Over the past week or so, many of you, especially readers on campus have probably noticed that articles on dailypennsylvanian.com have just plain not worked.

You’ve likely been seeing some version of this error.

Service Unavailable - DNS failure

The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later.

Reference #11.c48f748.1206020220.6a1305f

Well, I’ve been seeing it too, and now I’m here to explain it to you. The explanation is long and complicated, but trust me, it’s a rip-roaring story involving shadowy corporations, quarreling lovers and at least one Scandinavian country.

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As our election blog already posted, Hillary Clinton is going to be on campus tomorrow for what the press release called, a “major policy address.”

If you want to see her speech live and raw without any of the commentary you get from CNN or the major networks. Just visit dailypennsylvanian.com/live around 10am tomorrow when her speech is scheduled to start.

Or just check back later in the day to see the footage at whatever time is convenient to you.

If you’re interested in how we’re able to stream live video, we’re using a service called USTREAM.TV which is dead simple to set up. All you have to do is register an account and click broadcast and it will detect any camera attached to your computer and let you start streaming. Sure the quality might not be as good as you get with a satellite truck, but for $165,000 less, it’s quite a deal!

Edit: 2:06am, March 26, 2008

Throughout the stream, the number of viewers fluctuated between 80 and 85, this with relatively light promotion. A box on the bottom line of the print newspaper and a box at the top of the web layout when the stream went live. Quality of the video wasn’t so great though. You can see the recorded version from ustream here if you’re interested. http://www.dailypennsylvanian.com/live/

The biggest issue was how laggy the connection became, stopping quite frequently to buffer. With the number of viewers we had, while the audio stayed relatively clear, the video got very jerky, sometimes freezing up for seconds at a time before resuming. So while ustream seems to work great, I’m not sure how scalable it’ll be for larger broadcasts and bigger papers.

After finishing the stream, I downloaded the FLV from their server and easily integrated it into our own system.

All in all, I’m chalking this one up as a success.

One of the most remarkable stories in the news coverage of this year’s presidential election is the impact being made by college students across the country. Because of Pennsylvania’s late primary, students here at Penn have been relatively insulated from the candidates’ intense courtship of the youth vote in states such as Iowa. That said, no one with a television set or access to the internet could possibly ignore the media frenzy.With that in mind, the editors of the DP were interested in finding out exactly what Penn students are thinking about U.S. politics in general and the presidential election in particular. We published results of a scientific opinion research survey this past week on Tuesday 2/5 (pdf) and Wednesday 2/6 (pdf), coinciding with our comprehensive coverage of Super Tuesday.The survey was conducted over a period of four days (2/1-2/4) online. Invitations to participate were sent via e-mail to a random sample 3,000 undergraduate and graduate Penn students, netting 601 unique responses (and a +/- 4% margin of error, different for subgroups).

Unfortunately, due to space constraints, only a limited set of the results could be published in the paper. If you’re curious, you can download a full copy of the data summary here.

Super Tuesday and this past weekend’s primaries have left John McCain the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. In the tightening Democratic race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, however, Pennsylvania’s late primary might ultimately count quite a bit. This survey is, therefore, great insight into how campus will divide up come April 22.

P.S. Some might be interested in knowing that we used the software LimeSurvey.

Tuesday we had a meeting with Provost Ron Daniels along the same lines as the University Communications meeting, but this time the only people representing Penn were Daniels himself, and his assistant Leo Charney, who we grabbed after the meeting for a quick photo/video shoot which resulted in Wednesday’s “Personalities” piece, and the accompanying video on dailypennsylvanian.com.

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Tuesday, before our first Story Conference, a few of us Daily Pennsylvanian editors went down to Penn Police Headquarters for a “Meet and Greet” with some of the communications people for Penn along with head of Penn Police Maureen Rush. Basically, these are the people that we interview and talk to for stories nearly constantly.Besides Rush, Lori Doyle, who you always see quoted as “University spokeswoman Lori Doyle,” was there, and a few more PR people and assistants whose names rarely make it into the paper, but who DP reporters talk to a lot.Also representing the Division of Public Safety were our two main contacts there, Allina Boutilier and Jared Hupp. Phyllis Holtzmann and Jeanne Leong were there too, from University Communications, and Tony Sorrentino, our main contact for stories about retail and real estate.The meeting isn’t really that interesting, it’s more or less just a chance for all of us to see each other face to face, and talk about how to keep lines of communication open throughout the year.

The very first story conference of the year was yesterday afternoon at 5:45PM. Story conference is the planning meeting for the next issue of the paper, where the news, sports, copy, photo, design, web, managing, and executive editors meet to go over all the content that will be appearing with the next issue of the paper. It also gives us a time to discuss what we did well and what we did poorly with the previous issue.

Usually Story Conference is at 4:00PM the night before the issue comes out, but for this first issue, since it’s so large and since we have the time, we had it an extra day in advance.

At many other papers, the equivalent meeting is called a budget meeting, I believe, because the primary purpose is to go over the number of inches of room the paper has for each section. At the DP we do that, but story conference is also our daily meeting to just talk about what every editorial department is doing and keep lines of communication open.I was pretty excited to see the paper begin to come together for the first time this year, and having seen a few of the stories our reporters are writing I’m very optimistic. Hopefully you’ll enjoy this first issue as much as I am, and if you don’t please, please, let us know what you thought so that we can work on doing a better job.Today, story conference was supposed to start at 4:15 according to our new schedule. But like with all new things, there are some rough spots to work out and we’re still waiting for it. Hopefully we can get going in the next 5 to 10 minutes.