Energise your innovation – just get moving

Don’t let the pace of change, in any form of digital media or content creation, hold you back from being creative, from expressing your ideas and input to the change you want to see in your newsroom.

I pore over content and my feed reader, trying to perfect comment, and content, so that it is comprehensive, definitive, and unable to be questioned. I feel the need to cover the issue from all angles, as if I must attempt to encompass the breadth and wealth of thought out there. And yet I’m overwhelmed by the quantity of more, better, reasoned, experienced content creators out there, and so hesitate to speak.

Google Maps recommends kayaking

I always thought it was a joke when someone said there were directions in Google Maps to kayak across oceans. And yet, I accidentally stumbled upon just that when looking for some directions.

Not much logic behind the recommended kayak route – Seattle to Sydney. Wouldn’t something like San Diego to Brisbane (since I’m going to Brisbane) make more sense? But we’re kayaking some 12,700km (7,923m), there is no sense.

A new beginning

That post title is only mildly deceiving.   I have finally started using my delicious bookmarks, and porting them into the blog as daily links.

At least that way I can comment on the things I may otherwise intend blogging about but never have the time to really commit to a full post.

The next few rounds of links to be posted to the blog will be fairly extensive, as I’ve picked through the last 100 or so blog posts I had tagged for following up in Google Reader, and have another couple of hundred unread ones yet to clear.

Perhaps it will breathe some life into this ailing blog.

Cover It Live – free live blogging tool

I just sat in on a live blog using Cover It Live.

James Mowery from Performancing was demonstrating how it works.

A lot of bloggers on mainstream news sites already do ‘live blogging’, often on a regular day and at a regular time, and this tool could make their lives a little easier. Even if not working with an already clunky CMS, managing a live blog can be difficult at the best of times.

I like the ability to embed the live discussion within a blog’s post page – or on any page – and then easily manage things from the Cover It Live interface. A three-pane view shows additional functions (like inserting a poll), the content box, and incoming comments.

The Media Library is a great tool.  You can permanently store content in folders (audio, video, images, polls, links, ads and prewritten text), then drag relevant content for a specific live blogging session into a prepared show folder.  (see demo)

The benefit of this is preparing a live blog with what you already plan to say and present.  Many mainstream media blogs don’t really provide the functionality or interactivity of an actual live conversation.  A blog post is made, and then the live blogger takes and responds to comments, with no real further addition to their initial post it is essentially a statement up for discussion.  With Cover It Live, that can be spread out in real time, inviting more interactivity.

Image function could be improved.  During the live blog session you can  post images or video that the participants will be able to open and watch.  The way Cover It Live works, images at this stage can’t be too detailed as it looks like they’re restricted to about 330 x 220 px.   A full screenshot, for example, is difficult to view, whereas a portrait image of a person comes out looking fine.  In image selection, general web thumbnail standards should apply – crop tight.

Different templates can also be created that will show your branding before the blog goes live, while in progress, and once the live blog session has ended.

Cover It Live is probably best served covering a live event, and that was probably its intent.  I can see the downside for mainstream news bloggers who take the statement-response approach would be that newcomers to the conversation have to try and catch up with what has already been said.

On the standard static screen, they can at least read all the other comments and responses, easily, before choosing to engage themselves.
The live blog I sat in on, including a review of Cover It Live:
http://performancing.com/blogging/its-kinda-regular-blogging-its-live

And a review focused on live blogging news events using Cover It Live:
http://www.beatblogging.org/blog/2008/02/chating-live-wi.html

Between Drinks

I can’t believe it’s been almost six weeks since I last posted…

My Reading List, in the right sidebar and here, continues to be tagged with followup items every day, hundreds of which I am yet to follow up on.  At some point I’m going to have do delicious those items or incorporate the feed into this blog so it doesn’t look like I’m doing absolutely nothing!

In the meantime, the new post is above, on Cover It Live.

Blog redirect

I’ve ported the blog portion of my site to be the main repository of all things earley edition, so instead of earleyedition.com/blog, the blog now shows on the front page of the site.

Things looked to have worked fine initially, but now I seem to have lost all style and formatting associated with the site.

So apologies for the bare bones look, I’m not quite sure what happened.

From now on, earleyedition.com/blog is redirecting to earleyedition.com, since there is no real difference between the ‘blog’ and the rest of the content of this site.

I hope you continue to come back, and that it starts looking like normal again some time soon!

Happy Birthday Blog

Today the earley edition blog is four years old.

It was a future filled with optimism and hope when this blog launched during the first semester of 2004.

It was the early stages of the explosion of the new web log, or ‘blog’, craze, and today, in 2008, the optimism continues as digital media takes off.

Here’s to another four years, and more.

Portfolio

The last two posts have been embedded video content that I’ve been giving out as my video portfolio.

In that light, I’ve created a Portfolio category which also includes a radio interview submitted during a broadcast course, as well as another early podcast.

It won’t be the definitive portfolio, but at least for now I can add a few things to that category so some of this blog’s content can actually be found.

Independence

As the President so grandly quoted, before strapping himself into a fighter jet and going after the alien mother-ship in the Will Smith movie, Independence Day:

And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: “We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight!” We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!

Huzzah.

Being for all intents and purposes Australian, as an American citizen I feel this an obligatory post.

Again, You can do it

Michael Rosenblum is certainly going to piss a few people off.  And why wouldn’t people get pissed off when you’re questioning the practicality of tradition?

The Future of Local TV News? « Rosenblumtv

Who would buy an edit suite today? Not in an era when you can edit just about anything on a laptop. Makes sense.

Extend that argument to cameras, satellite dishes, transmission towers in an era in which anyone can put video up online with a server and an online connection and suddenly the whole architecture of local tv news as we know it starts to collapse.

[...]

Go over the local University. Get yourself a dozen bright and eager young journalists. They all have their own cameras and laptops anyway. And start your own local news channel.

There is no ‘barrier to entry’ except your own anxiety.
Someone is going to do this. Why not you?

Amen.  And while not every university student has a video camera, even the movie mode of a half-decent point-and-shoot camera is going to yield a decent 320×240 video image – pretty much your standard online video viewing size.

If you don’t have a video camera but WANT one you can get some of the higher quality ones (HD, 3CCD and external microphone) on eBay, brand new, for much less than the retail. I link you here to pages that have a review (not in-depth), retail price and eBay prices of a couple of cameras.
JVC GZ HD7
Canon HV20
Sony HDR CX7K

Twitter

Social networking is all the rage at the moment.

I’ve signed up to a few popular sites to see how useful they are – and because I’m a complete nerd. I did hold off for a quite a while on signing up to some of these, but I now feel it’s almost a responsibility to be involved and try to understand them more.

I honestly haven’t put much effort into expanding my social networks across these sites yet, and hadn’t visited some for several months before writing this post.

I’m on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, Friendster… probably something else, but I can’t remember at the moment.

You can read about Twitter in this article in The Australian yesterday, where it’s suggested Twitter may not be a complete waste of time.

“There are people who talk about their frivolous daily activities,” Owyang says.

“I remove them. For me it’s more of a business communication tool than a frivolous personal introspection tool.”

LinkedIn has been described as invaluable for professional and career networking. The following is a profile link promotion button. It will probably be part of a future redesign of earleyedition.com.

And Twitter has been described as inane, which of course it can be, as can blogs. But there are useful ones out there too. The badge below may be incorporated into that redesign I mentioned.

Belated Birthday

I started this blog three years and seven days ago. Happy Birthday Blog.

I refuse to give up on this blog, despite the horrendous lack of posting recently.

“Surely you could just provide links?” I hear you cry.

Here’s a relevant one:
Blogosphere boom’s pace slackens – but is beginning to fracture along cultural lines, according to the last par in that story. Interesting.

I may have also forgotten my brother’s birthday a month ago…. Happy Birthday….

Lack thereof

A couple of things.

Posting has been sporadic lately thanks to the time commitment of a two-week internship with ABC TV.

I do have things to blog, mainly pointing to interesting online media stories of late.

The other thing is related to that. This blog has become more and more a collection of links to online media stories and information, and occasionally my thoughts thereon.

I’m fairly comfortable with this, as it seems to be in keeping with my increasing interest in the converging world of online journalism, where newspapers and television are increasingly competing in the same video market.

Video Shoot

I didn’t mean to post the entire article online, but from the Online Journalism Review is a basic guide: Tips for shooting better online video.

I was reading through my Introduction to Broadcast Journalism lecture notes to see again the different shot types – pan, tight, mid, wide, etc. – and noticed some of the notes I took in class (almost two years ago now).

…give camera person as much info as will help get the right shots
- fine line between giving info and telling camera person what to do

But when online, usually I am the camera person. So I should know how to get the right shots myself, and be able to tell the camera person (if I do happen to have one) exactly what I want and how I want it.

Don’t do TV, do Web

In an interesting summation of what web video should NOT be, the following observation from Kurt Anderson is amusing because it’s true.

…a nervous editor interviewing wooden film critics, could be a public-access cable clip. Often, the Times reporters’ videos are like tentative, so-so versions of TV-news spots, unremarkable sound bites interlarded with scripted blah-blah boilerplate.

The lessons seem obvious: Don’t do Web video if you don’t have anything interesting to show, and don’t compete with TV unless you can do something they can’t or won’t. In other words, use the medium.

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