3/11 Video Map: Archiving YouTube Clips of the Japan Quake and Tsunami
By Rick Martin on 10 Sep 20113/11 Video Map: http://jp.1rick.com Update: It's now at QuakeMap.org
Some of you may recall the Newfoundland Hurricane video map I made back last September. I was a little fed up at the time with what I thought was primarily story-based disaster reporting from local news orgs, when there was an enormous amount of user-generated YouTube clips of the storm that were not being taken advantage of.
Wordpress Blogging with Markdown in TextMate
By rickmartin on 10 Jun 2011Some of you may have figured out by now that I’m blogging over on Penn-Olson.com, an up-and-coming blog focused on technology in Asia. Think Mashable or Techcrunch but with an Asian focus. It means that I get to cover China again, something I haven’t done much of since moving leaving China for Japan back in 2008. But above all else it means that I get to experiment with new web publishing tools, something I seldom get to do when writing freelance for individual clients.
Contemplating Data Tools After the Quake
By rickmartin on 14 May 2011Like many people in the weeks following the earthquake, I found myself trying to wrap my head around radiation data. I’ve been a big fan of data journalists/geeks for the past couple of years, and many of these people were doing great work after the quake. I tried to point them out on my own website by gathering their “quaketools,” and by writing a short feature in The Japan Times about data visualization.
This one's optimistic: Michael Anti on Twitter in China
By rickmartin on 02 Dec 2010After attending Michael Anti’s talk at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Japan, I came away feeling he had focussed a little too much on the impact of Twitter given that so few people use the service in China. There are only 100,000 users according to Michael, though I'm not sure of his source. I mean sure, Twitter is often an excellent bridge between English speaking Chinese and the rest of the world during breaking events, but it’s not revolutionary given the comparatively small user base.
Using TextMate Snippets for fast reporting from Volleyball World Championships
By rickmartin on 20 Nov 2010If you were following my Twitter stream recently, you may have seen some messages I sent out as I was covering some volleyball matches here in Tokyo. Reporting on International volleyball presented a couple of problems right off the bat for me:
Best places to run in Tokyo: A more empirical approach
By rickmartin on 15 Nov 2010I recently completed a piece on CNNgo.com about the best places to run in Tokyo. These sort of lists tend to make me uncomfortable, and this one would be impossible unless I ran all of the trails personally — tricky to say the least.