Tips on using Skype as a community media production tool
March 31, 2005
Charlie Rose has a knack for drawing people out, getting them to share their ideas and views in a way that illuminates. But did you ever stop to think that the only people who appear on his show are celebrities? And that 99 percent of the interesting people in this world are not celebrities?
So who’s going to interview all those people? Answer: the people will interview the people. What tool will they use to do this? Skype. How will these interviews be shared? Over the Internet, via public access television stations, via podcasting and via various computer media.
Skype was created as a no-cost long-distance phone service. It does that very well. What it also allows you to do, if you’re just a little technically-minded and have a homebrew gene or two, is to record your Skype phone conversation, with the other person’s permission, to an audio file on a second computer. Once you’ve recorded the audio, you can edit out the uhms, ahs and pauses, compress the audio and then place it on the web for public consumption.
Here are some tips on how to do so.
Why news industry is in peril and how participatory media can save it
March 31, 2005
In a report for the Carnegie Corporation examining how the young get their news, Merrill Brown says the news industry is in peril unless it dramatically rethinks it’s approach to news.
“News executives need to think about their products as participatory community institutions, not merely as distributors of their own creative output, and open themselves to input, feedback, ideas and journalism from outside their own organizations. In addition, news organizations must recognize the value of the one piece of technology that’s in virtually every hand around the world?the cell phone?so that the mobile revolution is, in fact, part of a news revolution.”
The five-page report is well worth reading, and also includes a PowerPoint with survey data.
Cool way to handle corrections online
March 31, 2005
Business 2.0 used a really interesting correction technique this week. After some details in a story about Arianna Huffington starting a new online site turned out to be untrue, the site didn’t simply delete the inaccurate information and post a correction, as most would do. Business 2.0 crossed out the inaccurate text digitallly and then put an editor’s note below explaining why. Here’s what it looked like:
Arianna Huffington plans culture and politics webzine
March 30, 2005
Arianna Huffington is planning a new online publishing venture, the Huffington Report, Business 2.0 reports.
Based in New York and staffed with a full complement of editors, the Huffington Report appears to be a culture and politics webzine in the classic mold of Salon or Slate. It will have breaking news, a media commentary section called “Eat the Press,” and its most interesting innovation, a group blog manned by the cultural and media elite: Sen. Jon Corzine, Larry David, Barry Diller, Tom Freston, David Geffen, Vernon Jordan, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Harry Evans and his wife, Tina Brown. That’s just to name a few, and Huffington is still recruiting.
In an e-mail to potential writers, Huffington said, “The idea is that the members of our blog will weigh in whenever the spirit moves them: when a news story makes you mad, when you see a movie or read a book that turns you on, or when you have a cause that you don’t think is getting the coverage it deserves. And we’re not just talking about politics — this blog will be about politics and entertainment and money and sports and religion. Anything and everything.”
washingtonpost.com’s lastest documentary video
March 30, 2005
washingtonpost.com’s John Poole sends in an excellent multimedia project on his site about the D.C. police Gay and Lesbian Liason Unit. It includes a great 13-minute documentary video by Poole and his colleague Jennifer Crandall, a gallery of stills by Carol Guzy and a feature article by Anne Hull.
Monitoring online information
March 29, 2005
A free new tool, PubSub, can help you monitor the blogosphere chatter and other online information in real time. PubSub scans more than 9 million weblogs, more than 50,000 Internet newsgroups, and all SEC (EDGAR) filings. In the coming months, the company plans to add more data streams. Here are some of the things PubSub can help you track.
Healthy blogging
March 29, 2005
Five readers of The Atlanta Journal and Constitution are participating in “a weight loss and lifestyle change challenge for 2005″ and blogging about their steps and experiences as they try to lose weight. Readers can follow along and interact via the blog’s commenting system.
Newsweek also recently ran a weight-loss blog, of a different sort. A 600 pounds Seattle-area teenager who is having laparoscopic gastric banding surgery is writing about his progress before and after the procedure.
Ajc.com, by the way, has a great health section, with health guides and videos, clinical trial updates and a searchable database of more than 5,000 Atlanta-area physicians.
Google News Source List
March 28, 2005
Private Radio has written a script that captures the Google News home page every 15 minutes, logs all the news sources it finds and generates a list of the top ranked sites on Google News. You can see the list here.
DallasNews.com does SXSW
March 28, 2005
Collective knowledge and The Neighborhood Project
March 28, 2005
Interesting experiment in collective knowledge:
The Neighborhood Project is creating a map of city neighborhoods based on the collective opinions of internet users. Addresses and neighborhood data are translated into latitude and longitude values, and then drawn on the map. The address and neighborhood data are collected from housing posts on craigslist, and from people filling out the form below. The coordinates are generated using the free geocoder.us. The map is from the TIGER/Line US Census data. Our first city is San Francisco, but we will add more soon….
The more people who add their opinion to the database, the more accurate the neighborhood boundaries become.