Your Home Remedies - the blog, the Facebook page, the Twitter feed (acutally a bit dormant now), the website
Once, twice, three times a lady
Your Home Remedies - the blog, the Facebook page, the Twitter feed (acutally a bit dormant now), the website
Once, twice, three times a lady
In the powerpoint on Multimedia Journalism which I used in today's session, I mentioned a couple of writers whose work is really worth looking at in more detail, if you want to think more about this whole area.
Henry Jenkins has his own blog, where he talks over his current research. His book - Convergence Culture - has been out for a while. When it was first published, he put some introductory notes about it on his blog.
Paul Bradshaw runs a brilliant blog about online journalism - his guide to the BASIC principles of online journalism is on his blog. The series covers brevity, adaptability, scannability, interactivity and community/conversation.
In the powerpoint I focused on adaptability and linked the ideas there to some of Paul's other writing about how news organisations should change to respond to the net - in particular his ideas about the news diamond. That post is part of a larger series of posts about the 21st Century newsroom, which are also worth looking at.
Another writer you should definitely follow when it comes to online multimedia is Adam Westbrook - his blog regularly highlights really interesting multimedia and online trends in general.
Here are a few links we might use in class today:
The BBC on the Coalition proposals for welfare reform
The Guardian on the same story - specifically Ian Duncan-Smith defending his proposed benefit cap
The Telegraph on Ian Duncan-Smith's welfare reforms
In today's powerpoint, I talk about building on Paul Bradshaw's ideas about adaptability and the news diamond and thinking about how to combine different media types to tell news stories more effectively...
There's lots of experimentation going on in this area at the moment. People are trying out new combinations of media and new ideas to see what works.I mentioned some sites that are good places to go to keep up with what's new:
As for some specific projects you could look at, I mentioned a few in class:
What I'd like you to do is write a review on your blog of an interesting/innovative multimedia journalism project. You could review one of the projects mentioned above.
But it might be more interesting for you (and me) if you find a new project. One way to do that is to look around on Multimedia Shooter and the other links I mentioned above. They showcase interesting lots of interesting new work.
One you write something you like, write a short review - no more than 200 words - saying why you like it, why you think it works well online, why it's innovative. Remember to link to the work you're reviewing.
Do this in addition to the other short posts I suggested you write as a way of getting started on your blogs.
Today we're going to look at how to put images on your blog. Not something that seems that hard, really. Just fire up Google Images and you're away. However, there are problems with using the pictures you find that way. We'll talk a bit about that today and about how to find images online that aren't copyrighted.
We'll look at Flickr, which is a great photo-sharing site and a brilliant source of non-copyright images - via the Flickr Creative Commons page. We'll look at Creative Commons a bit and what it means and go through some ways to find images there. In the meantime, there's an old but still useful guide to finding images on Flickr on Skelliewag.
There are various sites online that have stock photos you can use for free. The best known of the stock photo sites is probably stock.xchng. EveryStockPhoto is a search engine for free photos online - it's not a bad way to find copyright free images online. However, the best way is to use Google's Advanced Image Search and then, after entering your search terms, scroll down and tick the radio button next to 'Only images labelled for reuse'. This is a great way to find rights-free images on Flickr - much better than the site's own search engine. Lots of photographers on the site make their images available under the Creative Commons license.
However, you should make sure you look at the terms of the license they're using and when you put images on your blogs which you've found on Flickr or elsewhere online, you should always put some kind of credit link - a caption which acknowledges the source for the image and links back to it. The best way to do this is to put a caption at the end of your blog post, referring to the source of the image and linkng back to it.
It also pays to put some kind of general disclaimer on your blog, pointing out that it's a student project and not a commercial effort and that any kind of copyright infringement is accidental...
For your blogs this year, you need to get into the habit of using rights-free images. The best way to find these is via Google's Advanced Image Search. If there's time in class, we'll go over this.
We need to sort out various things today:
To get us started, perhaps we should work on putting together a list of the big online media/tech stories of the last week, share them via Twitter and Delicious with the rest of the class and then record what you find - with links to sources - on your blogs.
Here's a short lecture from Kevin Kelly on six verbs that sum up the future direction of the net.
Kevin Kelly: The Future of the Digital Media Landscape from WIRED and The Economist on FORA.tv
Here's a few links we can use in class today:
You'll find lots of advice online on how to blog. A lot of the stuff was written to get traffic and rehashes some basic standard advice, plus a little bit of basic search engine optimisation... This post from Problogger is pretty representative of a lot of what's out there. It's OK, I suppose, but doesn't take you that far. So it's worth reading round a bit - beyond the first page of results on Google for searches on blogging. There are lots of useful blogging tips online. Here's a few to start with:
I'm a fortysomething former slacker turned hackademic. Live in London. Teach in London
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