Over the years, I have been a little hesitant to write on my own blog about blogging and my work at the Times, given that I spend my day and sometimes night hours talking about blogs and online strategies here at The New York Times and with other friends in the publishing arts.

In the last few months, though, I have been taking steps towards organizing my thoughts on blogging and online publishing, and writing about them in a more structured fashion. Starting in late September, my colleague, Kathleen McElroy, and I will be teaching an online course for The New York Times titled, “How to Start a Blog”. This course is meant to serve two purposes: To give the uninitiated a fresh look at the anatomy, social and literary functions of a blog – both from the reader’s and writer’s perspective — and to help that person start a new, focused blog from scratch.

We will start out by looking at how people read blogs, and we will try to make you familiar with the common language that makes up the larger web. In the second part of the course, we will turn you into a publisher and give you the tools you’ll need to start blogging and building a community of your own.

The 2-week online class is $90 and is hosted by The New York Times Knowledge Network.

This class is in no way a guide to the secrets and strategies of The New York Times blogs, but rather a patient and methodical look at how blogs operate and are read, paired with the basic tools for starting and maintaining blog – which, I guess, is a strategy of its own.

If you are looking for a more in-depth course, then you might look at the Hyperlocal Blogging course that Mary Ann Giordano will be teaching starting in October. This class will cover the fundamentals of community journalism and local reporting to help you boot up a hyperlocal blog of your own.

Registration closes on September 19th. Feel free to leave any questions about the course in the comments below, and I will do my best to address them.

Each frame of this stop-motion video is an picture of 1000 decisions.

In this unique time-lapse video created from thousands of individual frames, photographers Scott Andrews, Stan Jirman and Philip Scott Andrews condense six weeks of painstaking work into three minutes, 52 seconds (read here how they did it).

When it was done, Poindexter had what he’d wanted—a unique visual record of an intricate workflow that’s been going on at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center for nearly 30 years—and, with the shuttle’s impending retirement, is about to come to an end.

It is rare that people take a step back and honor the processes that were put in place to make a complex endeavor, like the shuttle launch, happen in a matter of minutes.

*My apologies for embedding a video with a long 30 second ad. It was the only one I could find

Canon did not want to comment directly upon the C.H.D.K. project or whether it could harm the camera, saying only that untested software might “damage Canon equipment.”

It would have been a great move on their part to comment favorably to some degree on the innovations that were made here. It would also be relatively cheap for them to start up a blog about working with Canon technology, but they don’t even have to go that far. Mere acknowledgment is all that is needed.

This map was created using the Ushahidi open source software by students at Tulane University in conjunction with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and site host Radical Designs so that you, the citizens of the Gulf Coast have a voice to speak out in testimony of the how the Gulf oil spill is threatening your livelihoods and the ecosystems that you love and rely on. More about the group »

They also have a long list of other news and community resources that are pulling together updates and service announcements for all the communities that are affected by the spill.

So why is this so interesting?
Because it is a web recipe that has the possibility of gaining some real weight as it attempts to collect the news, information, and community service messages that make up the oil spill story as a whole. When I say web recipe, I mean it uses tools (an obsessive list of links + Ushahidi) that are being made available to anyone with basic web skills and the will to pull together the information.

The point at which we’ll know if their endeavors are fruitful will be when they have collected enough of the right information and news to generate a compelling experience of the whole story. I will be watching and encouraging, and I wish them all the best.

Ushahidi is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, e-mail or a web site and visualize it on a map or timeline. Watch this short video on it.

It is nice to see the students at Tulane University putting it to the test.

I find a person’s blog to be the determining factor for a follow, not the number of followers someone has. The bio and the linked website are the 2 elements that are the most relevant rich – maybe the photo as a distant 3rd option – which is why I am surprised to see that the follow notification e-mails still don’t include the profile information.

@xrisfg on Twitter

I am assuming that most people don’t comb through the follow notification e-mails as often as I do, but I am quite convinced that if Twitter would include the user’s profile information in them, they would find that the notification e-mail would be a richer means of following more users.

This week, The New York Times launched a new video series called, TimesCast.

The program, called TimesCast, lasting a few minutes, will appear on the nytimes.com home page at 1 p.m. each day; after 2 p.m., it will move to a less prominent position on the site. (It can always be found at nytimes.com/timescast.) It features interviews with editors and reporters who are covering the major stories, and scenes from meetings among the paper’s top editors discussing events that might go on the front page.

— from Media Decoder

For the most part I would say it is an accurate description of the candor that I experience while working in this large newsroom. In a lot of ways, it is kinda like watching a dry version of The Office. The camera angles are more immediate, and the editing appears to be mostly in-camera, which is refreshing. It also is an example of appointment based viewing on the internet, which doesn’t happen very often on the web, and is still a bit foreign to the way I expect to consume media these days.

I would like to know what the average person thinks about this series. Does it provide more context to the top stories of the day? Is it too much inside baseball?

All said, I have been excited to sit down and watch it take shape.

Note: While I do work at the Times, I do not work on the TimesCast video production team.

Juliette and I would like to introduce you to our new baby boy!

Kepler Cezzar Zilar

Born on July 23, 2009 at 6:32am in New York City.

He weighed 5lbs 7oz, is 18in long and is healthy from top to bottom. The nurses have been calling him the little astro-nut.

You cen see more posts, pictures and video of Kepler and our new family on our Futuretree blog. Or you can see the full gamut of Kepler photos and videos on Flickr.

He says,

“To digitize collections and sell the product in ways that fail to guarantee wide access would be to repeat the mistake that was made when publishers exploited the market for scholarly journals, but on a much greater scale, for it would turn the Internet into an instrument for privatizing knowledge that belongs in the public sphere.”

“Yes, we must digitize. But more important, we must democratize. We must open access to our cultural heritage. How? By rewriting the rules of the game, by subordinating private interests to the public good, and by taking inspiration from the early republic in order to create a Digital Republic of Learning.”

Umair Haque begins to define the interaction rules that are starting to define the 21st Century.

(via swissmiss)