I put a selection of URLs and text into Wordle to see what words I use the most and what the common themes are. You can change the colour scheme, font, layout and design of the Wordle images created.
Category Archives: Online Journalism
Kenrick Library Open 24 Hours Video
After learning about using a flip camera, Jade Rance, Victoria Elmore and myself went out and recorded a short non-rehearsed video on the library being open 24hours.
Not the most interesting of subjects I’ll admit but we had ten minutes to come up with an idea and seen as we were sat outside the library, we just decided to cover the ‘open 24hour’ story.
So here it is…
Week Eleven- Online Journalism- Karen Strunks Talking about 4amproject
Karen Strunks came in to talk about the 4amproject.
She is a key figure in the social media scene in and around Birmingham.
The 4amproject was started in 2009 after Karen was driving around one night at about 4 in the morning when she noticed how quiet and empty it was. Not like the normal hustle and bustle of the country’s second city.
Somebody built the website for her, and she started to get the word out about the project by using Twitter. She followed different people and companies until she reached her limit of 2000. After she reached this limit she had to wait until the amount of followers caught up.
Since the project started roughly 4500 images have been submitted from over 40 different countries.
Flickr
Next Karen set up a Flikr account and invited people to upload and tag their 4am photos. It’s a good way of sharing images and letting friends and family see what you’ve been doing and the photographs you’ve been taking. It can also bring more links to your accounts and ultimately bring more people to view your images.
Pixels
Instead of keeping her best high quality images online for people to steal, Karen reduces her images to 400x 800 pixels so if somebody does take them without asking for permission they don’t have top quality photographs.
Photoshop and Paint shop pro
She uses PaintShop Photo Pro and Photoshop to edit her images but said that she wished she knew about PaintShop Photo Pro before she forked out hundreds of pounds to get Photoshop. They are very similar photo editing programs, the only real difference between them is the fact that Paint-shop-pro is free and Photoshop isn’t.
Geo-tagging
Karen asks anyone who submits photographs to the project to geo-tag the images. This allows the location of where the photo was taken to show up on the world map of the 4amproject on Flickr. Currently not all the users are doing this as many people haven’t heard of it or don’t know what it is. She said she will be trying to push this more in the near future.
Setting up a Facebook account has also allows Karen to communicate with anyone who is interested or curious in the project. It’s another way of sharing and communicating as an online platform.
Blog
Karen also keeps a blog which hosts some of her photographs, has information on how to edit images and other key information for taking and posting photographs.
Week Ten- Online Journalism-A Talk by Graham Holliday
Graham Holliday joined our class today to share his experience and knowledge about how to get your work out there and heard.
Graham works for the BBC College of Journalism and has set up a website which provides information, stories and articles on Rwanda called Kigaliwire.
He uses many different online tools to promote his website and get his stories heard by as many people as possible. He also uses the online world to find stories from other people and sources which he can then investigate and spread onto his own Kigaliwire network.
His top ten tools for success are:
- Publish2- save articles and link to own website
- Pixelpipe- distribute digital across 100+ websites/ tools/ sites- networks
- Hellotxt- like pixelpipe
- Tubemogul- video
- Bit.ly- whos clicking on your blog/ websites and how many times
- RSS+ Yahoo Pipes + Feedburner- sort and filter through information so only get information you want. 1 RSS feed at the end instead of many
- Specialist Search Engines- Afrigator
- Tweetdeck- monitoring keywords
- Pingomatic- tells search engines that you’ve updated you’re blog
- Netvibes
Other advice was that you cannot count on just one service as it may go down or break. You need to listen first and find out where the networks are. Create debates and interest.
Week 9- Online Journalism
This week the focus was Video Online.
We had a nice change to our hour long lecture, we had a guest speaker, Sarah Booker. Sarah is the digital editor of 6 newspapers in Sussex and specialises in making videos for journalism. The main points she made about making videos were to be aware of:
• Background noise
•The shots being out of focus
•The video being too long/ short
• Boring/ uninteresting
• Lighting/ darkness
• Positioning of the camera, person, scenery
She said that filming real people talking about issues was more interesting and worthwhile than just filming a bunch of people who don’t have a lot to say. By only using a couple of people to talk more in depth on a subject, adds character and substance to the video. Filming as much as possible is also a key thing because you can always cut things out and shorten it down, but you can’t magic up footage if it’s too short.
Sarah’s top tips were: 1. Keep it short 2. Film as much as possible 3. No short answers 4. Right lighting 5. To make it as interesting and quirky as possible
After Sarah had spoken the lesson half continued as normal, but with Sarahs’ input making it more interesting.
There are four types of videos: 1. Video which supports a text 2. Video diary 3. Edited narrative 4. Vodcast
We also watched the Charlie Brooker video ‘How to report the news’ which I hadn’t seen before. It was actually quite interesting and funny, something you don’t expect when a teacher normally decides to play an ‘interesting’ video.
Watching a postmodern/ artyfarty twitter video from Rocketboom was also enjoyable. It was simply a stream of images of various Twitter tweets with different backgrounds and sounds added to it. Interesting but couldn’t really read all of them.
My favourite video of the lesson was one from Zefrank. It was a good looking guy who spoke super fast about random things and made funny faces. It didn’t provide much information but it was entertaining and he had a lot of charisma. This sort of video I could only dream about making.
So thanks Sarah for making the lesson a lot more interesting and ‘real life’ and for providing a geeky yet funny live streaming war.
