Today was Moose Camp for Northern Voice which was jam packed with workshop style presentations. I even got a cute shirt that says “bloggable”.
#1 Personal Media Outlet
The first workshop I went to focused on the citizen journalism aspect of blogging. A great book on this is “We the Media” by Dan Gilmour, which is next on my long list of books to read. John Hartman was a great start, with some great video clips and even played a rap song about blogging (Jay Smooth, Blog Beef Volume 1, I know why the Unicorn Cries). My fav clip was called “we the media” by Josh Leo (). Two big changes have had a major impact on this paradigm shift of consumer to producer – (1) time shifting and (2) portability. The consumer now takes control of their media diet and “eats” when they want and where they want. The new citizen journalist is a re-mixer and loves mashing up media. One main obstacle is clearing intellectual property rights, but the Creative Commons makes it easy to ‘trade’ rights as only some rights are reserved under their licenses.
#2 Real Time Reporting
I attended a demo on the real time reporting web app Now Public. It easily allows users to submit and share current news stories and add footage to existing stories – like digg.com but more comprehensive. The user can be either be an editor or a reporter or both. It is super easy to incorporate the photos and videos from the site on your blog (gives a nice java script applet). Plus the applet links back to Now Public so that the author can still remain in control of their work. This site is not trying to replace mainstream media rather trying to augment it. You can view the same story in different perspectives (mainstream, raw etc.) Dan Gilmor is an advisor to the site so he brings a trained journalist perspective. The founders take an opposite view to news – more of an ‘accidental journalist’ approach. Fact checking is not really necessary since it is usually an authentic report and the ‘news’ is actually happening to the journalist. Moreover, the founders take the view that the reader needs to be more educated and act as the fact checker – like wikipedia, this site follows the ‘wisdom of crowds’ mentality.
#3 Influency
This presentation was more about one persons individual web project - http://influency.com. He tells visual stories with photos. The focus of most of the stories are environmental dialogues in Vancouver. Every Sunday a group meets and travels to a new area in Vancouver to take pictures and then they meet at a coffee shop after a share their pictures as a major slide show. This site has some great nature pictures.
#4 Ajax for Non-geeks
This was the less technical AJAX workshop. AJAX is a web developing technique using javascript, css, xml, xhtml, xhr (makes it so the page doesn’t re-load). Websites using this technique are very dynamic and create a rich user experience. A good example is protopage.com. A good information source is http://www.ajaxinfo.com. Using this technique creates real time calls to the server to get data (w/o page refreshes) creating a better user experience with less waiting. Plus it uses way less bandwitdh.
....stay tuned more summaries to come --- to tired to write more ----
