Online Journalism Blog

“Previous generations of journalists — and other workers in all industries — had the luxury of expecting some supergeeks in their organization to take care of the digital duties for them. For better or worse, those days are gone.” –Mark Briggs.

Mark Briggs begins his book, JournalismNext, with some very valuable information about computer data, bits and bytes.

Knowing the size of computer data can help prevent you and whoever you send an email with an attachment to from clogging both servers. Why is this important info? Well from my personal experience, GMU makes a huge deal about students with clogged servers, which is why they continuously force us to clear out our inboxes so emails from professors can be received without trouble. Students can be heard across campus moaning and complaining while sighing “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” But it’s important if we want to get the necessary emails from our professors about class.

He goes on to explain that sending anyone with an email containing an attachment larger than 1MB can cause chaos among the sender and recipient. Hmm….that could be why I “never got” half my emails freshman year…

Briggs also gets into plug-ins and extensions, which came up when Aram Zucker-Scharff came and talked to our class regarding the blog site I’m currently writing on. As a Firefox user, I’ll be taking advantage of the site he mentions where I can go for cool plug-ins for the Firefox browser.

I had seen on some sites I search that I could subscribe to its RSS feed. To be honest, I had absolutely no idea what the heck this was…until Briggs explained it.

“When you subscribe to an RSS feed, you create a convenient, one-stop information shop tailored to your needs and interests.” -Briggs.

I’m no rocket scientist, but that sounds easy enough for me to understand. I’ll be taking advantage of it now! In fact, I’m setting mine up once this sentence is finished…

(2 minutes later.)

Looks good!