Tag: web/Archives

News Story Life Cycle

A big story changes fast at first, then evolves slowly over time. How do you let web-visitors follow that story? A single URL with all the info? A unique tag (or shortcode)?

How can one URL work both for those wanting to start from the beginning and for those just needing updates? Can one page contain everything from the initial tweets to the later analysis, historical perspective, and multimedia elements?

The answer to all above: Not easily. Mediabistro’s 10,000 Words outlines “The New, Convoluted Life Cycle Of A Newspaper Story.” The Seattle Times’ Lauren Rabaino summarizes what needs doing, presents some successful attempts, and offers her news-story info flow chart:

https://hearingvoices.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Life-Cycle-Of-A-News-Story-744x1024.png

Playtagger- Mod

The Delicious Playtagger seems to be gone, for now, maybe forever– possibly due to Yahoo! revisions to the Delicious service. Here’s a quick fix (version 0.1; check back: will write a better one later): playtagger_mod.zip

This uses the same Delicious audio player (playtagger.swf) and images (stop.gif, play.gif), with a revised JavaScript (playtagger_mod.js). It lets you store the files locally. (Also adds a class to the image: “mp3” for CSS styling, courtesey Consuming Experience. Plus you could create your own play/stop icons.).

To get ‘er goin’:

  1. Unzip playtagger_mod.zip and upload to your site the folder: playtagger_mod
  2. In the file: playtagger_mod.js.
  3. Change the variable at the top: playtagger_url.
  4. from: http://YOUR_DOMAIN.COM/PATH_TO_FOLDER/playtagger_mod/.
    to the URL of your uploaded /playtagger_mod folder (needs trailing “/”).

  5. In the <head> of any files you want the Playtagger- Mod to work, place:
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://YOUR_DOMAIN.COM/PATH_TO_FOLDER/playtagger_mod/playtagger_mod.js"></script>

    (Again, replace http://YOUR_DOMAIN.COM/PATH_TO_FOLDER/playtagger_mod with the URL of your /playtagger_mod folder.)

Should be good to go. The Playtagger- Mod script looks adds a little Flash audio-player mext to any mp3 links on your page. Looks/works like this:
Specialist “Laser” Lawrence (2:08; audio: Jake Warga, Iraq: Soldier’s Soundtrack.)

UPDATE: Playtagger- Mod is now working in the wilds of the great WFMU’s Beware of the Blog.

PRX Shares

PRX brought enuf for the whole class: they’re now Sharing Pieces and spreading the sonic love, in players big:

 

and small:

 

Audio pieces at PRX now embeddable in blogs, websites, and sharable via FB, Twit, email and other socially transmitted media.

J Data Age

Network image of USA, detail of video screenshotA global tour of J-based data-viz, from IBM Many Eyes to Brazil’s Infografio 2.0, Journalism in the Age of Data: “A video report on data visualization as a storytelling medium.”

The annotated Flash chapters are best, but there’s also a 50min Vimeo video, a podcast series (.m4v), and an accessible set of YouTube vids. (Produced by Geoff McGhee during a Knight Journalism Fellowship.)

via FlowingData (“Basically, all the repeat offenders here on FlowingData are in this video talking about what they do best…”).

PubMedia.us

HV is heavily involved in a new collaborative project/domain, the PubMedia Commons at PubMedia.us.

It’s an aggregation of different blogs about public media. You can read excerpts & link-to them all their posts from one webpage., and one feed:

feeds.feedburner.com/PubmediaPlanet

(An aggregation of blogs is known as a “planet“). We also have weekly features of audio, video, and multi-media work. And there’s a place for pubmedia web folk to share code & hacks (a lot re: WordPress). Future plans include merging w/ PublicMediaCamp & PubMediaChat.

Pivot

The House Gates Built is not normally known as a fountain of innovation. But MS’s LiveLabs has really delivered the future in the form of Pivot. It’a web application — “don’t call it a browser”:

“Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?”

We’re navigating the web for the first time as if it’s actually a web, not page to page, but at a higher level of abstraction… So right now, in this world, we think about data as being this curse. We talk about the curse of information overload. We talk about drowning in data. What if we can actually turn that upside down and turn the web upside down, so that instead of one thing to the next, we get used to the habit of being able to go from many things to many things, and then being able to see the patterns that were otherwise hidden? If we can do that, then, instead of being trapped in data, we might actually extract information. And, instead of dealing just with information, we can tease out knowledge. And if we get the knowledge, then maybe even there’s wisdom to be found.
—Gary Flake, Technical Fellow, Microsoft; founder/director, Live Labs

Also check the TED talk for LiveLabs Photosynth — another Seadragon derivative.

Joe Frank FB

Photo of Joe FrankSure Facebook sux. But it has its moments; and many of them are found on Joe Frank’s page, amongst his semi-regular deliciously dark ramblings:

Flying over the Tanganyika Game Reserve in a hot air balloon. My guide is a drunken Englishman from the old colonial school dressed entirely in white. He has a flask of port strapped to his leg. His nose is red and veined. We travel over a savannah, observing herds of wildebeests and zebras below.

hen the colonel removes his clothes and throws them over the side of the basket. He claims the natives collect them and use them to make flags and scarves, which they sell to the tourists.

Dancing in the streets of Rio in a samba club, making our way up Sugar Loaf Mountain to ascend to the statue of Christ that looks over the city. I feel a sense of exhilaration, my heart bursting with joy. I’m wearing a fantastic feathered woman’s mask, eyeballs on stalks, ears on springs, Pinocchio nose supporting a live tree limb filled with songbirds, and joyously dancing in high heeled platform shoes and net stockings, gyrating my hips, a pair of soccer balls attached to my rear…»

Be his FB-fren and read the rest of this, and many other of his flights of freaky.

Third Coast Reborn

The Third Coast International Audio Festival celebrates their transition to an independent org with a new website, with a really nice audio library. More good news: they’re continuing their Re:sound series and competition.

Their new audio player (customized jPlayer) is quite the cat’s PJs:

The [Un]Observed

The [Un]Observed is a new Radio Magazine whose stories cross genres, countries and societal subjects.

Try “The Trouble With Rick” by Aussie “media practitioner” Kyla Brettle. She calls her piece a “radiophonic exploration and impressionistic interpretation of how the world spoke to Rick.” May sound pretentious, but is a pretty good description of the way she paints her audio portrait:

Medical image of the earWalking into a noisy restaurant, Rick Tarulli felt inundated by a barrage of sound — the effect of which was so overwhelming that it made him lose his balance. Every conversation in the room shouted at him, the scrape of knives on plates made his vision jump and he could clearly discern the hum of the fridge out back. Rick knew there was something going wrong inside but couldn’t work it out. Neither could his doctors. Three years ago Rick discovered his symptoms were caused by superior canal dehiscence syndrome, a recently diagnosed condition that affects the inner ear.

Other contributors include HV frens Aaron Ximm (aka, quiet american; “Guatanamo Express“, Jonathan Mitchell (“Eye Contact“), and, ‘course, AnnKara: those females at the forefront of every forward facing futuristic audio feature.

Interested in contributing? Contact them; their ears are wide open:

What we’re looking for [is] innovative, engaging and dynamic use of sound as a medium to tell a story. That story can be about a wide range of things, and can be as long or short as the producer would like. The main guideline is in the execution. One of the goals of The [Un]Observed is to move away from traditional, act/track, radio pieces to something where the medium of sound is explored and expanded. The magazine hopes to be a playground of sorts for radio and audio producers to present work they are excited about and proud of. Beyond that, we hope to create an international space where sound makers from all different parts of the world can come together.

via sound Rich and Chadwicks.

#pubmedia

#pubmedia is the hashtag for Twits to spew 140char-acterizations of any public medium; so, OCPD sufferers (obsessive-compulsive posting disorder), opine away.

Googleverse

Matt Dunne, Google’s head of community affairs, names numbers:

Each day, Google processes 2 billion searches, sends two e-mails per second through its Gmail account system, and uploads 22 hours of video onto You Tube, per minute. It would take a lifetime to watch the video posted on the site every three months.

…and what a dull, dreary lifetime that would be. More Google #s in “The ever-expanding GoogleverseVtdigger.org.

FU FB Group

FU FB Group logoThere’s a new Group on Facebook called FU FB:

For taking our time and our bandwidth, for making “friend” a verb while devaluing it as a noun, and for lotsa otra evils we’ll add later: FU FB, a new Facebook Group

Keitai Shosetsu

Keitai is Japenese for cell-phone, shōsetsu for novel; so keitai shōsetsu is “cellphone novel” (also “thumb novel”): a new lit genre started by young .jp girls. Their novels are posted to a media-sharing site as a series of text messages, which millions of .jp-teens download and read on their mobile phones.

Readers rapidly respond, and sometimes suggest. Some authors have used the best suggestions to alter their plots. Quite a few of these cell-phone serials have evolved into successful paper novels, selling 100K’s and even 1M’s of copies. Readers often purchase not the paperback but the hardcover as a momento of their literary interactivity. Half of the Japan’s half the top 10 fiction bestsellers of late have started as keitai shōsetsu.

The New Yorker interviewed author Mone:

Mone started posting her novel straight from her phone to a media-sharing site called Maho i-Land (Magic Island), never looking over what she wrote or contemplating plot. “I had no idea how to do that, and I did not have the energy to think about it,” she says. She gave her tale a title, “Eternal Dream,” and invented, as a proxy for her adolescent self, a narrator named Saki, who is in her second year of high school and lives in a hazily described provincial town. “Where me and my friends live, in the country, there aren’t any universities,” Mone wrote. “If you ride half an hour or so on the train, there’s a small junior college, that’s all.” Saki has a little brother, Yudai, and a close-knit family, a portrait that Mone painted in short, broad strokes: “Daddy / Mom / Yudai / I love you all so much.” Before long, however, Saki, walking home from school, is abducted by three strange men in a white car: “—Clatter, clatter — / The sound of a door opening. / At that moment . . . / —Thud— / A really dull blunt sound. / The pain that shoots through my head.” The men rape her and leave her by the side of the road, where an older boy from school, Hijiri, discovers her. He offers her his jersey, and love is born. More…

The Corner

Aaron Dixon on the cornerAmong the great oddio-viz coming out of Maker’s Quest is The Corner: 23rd and Union, stories, photos, and phone call-ins about one street intersection “near the geographical center of Seattle.”

KUOW’s Jenny Asarnow directs the project. One of the many fine Corner interviews at the site is with “Aaron Dixon: The Checkmate” (mp3):