this time with Geek Girls Copenhagen, a.k.a. #GGMCPH on Twitter. Here’s a picture of the room with the early birds settings up. (It’s the same place used on Saturday. Thank you, Kulturanstalten and Mark Gazel!)

The GGMCPH Workshops

The agenda for GGMCPH began with workshops for novices and for advanced. I volunteered to help the novices. That was far trickier than I thought.

Almost all of the novices needed help getting their .org software installed on a domain. For those I helped, almost all of the hosting services were very bad at communicating the information needed to prep the wp-config.php file. One had an ftp problem and was getting zero help from the support people. I speculated whether this was why some people gave up. This was a tiny barrier that had a huge impact. They couldn’t get anywhere without connecting the WordPress installation to their database! I will tell Mark that the WordCamp could really use a novice workshop, too. Susie Christensen was good at determining that all needed an overview and she gave that. Then we did mostly one-on-one help. I felt slow and useless, but one person was very appreciative, so I felt better. If the hosting sites had given the right information…. Sigh.

Themes

Several people asked about finding themes, and we explained how to search for inspiration. @TheWildPony tweeted a question on the same topic: What is your favorite modern theme – and why? I haven’t been theme surfing lately, but one always comes to mind: Stardust. Stardust is a WordPress theme by Tommaso Baldovinno. I think it is a clean theme, but I especially like the fact that the theme is accessible. Your screen readers visitors will thank you. There’s my own blog here, where all images and CSS is tweakable, and it’s accessible. Of course, the author of the blog can mess up the accessibility, but an accessible theme is a great starting point. Those were the ones that I recommended.

Finding a theme is really a trial-and-error task. I think it is still hard for novices. Maybe they’ll find a suitable looking theme, but then the backend will be awkward to work with, or they want something slightly different, and cannot tweak it themselves. Frankly, I think we can have another session soon, just on themes!

Lisa Risager gave a nice walk-through about themes, especially child themes (another item on my to-explore list). She’ll be posting that later on Slideshare. I tweeted about Sylvia Eggers’ Accessible Child Theme. (It would be cool if we could get Sylvia Eggers and other German WordPress Geek Girls or Webgrrls to come to Denmark for an unconference/meetup some day.)

Here’s another picture of the room – now filled with inquiring and listening Geek Girls.

My overall note taking was poor. As one of the planners of the day, I was helping with practical things, in addition to helping novices. My multitasking mojo had taken the day off, but I was assured of blog posts and pictures in the coming days. I’ll monitor the ggmcph tag on Flickr for photos, such as one of our lovely carrot cake from our coffee/tea/cake supplier, Kaffeplantagen!

On Design

When Karen Balle gave 10 tips about design of a blog, I realized we could also have an entire day devoted to design. Oh, there are plenty of unconference opportunities in the air!

Karen gave classic advice that was applicable for all. She had checked out our websites in advanced and used screenshots to emphasize her points! Some of the highlights were

1. What do I get in 1 click? Always think as a user.
2. First impression hooks your visitor – you have 5 seconds! What do you want to tell or sell?
3. Explore and invent – invite people to comment, hear what they say, and refine your site again and again, making it a little bit better every time.
4. Keep surprising yourself – hook your readers/buyers. Give a lot and get a lot.

Goodbyes and Thank Yous

At the last minute, I discovered that we had to fold up the 20 tables and clear them and all the chairs out of the room! A samba class had rented the room after us and expected it to be empty. 50 Geek Girls had that room emptied of everything in 5 minutes flat! I was utterly impressed. What energy! Pure action. That included cleaning up and packing up personal belongings! (I should invite them all over to my apartment and hand them my vacuum cleaner and dust rags….)

This day wouldn’t have been possible without the women who signed up, so thank you to everyone who came.

A round of thanks to my partners-in-geekiness: Amelia Berkeley, Annette Pedersen, Henriette Weber, Lisa Risager, and Nanna Thorhauge.

To our lovely sponsors – Creuna and Mediabevægelsen and Kulturanstalten – I say hip, hip, hurra! and thank you!

To round off this extravaganza of WordPress, I give you – courtesy of @jenniecph – 50 marvelous photos of Basset Hounds running. The brain is overloaded, so a barrel of laughs ends the day nicely!

I’m going to throw a bunch of data at you now. I want to pass along some great information I discovered tonight, but my brain is having trouble getting into a decent writing mode. Regard this as a jumbled bag of nice quality chocolate instead of a nicely laid out tray of nice quality chocolates. OK?

10 Things Paul Bradshaw Learned about Data Journalism

My favorite online communication and online journalism group in Denmark invited Paul Bradshaw to speak at a Dona.dk meeting tonight. The talk was entitled “10 things I learned about data journalism”, but I am not going to list all ten items (because I didn’t write them all down). I was trying to listen, learn, absorb, and think.

I took home some great resources and a few very nice quotes.

The Usual Suspects

Let’s start with the resources – people actually. A lineup of Paul Bradshaw’s People to Watch (hmmm, POW seems like a good acronym in light of the topic) are

• Tom Steinberg with My Society, “one of UK’s best known democracy websites”
• Charles Arthur, Technology Editor at The Guardian
• Heather Brooke, “journalist, writer, and freedom of information activist” according to her description on Wikipedia
• Tim Berners-Lee (without his invention, would you be reading something called a blog?)
• Chris Taggart, who launched Open Charities and Open Corporates (rather impressive sites)

Yeah, you could say that some of the work being done in this list does have a “pow” effect. Anyway, five people, and reading about them and what they are working on should keep you busy for the next many days, months, years, etc.

Compile. Clean. Connect.

Add the word data to that and you get:

Compiling data.
Cleaning data.
Connecting data.

This is the job of a data journalist. There is a ton of news hidden in data. The data journalist has to dig out the information and be able to present it to the public in an accurate fashion. That means digging up, or compiling, the data, and then examining it closely and carefully. Finally, those bits and pieces have to be put together in some coherent fashion that is objective and relevant and so on. These three C’s are one of the lessons learned.

The data journalism continuum, as Bradshaw describes it, is similiar: finding, interrogating, visualizing, mashing. There are double-headed arrows between those stages so you can move along the continuum in both directions. And you will.

I began to think about recent comments on how reporting from the Japan earthquake and tsunami was inaccurate, and how news about the nuclear reactors was especially poor. It’s this type of situation Paul Bradshaw is discussing – gathering the data, going through it, questioning and checking it all, and possibly starting over if something is incorrect. It’s a demanding job and the flaws will show if it is not done properly. However, an unsuspecting public might now realize the weaknesses right away, and then we can get skewed or completely wrong impressions of the news. (I see parallels to the job of many technical communcators, too.)

When he showed the data journalism continuum, Paul Bradshaw was talking about his first lesson: you can never be an expert. There is so very much to do. One person may not necessarily be able to do some coding to work over the data and make super sharp data visualizations and so on. Data journalism is too all-encompassing to master.

Another person mentioned was Adrian Holovaty from Everyblock. He was apparently doing mashups similar to Google mashups – before they released the API! This was to plot in crime reports for Chicago. Now he has moved on to Everyblock. Who doesn’t want an Everyblock to stayed tuned to local neighborhood news? (I’m betting that this was discussed at the Cognitive Cities conference last month. It’s also the type of news that would be popular at Reboot conferences.)

Seeing Data

“Visualization is about taking things away.” Visualizations are great for instant communication, but they should always link to the full data set and give proper credit to sources, Bradshaw said. The reference to this point was this Tree Hugger article about last year’s volcano story and its infographic. We also had a slide with the image in this article by David McCandless. If you don’t know about David McCandless, check out that site. His material is drool-worthy. He is a must-know resource for visualization.

There was another great visualization with a great story in a tale from Mexico. It was from a post that also involves Benford’s Law. Read the post for an explanation of Benford’s Law and for some great links. Your mind will boggle.

Data journalism has commercial potential in that it is “sticky, engaged, targeted, and valuable”. A visualization might be here today and gone tomorrow, from one perspective. The in-depth analysis can be stickier – sticking in people’s minds. I feel more engaged as a reader when I see attribution and references and well-articulated arguments about some topic. OK, maybe someone can fool me, but I think when you are reading the work of a good data journalist, you’ll sense the craftsmanship.

I was quite intrigued by The Guardian’s Datastore on Flickr.com. They state: Take our data, mash it up and create great visualisations with it – then post them on here. Whoa. The point here? “Data is a social object.”

That could be a closing comment to this post – it was Bradshaw’s last slide, and it’s a good one. However, I was captivated by another lesson, which I tweeted out after the talk.

Numeracy should be as valued by news orgs as literacy.

And in parentheses: Every newsroom should have a statistician. See? That’s back to not being an expert at everything. Maybe you do not know stats that well. Get someone who does!

Epilogue

There is a Delicious list of references for this talk.

The most delicious link is Paul Bradshaw’s website. I signed up to get his posts by email because my RSS feeder suffers from neglect at the moment. Signing up for news there means I’ll know when his book, “The Online Journalism Handbook”, comes out. I know someone who will be interested in that! If this chapter on UGC is in that handbook, I think some technical communication hearts will go pitter-patter!

This post was written to PInk Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”. Many references in the talk rang bells in my mind. Most references were from the UK and through @stcaccess, I happen to follow a number of people in the UK who happen to be involved in open data and local government. Of course, they are passionate about what they are doing, but despite only knowing a handful of people doing this, I feel like there is a big movement of ordinary citizens doing extraordinary things with open data in their community. They are the crowd that can be sourced by the data journalist. One of those people is the very nice @pigsonthewing, who happens to be connected to Pink Floyd and who happens to come from Birmingham, just like Paul Bradshaw. For some silly reason, writing about the topic of data journalism and thinking about the local/open government tales I’ve heard over the past two years seemed most appropriate with Pink Floyd lending a hand.