Montana fire coordinators will use Twitter this summer to give residents updates on wildfires, road closures and evacuation notices, the Associated Press reports.
The Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation spent 15 months looking into social media options before settling on Twitter, the AP said in its report. Seeing examples of how other states have used Twitter during wildfires helped seal the deal.
The udpates will flow from @mtdnrcfire. The tweets will supplement updates sent out by telephone alert systems and postings to the InciWeb website.
Also of note is the Northern Rockies Coordination Center, which manages fires in Montana, North Dakota and parts of Idaho. Follow the center on Twitter at @nrccnewsnotes.
Today, I’d like to introduce you to Allie Buck.
Allie Buck, a twentysomething artist and mother. In 2010, she had been volunteering as a docent for about four years at the Emerson Center for the Arts and Culture in Bozeman.
Reporter Jodi Hausen interviewed Buck for Christmas season story about volunteering in the Gallatin Valley. As a docent, Buck was taking children on gallery tours and teaching art classes for kids. She also helped out in the center’s ceramics studio.
You can read all about Buck in our Dec. 19, 2010, story here.
Why do I mention Buck on this particular blog? It’s because “Allie Buck” is a part of every single story uploaded to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle’s website. Every one.
You see, the software that runs our website allows us to enter keywords for each story. When you begin to type in a keyword, the software automatically suggests an existing keyword, and since December 2010, the first suggestion, no matter what you are typing, is “Allie Buck.”
“Allie Buck” is not alphabetically first in our list of tags, not by a long shot, but it comes in as the first suggestion anyhow. And here’s the fun part: No matter what you are typing when the “Allie Buck” suggestion comes up, if you hit enter to put in the tag, the software ignores what you have typed and inserts “Allie Buck.”
You can avoid this occurrance by waiting a few precious seconds for the auto-complete cache to empty — or whatever its doing, but most of the time people entering stories on the website forget. Inevitably, we find ourselves deleting “Allie Buck” tags off our stories.
(Yes, I could report this as a bug to the software people, but it’s just another support ticket I haven’t gotten around to filling out yet.)
I don’t know where Allie Buck is today or what she’s up to, but she has certainly had an impact on the way things are done here at the Chronicle every single day.
This post will be brief and pertains more to my other blog, Becker’s Online Journal.
Let me start by defining two facts:
- I do a lot of stuff every day.
- I don’t write many blog posts.
It seems like the first fact would provide fodder for the second fact, but I hesitate to write about a lot of the stuff I do every day. Frankly, I think it would bore most of my readers to sleep, though it is fascinating to me. I do things like improve minor things about our paper’s website, tweak lines of code, make edits to news stories...
I guess the point is: I wonder just how much detail about my daily work I’m willing to give away and how much of it will interest general readers.
Montana Highway Patrol troopers have a new online tool that will allow them to verify from the roadside that drivers have the required liability insurance.
The Montana Insurance Verificatio System was authorized by Senate Bill 508 in the 2009 Legislature. It will be put into use on May 21 in MHP District III, which includes Beaverhead, Deer Lodge, Granite, Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, Madison, Powell and Silver Bow counties. It will be available statewide by August.
“Rather than just having to rely on their best guess, MTIVS will enable troopers and other law enforcement officers to base their decision on whether to issue a warning or a ticket on accurate, real-time information,” said MHP Col. Mike Tooley.
Troopers will also be able to use the system to determine whether a driver had liability insurance at the time of an accident, according an announcement from the state justice department.
Montana law required that vehicles driven on public roads carry liability insurance.
The $1,299 Cube is a plastic jet printer that can produce objects up to a 5.5-inch cube. Its cartridges, which contain plastic instead of ink, can each produce 13 to 14 mid-sized objects, according to specs provided by the company. The device even prints over wi-fi, in case you feel like firing up your 3-D design software on the couch while watching television.
Unveiled at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show, the Cube will be exhibited in 25 cities around the country, including San Francisco and New York. Local nonprofit HATCHFest played a role in getting the Cube demo’d here in Bozeman, according to the release. Check out a CNET video review from the electronics show below.
The Cube team will show off their gadget Friday from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at CTA Architects & Engineers, 411 E. Main St., #101, in Bozeman.
Here’s to catching up on old topics. Montana Opticom, the ISP that in 2010 received $64 million in federal stimulus money to lay fiber-optic cable for broadband in the western portion of Gallatin County, recently applied for permission to bury some of that cable on forest service land.
According to the Gallatin National Forest, Opticom proposed installing fiber optics between Big Sky and Belgrade, which includes a roughly 15-mile portion of national forest land along Highways 191 and 84.
The line would be installed within the existing, disturbed right-of-way along those highways. You can read about the details of the proposal here and check out the scoping documents here.
The work is expected to take about 45 days, according to the forest.
The comment period on the proposal closed March 30. I have a call in to the forest to see what the next steps are and to see if there was any significant objection raised in the public comments.
On another Opticom front, you can check out the company on the ProPublica Recovery Tracker. Details on the roughly $32 million loan portion of the Opticom funding can be found here and details of the grant portion can be found here. Including with the ProPublica data is a list of the vendors connected to Opticom’s stimulus funding.
According to Recovery.gov, out of the $64,127,322 awarded, Opticom has so far accepted $17,461,128 and spent $14,239,193. That’s as of the end of Q4 2011.
In what will undoubtedly be the biggest social media story of the day, Facebook announced that it is buying the popular photo-sharing service Instagram for $1 billion.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the news on his Facebook timeline, of course. In the post, Zuckerberg writes that Facebook needs to be “mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.” Accordingly, Instagram will be kept independent of Facebook, he said.
In his own blog post, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom wrote:
It’s important to be clear that Instagram is not going away. We’ll be working with Facebook to evolve Instagram and build the network. We’ll continue to add new features to the product and find new ways to create a better mobile photos experience.In its formal press release, Facebook said the deal is expected to close this quarter.
According to a report on AllThingsD, San Francisco-based Instagram had 30 million users on the iPhone before releasing an Android app last week, which quickly drew in a million more users.
In case you missed it over the weekend, here is a video by Chronicle photographer Mike Greener. It accompanied a story by Amanda Ricker in Saturday’s paper about a donkey and gander on a farm in south Bozeman who have become friends since the gander’s mate was killed a few weeks ago.
Greener spent quite a lot of time — by our past standards — shooting footage, recording and tweaking his audio and then fine-tuning the whole project in Final Cut. I think the result is leaps and bounds beyond what we have done in the past in terms of complexity and quality.
(And of course, by the things we have done in the past, I mean the videos I have produced in the past, since I have been the one producing videos so far. Did I mention I have no formal training as a photographer, filmmaker or video editor?)
I look forward to seeing the other projects Mr. Greener turns out, and his accomplice, Chronicle photographer Nick Wolcott. They’re both on the verge of getting some neat new video equipment, so it should be good. By the way, if you’d like to see more projects Greener did before coming to the Chronicle, be sure to check out his blog.
In case you missed it over the weekend, here is a video by Chronicle photographer Mike Greener. It accompanied a story by Amanda Ricker in Saturday’s paper about a donkey and gander on a farm in south Bozeman who have become friends since the gander’s mate was killed a few weeks ago.
Greener spent quite a lot of time — by our past standards — shooting footage, recording and tweaking his audio and then fine-tuning the whole project in Final Cut. I think the result is leaps and bounds beyond what we have done in the past in terms of complexity and quality.
(And of course, by the things we have done in the past, I mean the videos I have produced in the past, since I have been the one producing videos so far. Did I mention I have no formal training as a photographer, filmmaker or video editor?)
I look forward to seeing the other projects Mr. Greener turns out, and his accomplice, Chronicle photographer Nick Wolcott. They’re both on the verge of getting some neat new video equipment, so it should be good. By the way, if you’d like to see more projects Greener did before coming to the Chronicle, be sure to check out his blog.
