Advanced Multimedia
Official blog of the UCB Advanced Multimedia class

From recent graduate Mark Luckie… 10 things he wished he learned in jschool. Actually, number 1 makes me feel better about my reclusive so-called life of the past three weeks…

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The Bay Guardian has a new look. First of all I’m glad to see little video player (with my video) sitting there just below the fold on the right. Videos there will both have content from the Guardian and user submitted content about goings on around the Bay.

What’s interesting about this redesign is that it is putting what gets the most daily traffic, videos and blogs, front and center, whereas the longer content that’s in the weekly is below the fold. I haven’t seen another weekly quite throw away their print content to such an extent yet, so I’m interested to see how this works out for them. I like the little day-by-day calendar on the side too.

However, I’m not as crazy about the rest of the design. I’ve railed against red on the web in the past and I’ll continue to do so. Unless you want to throw-up a big ‘ol stop sign and say hey look at me over here, too much red just confuses the eye. And it just always looks slightly off. This page is more confusing that the previous one, I have no idea what’s a main feature, a blog, and what I’m supposed to read first.

In some ways it’s almost more of a portal than a newssite…

So what do you think? Am I just being a hater?

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Check out this ad for an executive editor for the Roanoke Times. It’s all done in a digital format. I like the video testimonials under Who We Want.

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All right, I’ve been accused of Chronicle-bashing in the past, but I can’t help but post another. I think sfgate has gone a great way toward changing its image, making use of more multimedia elements, and creating spaces for its community to contribute thoughts, facts and stories on the subjects they care about. Two new community-focused projects are a case in point. The Chronicle has recently introduced Bay Area Moms, borrowing from the successful Indy Moms community spawned by the Indianapolis Star. A couple days ago it launched Bay Area Pets, for petlovers to post thoughts on Rex’s recent shenanigans…

Both are great big steps in the right direction, IMHO. But pets? And moms? C’MON. This smacks of a complete lack of imagination, or knowledge of the area. In a city like San Francisco, home to more subcultures and micro-communities than it has microclimates, you’re telling me the two most active communities you want to engage are moms and pet-lovers?

Sure, you might not want to post a forum for the goth scene or encourage enthusiasts to post their S&M photos, but think of the opportunities out there and the bay-area communities that are underserved: surfers, bikers (of every stripe), readers (the Bay Area spends more per-capita on books than any other city), swimmers, artists (of every stripe). Just have a look at craigslist and you’ll see whole universes of San Franciscans who are dying to connect and communicate locally with others who share their interests, and who probably would appreciate an article or two on the issues that effect them.

I’m especially tweaked by the Bay Area Moms idea, given that San Francisco is home to more non-traditional families and familial permutations than can be imagined. WHY you would want to limit that community to “moms” – potentially alienating parents who don’t identify with June Cleaver – is beyond me.

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Penguin has been experimenting with the idea that there is more than one way to tell a story. Every week for six weeks they are posting a short story told using multimedia. There are follow your own adventure stories, google map stories, via blogs, etc.

I like the map one.

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Last week the Entrepreneurial Journalism class heard from Amra Tareen, one of the founders of AllVoices.com, an ambitious project to advance grassroots journalism and provide a direct link between citizen reporters from all parts of the globe. Fascinating stuff. Allvoices has a unique idea of clustering news events, popular blogs (which it essentially imports from outside RSS feeds) and its own user blogs & articles. Each news item – or “event” (ie. car crash in Minneapolis, or Britney Spears seen wasted in Prague) is geotagged to its specific city of origin, and cataloged so that others can add to or comment on it.

Like other news aggregation sites, Allvoices exerts little or no editorial oversight to what goes up, relying instead on user rankings and the popularity of each post… which makes for a motley assortment of articles and topics, and doesn’t do much to safeguard the veracity of its ‘events’.

This is an example of a great website idea… but why are tech-spearheaded projects like this so resistant to editorial oversight? While old media is still reluctant to give up even a smidget of editorial control, or invest in much new technology (aside from a standard CMS system), sites like Allvoices (brilliant tho it is) veer in exactly the opposite direction, overspending on the technology and leaving the editorial chair empty, potentially allowing their site to be overrun with schlock and endless flame wars.

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If aggregation is creation, Apture has created a new world. The WashingtonPost.com just started using this application on its celebrity and politics blogs. It allows web editors to bring in related articles, images, videos, and documents from the Internet or their own online archive into their articles.

What’s awesome is that Apture connects a news site’s content to the world of information on the web without making the viewer have to leave the new site’s page. You wanna know where that place is on a map? Here’s a Google map in a pop-up window. Wanna see what the place looks like too? Here’s some flickr pictures. You wanna know what the Weather Underground that the reporter just mentioned is? Here’s the Wikipedia article in a pop-up window. Multimedia journalism made super easy!

Oh, and it’s free, and we should totally use it.

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I just found about this from a friend: MOB Logic.

What I love about this site is the fact that it is totally DIY. Sure, maybe it’s not for the most noble of reasons — I learned from a reliable source that Lindsey Campbell wants to be an actress, which could mean she’s doing this for fame — but she still took a simple idea and ran with it, and now she’s sponsored by Saturn Automobiles. (Everyone in the news biz knows that car ads are the Holy Grail in terms of advertising income.) I know it makes me want to go out an make a Web site of my own…

Here’s an example of one of her videos.

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“‘Charlie Rose’ by Samuel Beckett”

Charlie Rose interviews himself, but he’s clearly afraid of a man named Steve and the dialogue quickly becomes inane. Why?

Anyone else going to see Wozniak tomorrow?

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