So… I think we need to have stronger branding for the new hosting program when we roll it out in a couple of weeks. Internally, we’ve been calling the first two versions Hosting v1 and Managed Hosting, but I don’t think that CoPress Basic vs. CoPress Standard is much better. Basic and Standard don’t communicate the services very well. Unlike Basecamp, we need to have our names communicate the services, or at least be more distinct, because they aren’t necessarily different tiers of one product. They’re different tiers of multiple services tied together. Does that make sense? Any ideas?
Tag Archive for 'questions'
AreMySitesUp? hasn’t been all that reliable for us and I’m ready to start moving over to another service. The one I’m seriously considering is Pingdom which offers a nice set of services with their free, one site account. I think the way we’re going to go about this is to sign up a new account for each client because this will also allow us to give the client access, and ownership if they’d like, of the account. The question I have right now, however, is whether I should sign up with an email address that will email both us and them with downtime reports, or whether we should just be recipients of the data.
My reason for is one of transparency so that they can be clued into the process of how we respond to site issues, etc. but my reason against would be whether they actually want to know that information or not.
In the interest of trying to develop their capacity to do this on their own, however, I think it’s pretty important to be tuned into as much of the process as possible. Thoughts?
I’m headed downtown later today to meet with Nick Cottle and Carolynn Duncan of the Portland Ten, a project to help foster 10 startups reach $1 million in revenue by October 2010. I’m not sure that we’ll be headed down that track yet, especially because they want to work with startups based in Oregon, but they offer Startup Checkup meetings where they ask questions and give feedback on the entire scope of our business. I thought I’d try this out in order to get wise advice on some of the biz dev questions we currently have.
I think that it’s going to be pretty important to integrate search into our website in a highly-functional fashion. The tool I propose we use for this is Google Custom Search because it will be easy to set up a search engine to index the main website, the forum, the wiki, the microblog, and Inside CoPress. The bigger question is how we incorporate it into the design. I bring this up now because MediaWiki has a built in search that is currently in the sidebar of the new theme Andrew is building. One idea is to have it in the sidebar, but we could also try to incorporate it into the header. Thoughts?
I think it would be great to video and/or livestream the sessions we take part of at BCNI Philly. How many people are planning on bringing video cameras? I have a Flip MinoHD but that’s about it. I’m also planning on bringing an audio recorder and possibly a dSLR.
A question for Greg or Adam: do you know how to put chapters in an audio file? I think AAC supports this, and it might be sweet to break our weekly call down into sections (i.e. so one can just listen to the hosting part, etc.).
Hi all, Ryan Sholin here. I’ve been catching up with some of the TWiC podcasts and recently took a listen to the first board meeting conference call this week.
A few questions came out of that playlist, and I’ve passed some ideas back and forth with at least two of you already, but I’d like to throw this issue open for more discussion.
Regarding “student” status as a prerequisite for being a board member, officer (or really, for anything): I think there’s a nice big Venn diagram that you can draw to outline some of these overlapping circles:
- Undergraduate Journalism Students
- Graduate Journalism Students
- Journalism Students enrolled in a class that involves producing content for a student media outlet
- Journalism Students who produce content for independent student media outlets
- Independent Individuals employed by student media outlets connected to journalism schools
- Independent Individuals employed by independent student media outlets
- etc…
So, it’s not such a clean cut between “student” and “not a student.” And limiting “student” status to undergraduates counts out students from a few big grad-only j-schools like Columbia University.
Continue reading ‘A bit of definition: What’s a student? What’s student media?’
Are there any conferences near the end of May or beginning of June?
Has anyone bought or used Outpost before? It looks pretty snazzy and I’d like to be able to access Basecamp on the go, but I’ve been burned by so many pay iPhone apps that I’m not entirely interested in experimenting.
In the interview Greg and I did this morning with Steve Buttry, Steve said “language reflects thinking.” The context was a discussion about his new title as “Information Content Conductor,” and why he chose that terminology instead of calling himself the editor. I’ll let you guys listen to the whole podcast to get his explanation, but the short of it is that you can sometimes lock yourself into old thinking and thought processes if you restrict your language to old terminology. This applies to us as an organization especially because we’re trying to be the thought-leaders in the room. If we stick to old ways of talking about the problem, we’re not going to get anywhere new.
The short of it is that I’m arguing we include the term “ecosystem” in our about page. The first two paragraphs as they stand now are:
CoPress is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing college news outlets with the technical resources they need to achieve sustainability online (or as we put it previously, to “building a better technical ecosystem for student news organizations”). What the heck does that mean? In short, we want to use any means necessary to help these extremely valuable properties avoid extinction; the long explanation, of course, gets a bit more complicated.
As we see it, student news organizations are in a precarious position much like the rest of the journalism industry. Firmly moored in traditional practices and supported by what amounts to a captive audience, many previously thought that college newspapers would be OK just trudging along. Unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case; moreover, operating around obsolete ideas does a huge disservice to those that will soon be the powering the world’s media.
I’d like to change them to:
CoPress, a student-centered, non-profit organization, empowers student news organizations to to innovate and succeed as digital news organizations. We’re creating an open, inclusive, and transparent technical ecosystem to enhance collaboration amongst student technologists. There are three key components, we believe, to a vibrant network:
- The community – Students learn best from one another, and we want to increase the opportunities they have to work together both online and off. [more text about how the community gets involved]
- The technology - Innovation demands open source code, and we are identifying the best CMSes, plugins, and applications for our sector to use. [Something more about the hosting and support we offer]
- The resources – [something more about the resources we offer, including information from the forum and the wiki]
This initiative depends greatly on the strength of our community. We as an organization want to focus on providing the best possible platform for online student news organizations to share ideas, collaborate, and build super innovative tools for journalism.
The short of it, though, is that our about page needs a bit of work. At the moment, it’s a tremendous block of text and not very friendly to our readers. I think we can improve upon it by offering a few sentences of text and then breaking what we offer into the list format-ish that we have (with maybe a few images as well). I have pretty strong opinions about the wording of those sentences, however.
Any feedback would be appreciated. I plan on rolling this out tomorrow.
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