Monthly Archives: May 2010

InfoGraphic: Gulf Oil Explosion (Daily, 30 Days)

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

Updated 30 May
It’s been more than 30 days since a BP explosion killed 11 employees and opened a pipe that is spewing vast quantities of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. On Thursday, BP acknowledged that the “leak” is greater than the official government estimate of 5,000 barrels (210,000 U.S. gallons) per day.

Depending on which estimate you’re using, over a 30-day period this ecological disaster has resulted in between 150,000 (NASA) and 3,000,000 barrels (feds worst-case scenario) of oil gushing unchecked in the Gulf. For context, the Exxon Valdex spill was approximately 250,000 barrels (10.5 million U.S. gallons). The U.S. consumes about 21 million barrels of oil a day.

What follows is a recap of the estimates, followed by two infographics; one visualizes the daily estimates, the other visualizes the 30-day total in the context of the Exxon Valdez spill. (Note: the BP situation is not a spill; spills are one-time events. It doesn’t seem quite right to call it a leak, either, since the connotation of “leak” is something with a small volume.) Continue reading →

Facebook and Privacy Tools

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

Yesterday it felt to me like rabbits were at work and their progeny was Facebook privacy apps. Four crossed my screen within a space of hours: Privacy Check, ProfileWatch.org, ReclaimPrivacy.org and SaveFace. The first three are useful in helping identify the types of Facebook information that have made it to the public web, but they aren’t helpful in the shades-of-gray publicness that comes from tweaking “friends of friends” and “friends and networks” settings. The fourth is a giant reset button. Here’s what I found out about each.

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Facebook SPAM

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

Facebook SPAM“So-and-so liked <insert a Facebook page> and suggested you like it too.”

Why are you sending me this message, Facebook? I haven’t authorized you to send me messages like this.

I double-checked my notification settings (which are at a minimum, as the screen shots below attest) and there’s no “opt-in-or-out” option for “when a friend likes a page.” There is an choice for “suggests a page to me” and my setting is “don’t send a notification.” Nevertheless, Facebook was sending me messages about pages, messages that appear to be auto-generated efforts by Facebook to push traffic.

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News Judgment: The Tennessee Floods

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill
Share photos on twitter with Twitpic

Country Singer Kenny Chesney Evacuates : TwitPic Photo

On Saturday, I heard a little about the rain in Tennessee. See, it was supposed to pour in Athens, Georgia … but all we got was humidity. The storm, I was told, had “stalled” over Tennessee, where it was raining a lot. I was a lot more focused on track conditions at the Kentucky Derby.

I spent most of Sunday in transit from Athens to Savannah (by car) and from there to Atlanta to Seattle (by planes). In preparing for Monday’s digital journalism class, I poked around news sites looking for an audio-slideshow with images from the flood. I didn’t find one. I found a couple videos (one was simply helicopter footage with no voice over) and various still photos — but no galleries.

Monday morning, CNN had a caption-only “gallery” of, I think, five photos. It’s up to 13 as of this writing — the new seven consist of six iReport photos and one government shot. The Tennessean has 95 photos in just one gallery. Here’s another with 23 pix of landmarks. Continue reading →