He returns...

Hey everyone. Just wanted to let you know I finally made it back from Vegas early this morning. The NAB conference was absolutely amazing, and I was fortunate enough to have been working as a room monitor for several different seminars that dealt with a number of topics relevant to the focus of our 5990 course. I attended a few sessions on video podcasting that featured a great number of tips and ideas for producing video geared for the web. I also got to sit in on a few courses on blogging, as well as some director of photography workshops. All in all it was a great trip and I can't wait to fill you in on everything.

For this week's post I figured I would share with you some of the great resources I came across while at the show. Here's a link to a website produced by Rich Harrington, one of speakers at the conference who devoted a number of his sessions to video production for the web. The site, called vidpodcaster.com, features a blog that is updated several times a week, and also provides a link to subscribe to the free podcast "Producing Video Podcasts" (which can also be done through iTunes as well). I have checked out a few episodes so far and, in addition to being fairly well produced, found them to be pretty informative. I also thumbed through the official book (which goes by the same name) at the NAB book store and am considering picking that up as well just to have on-hand for reference. I would definitely recommended looking into it.

I hope the weekend workshop went well for everyone and can't wait to see how everything turned out. Have a great weekend, and I'll see you all in class next Tuesday...

conscientious blog

http://www.jmcolberg.com/weblog/

this claims to be a 'fine-art photography' blog, but it has plenty entries on photojournalism and street photogs and stuff, i like it lots.

you know what else i like lots, is online mixtapes. make one and share for friends and neighbors alike!

ps. i can't wait to see everyone's videos on tuesday. are we watching them on tuesday? i really want to watch them on tuesday.

Blog Book...Yippy!

So, I was at the university bookstore just the other day and found a book on blogs in the bargain book section. Now, if you're like me and simply must scoop up any deal that happens to be advertised (yeah, I'll admit that I'm an advertiser's jackpot...impulse buyer all the way) you will understand that I bought Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World by Hugh Hewitt (I mean come on...it was like $2) and 5 other books as well. I fully intend to read this book when I get the free time...don't know when that will be...but hey! at least i made the effort to buy it and call it my own.

Anywho...thought it was relevant and interesting...didn't know if any of you had heard of it or not...

Do you have a secret to share?

I came across this really neat Blog called Postsecrets. People are encouraged to send in postcards, decorate the back and share a secret. The secrets are funny, dirty, horrible, innocent and sometimes unthinkable. Every postcard is anonymous. It is currently the 16th most popular blog, according to Technorati. Check it out! It is a guaranteed laugh, gasp and "no they didn't."

Has anyone heard of this? I think it definitely beats out icanhascheezburger.com...you know the funny cat photo blog.

Chipper Jones and the AJC Braves blog

I meant to post this like a month ago, and I just now remembered. Chipper Jones, a baseball player for the Atlanta Braves, commented on the AJC's Braves blog, posted by David O'Brien, for like an hour about a month ago. It was pretty cool, and he apparently reads the blog a good bit.
"By U Kno Who
February 6, 2008 9:51 PM | Link to this
I read the blogs pretty often. I like to know what is being said. Not so much during the the season because I don’t have that much time, but in the offseason, I read quite a bit especially when we make moves just to see how jacked up u guys get."

He said some pretty funny stuff, and that was the coolest thing about it, for me.

Facebook? Nyet, Livejournal ...

So, remember Livejournal? Where you vented in high school about teachers who didn't know how to teach, friends who stabbed you in the back, parents who didn't understand you ... and such things that really just proved how much of a whiny punk you were? Well, it's apparently still going strong in ole Mother Russia according to a French graphic. My French is terrible (READ: nonexistent) so someone else will probably make more sense of it, but I'm led to believe by Journalistopia that it's a breakdown of popular social sites across the world.

Here's the graphic.

Au revoir, mes amis ... is that right? ...

bloggery

check it yo!

www.tumblr.com

it's another blog type thing, except I don't think you could make posting multimedia bits any easier than they did. what makes me sad is you can't comment on posts.

Ethics of Blogging

I'm working on a paper in Fink's Media Ethics class about the ethics of blogging. We've talked a little about this in class, but I was wondering if you had any input about the limitations of these ethics. I found a few websites that have attempted to set boundaries, such as CyberJournalist. Has anyone given this thought or have any guidelines they follow?

Project Help

So on Cade White's blog there is a list of newspapers that are incorporating video and other multimedia paraphernalia. It’s not updated in the least, but, hey, it’s a start. This could be especially helpful to those who don’t have their newspaper picked out let for their projects. Very helpful stuff. And anybody let me know if there is a more updated version somewhere else.

Blogs and anonymity

The authors at firejoemorgan.com, a really cool baseball journalism blog, revealed their identities to the public on Tuesday after having remained anonymous since the blog's inception in '05. It's a big deal because it's a pretty popular blog (it won a popularity contest between 64 sports blogs at Busted Coverage), and because of the blog's unique purpose: exposing b.s. sports journalism. In this way it's kind of like media matters, but for sports, so not as important.

When the authors revealed their identities on Tuesday they cited "The people we make fun of have a right to face their accusers." and "We don't want anyone to be able to write off what we say as the un-credited ramblings of people too afraid to stand behind them. (The ramblings.)" as reasons for shedding their anonymity. Authorial anonymity isn't unique to to online journalism (at least I don't think it is), but blogs seem to really lend themselves to the practice, and I guess that has advantages and disadvantages. One the one hand, anonymous blog posters don't have any built-in credibility like a print reporter that has a byline next to his story, as the authors perceived in the second quote that I pasted here. But on the other hand, anonymous blog posters can be freer in who they target and in how scathing they are toward their target (i.e., they can curse more). The guys that run firejoemorgan aren't pros, though, so I don't guess revealing their identities will have a real impact on their work. They don't contact their targets either.

Can one image tell a story?

I read a blog entry by Mindy McAdams about multimedia journalism. At first, McAdams says that an image in and of itself is not capable of telling a story without movement or words. What do you think of that?

Toward the end, seemingly a complete opposite idea, McAdams argues that as many words as possible should be cut because things tend to be too wordy.

Or is this to say that we should always pair words or audio with images, but that the words should be simple and important, only?

Also, just a little random piece of fun:

View the most EMAILED links for today from CNN.com:

1.
Surfing cat
2.
Defendant slugs lawyer
3.
Friendly moose raises eyebrows

blogs

An adjunct prof at NYU named Clay Shirky writes about the internet, a loooot, and going through some of his stuff I found one that was kind of exactly what we were talking about last class w/ blogs and publishing and "publishing," just with a little more elaboration and forecasting.

http://shirky.com/writings/weblogs_publishing.html

Yardbarker and Dontrelle Willis

I follow major league baseball compulsively and a couple of months ago I came across this sports blog site, yardbarker.com. The coolest thing about it is that some athletes have their own verified accounts and they post articles and comment on other people's articles. I only really follow one athlete there, though - Dontrelle Willis, former Florida Marlins and current Detroit Tigers pitcher. I follow him because he posts a good bit and comments a ton, sometimes on articles that don't pertain to him or baseball at all. A user named MixMakers posted an article about LeBron James using profanity on live tv and Dontrelle commented "so what. who cares."

It's fun to think about rich athletes just dicking around on the internet. It's also an interesting side of journalism, having the subjects of mainstream news stories commenting in their own words in their free time, and as part of a community too.

If you talk loud....

I am sure some of you have seen this, but hopefully this is new to some. The blog, Overheard in Athens, is a hilarious account of mainly college student's conversations around campus. Next time you're on the bus be careful! You never know who might be listening.