Whether or not you believe Barack Obama is Mr. Wonderful, this percolating politics meme is kind of a hoot: Jason Kottke is aggregating tweets that start with "When Obama wins"...

Glad to know the web doesn't figure as large in people's anger as I might have guessed, but I'm not encouraged by the relative sizes of love and hate.

Update (2008.04.02): There aren't enough posts at HappyJournalist.com to turn out a good cloud. C'mon, people!

I'm looking forward to attending the Journalism 3G symposium on computation and journalism at Georgia Tech Feb. 22-23. If you're a news geek, I can't imagine a better place to be. If you're going, ping me.

For sale on Amazon.com: 19-0: The Historic Championship Season of New England's Unbeatable Patriots, by The Boston Globe.

Guessing the Giants might quibble with that title.

The students in my online media class at USC are looking for the technical skills that will help land them jobs in journalism, and I want to help them identify what those skills might be. I have a pretty good idea, of course, but I thought I'd be more quantitative in my assessment. So I took all the online job descriptions on JournalismJobs.com from this year, omitted the non-technical words (like "editor", "seeks" and "self-starter") and built a tagcloud out of the rest. Here's what it looks like:

Update (2008.02.04): This post drew a lot more notice than I would have guessed. My favorite response comes from fellow Mizzou alum Chris Heisel, now at the AJC, who built his own tech skills tagcloud. I have a feeling Chris' wish list comes a lot closer to nailing the critical skills than most of the postings on JournalismJobs do.

Update (2008.04.02): The tagcloud is hopefully more useful now that the tags link back to keyword searches in JournalismJobs.com's online job listings. I was linking keywords for my post on AngryJournalists.com and I thought I might as well do it here too.