Entries from February 2007 ↓

The New York Times is accepting user generated videos for their Wedding and Celebrations section, using Brightcove.
Couples whose announcements have been chosen to appear in the paper can create a 3 minute “How We Met” video which will appear at NYTimes.com/weddings. So far, I don’t see anything up there aside from professionally shot “Vows” videos which appear on the same site.

Weather.com has a super duper interactive map with animation, satellite, radar and cloud views. It’s currently in beta and takes a few seconds to figure out, and it’s powered by Microsoft Virtual Earth instead of Google. I think this is the first serious map I’ve seen that didn’t have Google in the left-hand corner.

An article by St. Pete Times’ Eric Deggans explains that there is news behind the tabloid lives of Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith.

In Spears’ case, we have one of the world’s best-known pop singers melting down before the public’s eye - a woman with two kids, millions of dollars and multitudes of fans who still can’t conquer her own personal demons.

Everyone has personal demons. Is the fact that even celebrities with lots of money don’t have their lives together either really newsworthy? And if it is newsworthy, is it worthy of the coverage it’s been getting?

Smith, a 39-year-old professional train wreck of a celebrity, died unexpectedly - under circumstances similar to the death of her 20-year-old son five months earlier. She’s left an estate potentially worth $400-million to a 5-month-old daughter who at least three men claim to have fathered, kicking off a legal battle over where Smith should be buried.

This I think has more substance. The legal issues and the similarity of her death to her son’s could be exploited into real news. But 24-hour coverage? Never.

Deggans says there are two major problems with news coverage: Traditional gatekeepers are failing, and coverage is desperate, unimaginative and lazy.

I don’t notice a lack of what I want to know. But perhaps my dependency on RSS for news reveals a gap in traditional coverage.

Fox News host John Gibson thinks I’m a snob. I’d rather know about the war in Iraq, but Think Progress documented this comment:

He accused reporters — such as CNN’s Anderson Cooper — of “news-guy snobbery” and attacked them for covering the Iraq war. Mocking Cooper, he said, “Oh, ‘There’s a war on! There’s a war on!’ Maybe, just maybe, people are a little weary, Mr. Cooper, of your war coverage, and they’d like a little something else.”

Yup, the UF Newsies are no longer on The Undertone. The Gainesville Sun gave us a blog instead.

by Megan Taylor

Tampa Bay Online is not my favorite news site. The home page is cluttered and unorganized and the execution of the site is sloppy.

Recently, two of their multimedia packages were brought to my attention: Gasparilla and Restoring the Everglades.

The separate elements of the Gasparilla package are very well done, though I’m not crazy about how they are assembled. The pictures are great, but why are there two separate slide shows? And one of them is really small. :( To play the Gasparilla game, you have to download Shockwave. Grrr.

Restoring the Everglades is a far more important package. And while the concept behind what they tried to do is super awesome, it looks sloppy. The sunflowers have weird green background, the separate layers of animation don’t blend and are sometimes shaky.
The article underneath the multimedia package is contained in Flash, but doesn’t do anything besides scroll down through the article with a nice graphic next to it.

Flash shouldn’t be used for Flash’s sake. If the article works better at text, leave it in text. If you want to make it a package and don’t want to split up the article into reasonable segments, embed or link a related package.

If your complicated Flash package looks weird or doesn’t work right, simplify. Content is still king, and your super-duper (non-functional) multimedia won’t do anything for you.

The UF Newsies are moving from The Undertone to our own blog on the Gainesville Sun site.

This is great, because the site will be geared towards what we write about rather than just filling in space.

However, I’m already seeing some problems with the CMS (content management system).

Rather than uploading a full-sized image into the blog post, the best you seem to be able to do is add a thumbnail to the post which people have to click on to see the full sized image. While videos, podcasts, and photos can be uploaded to the blog, they are not
integrated well with the blog posts themselves.

The photos at least, show up nice and big in the RSS feed. (That’s right, we have an RSS feed now!)

I don’t know what program is powering the site.

I’ve seen this a few times now, where the CMS that a company is using just doesn’t lend itself to facilitating the use of multimedia. It makes me want to go back to old-school HTML editing. (Not just because it would increase my own marketability.)

I even have trouble with Wordpress occasionally, though to be honest some of that is because I haven’t had a chance to go through my CSS and PHP with a microscope yet.

Is there a favorite CMS among media companies that makes this easy?

Paul Bradshaw’s online video checklist:

• Short
• Illustrates something that couldn’t be described as well in words alone (by most people)
• No anchor - in fact, no commentary at all
• It runs alongside, and complements, a text-based article, rather than replacing it.
• Compelling content (i.e. cute animals)

This was given as part of a comment on “You chance to name leopard cubs.”

He also said

It reminds me of the moving images on newspapers in Harry Potter films - perhaps we need to think of video in those terms, though not always.

Open Art is a collection of art by Gainesville artists, released under Creative Commons licenses. The showcase is taking place in the Reitz Union Gallery as well as online.

A Professor at the Southwestern School of Law created an interactive study guide to help students cram. The guide focuses on U.S. Copyright Law.

A few weeks ago we did a brief study of Typography in my Advanced Online Media Production class. I didn’t really get it. Yea, some fonts are more expressive, size can be expressive, space between words and lines can be expressive. But I didn’t get it. Until now.

Ever see Pulp Fiction? Do you remember what Marcellus Wallace looks like?

I sure do.

The Visual HTML Jokes Pool on Flickr has 38 members. They’ve modified photos to represent HTML tags.