Hays County Parks and Recretion funding application posted

Hays County has posted its application for park funding here, as directed by the Commissioners Court on Tuesday.

The county will distribute $3.5 million in surplus funds from the 2007 parks and open spaces bond issue to park projects that could be be completed and open to the public within three years of the funding award.

The Hays County Parks and Open Spaces Advisory Board will score the proposals on a competitive basis and present their findings to the commissioners court. The court will have final say in how the funds are disbursed.

The application deadline is Oct. 1.

Hays County honors Kyle/Buda VFW

Photo by Trey Hatt

The Hays County Commissioners Court proclaimed Aug. 31 as Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 12058 Day during Tuesday’s meeting.

Surplus bond money up for grabs

Money left over from a $30 million Hays County bond issue will go to the county organization that gives the best proposal to the Hays County Parks and Open Space Advisory Board in September.

Carl Owens, who represents the proposed Wimberley Aquatics Recreation Park, proposed delaying the appointment of Donna Brahser to the Parks and Open Space Advisory Board until after the board scores projects in the running for $3.5 million in surplus bond funds. Photo by Trey Hatt

The Hays County Commissioners court approved the measure Tuesday. The county’s intent was to establish a formal, competitive process for distributing $3.5 million left over from the 2007 bond, according to Precinct 3 Commissioner Will Conley.

Beginning Sept. 1, organizations will be able to submit their recreation program proposals to the board. The proposal window closes Oct. 1.

“Thirty days is plenty of time for nonprofits and local agencies to submit their projects,” Conley said.

Precinct 2 Commissioner Jeff Barton was quick to note that the $3.5 million is surplus money, and that the county is not “diverting” funds that where allocated elsewhere.

“We exceeded our goal and came in under budget,” he said.

The projects funded by the bond set aside 800 acres of natural habitat, which far exceeds the goal of 600 acres, Barton said.

The Parks Committee will score the proposals and present them to commissioners court in October. The Court will have final say on the dollar amounts, but Barton encouraged the Parks Committee to provide any additional comments that would not be covered in the committee’s scoring matrix.

Appointment to Board

The Commissioners also accepted Precinct 4 Commissioner Karen Ford’s appointment of Donna Brasher to the parks board–above the objections of Carl Owens, who represents the proposed Wimberley Aquatics Recreation Park, one of the programs seeking a piece of the surplus funds.

Owens told the court that Brasher, though she is highly qualified, was a key advocate for the Harrison Ranch Park, which Owens sees as a major competitor for funding.

“She has a stellar resume and would be a huge asset,” he said. “But consider delaying her appointment until after the scoring process.”

Owens told the court that several people directed him to the City of Dripping Springs’ online archives, which document Brasher’s presentations on behalf of the park.

Ford said that she was unaware of Brasher’s involvement as a “point person” for the park.

“I reached out to her because I thought she would be a great person,” Ford said. “At no time did I consider that she was a shoe-in for Harris Ranch Park.”

Brasher was one of the original members of the parks advisory board.

Gettin’ into blogging

Well, folks, I’m a mass comm grad student focusing on new media, and I’m not even blogging. That’s got to change.

I’m re-purposing this blog from a school assignment depository to a live, active blog. I’ll be posting news that I cover and commentary that I want to afflict you good people with–kind of like what I’m doing with Facebook and Twitter.

Cheers!

Overall impression

After studying the topics presented in Issues in New Media, my overall impression is that we will figure out sustainable business/financing models for news in the age of Web 2.0 and people’s lives will continue to improve as more information becomes accessible to them.

I do not, however, come to this conclusion based on any great ideas presented in the literature. Right now, scholars and professionals are absolutely befuddled by this new landscape. The most useful articles are coming out in the popular press, not the academic journals. Some of the best studies that are being done aren’t even being published at all; they are are posted on researchers’ blogs. The technology continues to advance with or without the media’s consent (or the public’s, for that matter.)

I draw my optimism from looking at things from 30,000 feet and considering our past. We can make two overarching conclusions: 1) People’s desire for news doesn’t seem to be flagging and 2) People incorporate technology into their lives and culture and do wonderful things with it. Nothing I’ve seen or read indicates that the Internet will be the one invention that market forces and democracy just can’t deal with.

What surprised me the most this semester was just how ill-equipped academia is to process innovations in new media. However, it can be done as long as the researcher is imaginative enough to see how the particular phenomenon she’s studying fits into the broader fabric of the field. It’s okay to study MySpace as long as the researcher can identify and understand the “genus” as well as the “species” of these Web 2.0 creatures they are studying–because “species” often go extinct before the paper can get published.

I think privacy issues should be discussed in some depth in future iterations of this class. Mainstream media sources are reporting on third-party companies that compile dossiers and consumer profiles on millions of Web users; there’s a debate on whether we have a reasonable expectation of privacy on the Internet (and I’m not even talking about what we post on blogs and social network sites.)

Importance of Data in the Future of Journalism

Well, let’s look at journalism’s past and present.

Investigative reporters have been filing open records requests (and acquiring secret records) for as long as there’s been modern reporting. Somebody had to pore over the data, find out what malfeasance and thievery they indicated, and translate the numbers into a form that the reader or viewer could grasp easily.

The spirit is still the same, even if the techniques have changed. Now, instead of forcing rows of figures into a block of lively and informative narrative, people like Aron Pilhofer’s crew at the New York Times can create database-driven interactive features that let the numbers speak for themselves. The reader can almost write her own story based on what data sets she is interested in.

Journalists, educators and students can prepare for this new landscape by accepting that reporters can’t ever get the whole story down in one fell swoop. If you make a bunch of data available to the readers, they’re going to pick up on an angle that you missed. If they don’t, it means they’re not using your site.

People in the field or in academia also need to understand the basics of data–at the very least, understand that it is important and why. J-schools should offer courses that help students understand data and data-driven storytelling.

Research Question

The focus of my research paper, as well as my thesis, is the overall question, “How do do new media affect small-town culture in Llano, Texas?”

The immediate research will involve giving members of a social network in Llano (for example, a church group) access to a web 2.0 site designed specially for the group and studying their usage. Will it supplement or supplant their offline social activities? Why and why not? I plan to investigate these questions through content analysis and survey questions.

The Long Tail and Free

I know we’re supposed to engage the readings that were assigned (The Long Tail and Free), but both concepts hinge on what R. Buckminster Fuller called “ephemeralization”–doing more and more with less and less, which leads to an economy of abundance versus an economy of scarcity.

The idea of the Long Tail holds that a company can sell as much or more of their one-offs, obscure items and weird things as it sells its few “blockbuster” items. The graph looks vaguely like a hockey stick–and needs both ends to work. You can’t just be all “tail” or all “blockbuster.”

The free economy capitalizes on people’s love of free stuff. Not cheap stuff–free stuff. If it’s free, it goes viral Chris Anderson argues. You can give away free stuff and charge for your “premium” services, or you can give it all away for free and have someone else pay to sponsor it.

Both ideas are possible now that bandwidth, storage and processing power are becoming cheaper and cheaper. If each “unit” costs a fraction of a cent to produce and/or store and you sell a million of them for a nickel, you’ve just made a tidy profit.

The only problem with this economy of abundance is that it takes control out of the hands of the producers and distributors and gives it to the consumers. To rule in an economy of scarcity, all you have to do is gobble up all the supply and control the choke points of distribution. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years–the most pure manifestations of scarcity economics are the war of conquest or the strongman tactics of organized crime.

In an economy of abundance, you have to increase demand. That takes more finesse than planting (literal or figurative) car bombs and land mines in the path of the competition. You actually have to engage with your customers and put out a quality product.

Instructional Videos for FREE

Here’s a little piece on PHP and MySQL:

The problem with online instructional videos is, like anything on the Internet, the lack of outside quality control. If you want that, you’ll have to pay for it.

On the upside, before every geek with broadband could paste his or her vidoes on YouTube, you’d have to pay for ALL of your instructional videos–even the crappy ones.

And finally, on the Internet you have to check your sources. But you should do that, anyway. If we apply the same criticial thinking to “real life” as we do to things we find on the Internet, then I think our online experiences will have expanded a valuable lifeskill.

The next big thing in social media

Two themes emerged from today’s assigned readings: It’s stupid until you try it, and Innovate first then worry about a business model.

People who invent Web-changing applications like Google, Facebook and now Twitter are out to solve a problem or do something really cool, not get super rich in a year. But sometimes a spark of an idea will start a bonfire on the Web, and millions of people are using the app.

Then it’s up to someone to figure out how to build a business model – which must exist. We’ve got a zillion users, and if we can’t figure out how to make money then we need to hang it up.

But that business model needs to preserve the original magic that made the millions of users so loyal in the first place. You can’t creep them out with stalker ads or whore out their private information willy-nilly.

Social networking is here to stay-the plumbing is in place, even if Facebook and Twitter go the way of Friendster and Myspace. The next step is to integrate geolocation and smart advertising without compromising security or creeping out the users. I don’t think social networks will replace Google’s search algorithms and the New York Times, but the social networks are cutting into markets that they weren’t initially designed to compete in.