Podcasting

I have personally never listened to a podcast that was not a video podcast and I couldn’t relate to the hype. I myself don’t like the term podcast, because it is widely misunderstood and often used for something completely different.

I looked at podcasts on download.com a web-site powered by cnet.com. They have an impressive collection of free music to download and there are also some free podcasts from a recording studio. Every month or so a new artist records in the studio and the interview of this up-and-coming artist, plus the new song, are available via podcasts.

Another music podcast available on podcast.net was “Minor 7^th”. More of a downloadable radio-station you can listen to with acoustic music. It was interesting, sometimes giving information about the artist and their music.

If you like music, podcasting is a brilliant way to get yourself acquainted with new music.On pocast.net, I found a commentary on the candidacy of Kinky Friedman as governor of Texas. This was a very political issue and although it was short, the commentator got his point across. Usually podcasts are rather short, because they should be heard in one setting, but some last for half an hour or longer.

The Going Deep Show is a podcast, where people pretty much talk nonsense. It’s a sort of personal commentary on events happening in their lives. However it is kind of long and really lacks humour. However it seems very professional because they talk about actually being in a studio. It sounded like a conversation of employees of a radio station when music is played.

I also found some educational podcasts. I read online that Universities such as Stanford and Duke teamed up wit apple and a huge collection of lectures are made available using iTunes. Even the University of Hannover has some podcasts on its very own e-learning platform. (Although they focus on video podcasts and have a very minimal amount)

BusinessEnglishPod.com is a page where people go and try to strengthen their conversational skills in English. The podcasts are made up like the cassettes used in schools. There are listening examples and tasks given. These podcasts are heavily linked to the website, providing answers and further material for learners.

The podcasts were really easy to download. Some were unfortunately only available on iTunes and this had to be installed on the computer. Some were even only accessible online.On some pages those podcasts were linked to social networking sites, making it easier to share your favourite podcasts with the world.

All in all, it can be said, that if you look on the right sites you find podcasts on any given topic. Ranging from ridiculous funny, to more serious and educational.

And the Oscar goes to… You!

Creating a vlog or short video was nothing new for me. Although I have never actually produced a vlog myself, I was familiar with the concept and also had previous knowledge of filmmaking from “The Knightly News”, a high school news program I took part in while I spent a year in the United Sates. I like making something unique and funny, although my recent test-project is not. The idea came when I was watching videos on YouTube. However, I did not only want to show a clip of me playing the guitar.

I had some ideas and had a basic picture of how my vlog should look in my head as well as some scribbles on paper. When I finally got the camera, I immediately wanted to start filming. And I did. I started to film something which I wanted to input into my computer to see how it looked. This was when the first problems occurred.

Problem number one: Connection. After connecting the Camera to the Computer Windows Movie Maker told me that the connection was prehistoric. I tried to bypass this with no result. After finally giving up and upgrading my hardware I thought I could finally work with this.

Problem number two: Filming. Filming was easy, aside from the fact that I could not use a microphone which makes the sound of my recording rather sloppy. Also, I could not move the camera in a speed I liked, or even at a constant speed, this might be my own fault though. Nonetheless, the footage I shot was semi-useable and shooting was the easy part of this project, although I somehow regret not getting more footage.

Problem number three to fifty-five: Editing. It might have been less than fifty-five, but that was how it felt. Windows Movie Maker is a wonderful tool, if you have no use for the edited parts. You can not really edit with this program. I learned editing on VCR’s with the help of a jog-dial and after a while this was pretty easy to use. Moviemaker was not. I had a certain picture what I wanted to do and it could not be realized with this software. Especially the missing of an additional video track as well as the lack of accuracy deeply annoyed me after a while. The result was choppy cuts, sound inconsistencies, and it left almost half of my footage unusable for the sound of two recordings could not be matched.

All in all it was a fun experience and I just hope the group project will be the same. I think filmmaking on your computer is still relatively easy if you have the right equipment. Every day new internet stars are born. Who knows? Maybe some producer discovers our work and we will end up in Hollywood. The Oscar goes to…Me.

You digg…?

At first sight, Digg.com seems like a huge waste of time. Too many web-pages you don’t have the time to view. When I first looked on the main page of recent “digs”, there were some videos posted. I figured those were the top rated movies and tjose must be hilarious if they are favourites, but all I saw was really bad humour. I couldn’t understand why these video ranked so high. The stuff you can find on Digg is so immense that you feel lost pretty fast. Most of the favourites are very special interest and because everybody thinks their find is the best, they put it on. However, you also find some fantastic sites you wouldn’t find if you searched for it using Google or other engines. Some pages even link to other Web2.0 platforms, such as Flickr which makes those very interconnected.

The news represented are mostly concerned with soft- or hardware. A review of a new program that you can download for free or a new driver, are some of the top rated contributions. If you’re not a computer geek, you won’t find it noteworthy.

The focus definitely lies on funny contributions, but those really lack content.

I liked that you don’t have to register on Digg, but that you can actually use your existing Yahoo account. Given of course, that you use Yahoo.I also liked the part that you can add favourites (or “digs”) pretty easy. One of my favourite pages the website of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart even has little buttons next to the videos so you can add them easily to Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us. Nonetheless most of your favourite links are probably already in there and after a while it gets frustrating to try to add them.

All in all, Digg is a place where you can waste a lot of time. Looking at websites you don’t need on a platform that doesn’t really mirror your interests.

The people contributing are all individuals and if they “dig” it it’s got to be good. However, it usually isn’t.

Digg tries very hardc to combine all the strengths of YouTube, Flickr and other platforms that don’t just focus on social networking, but nonetheless incorporated those into their own pages already. For me, when I want to see what videos other people are watching, I go to YouTube, if I want to do the same with pictures I use Flickr.

I sometimes send and receive links via Instant Messaging from my friends, which works a whole lot better.

Flickr and Twitter

Flickr is platform where you can upload pictures. However, it is different from other pictures available on the internet. Search engines like Google or Yahoo have their own picture search, but those search only on websites. Only pictures on embedded on homepages will be found an usually they are small or are of bad quality. Additionally, the results are hardly satisfying, because usually the pictures are named differently and are almost never tagged.

Flickr is a community basically for photographers or people interested in photography. Users show their personal photos and group them. Those Pictures are sometimes very personal or artistic. Pictures of a trip or of friends or art-photography can both be found on Flickr.

Flickr could also be used as a picture database. When you look for certain pictures to a given topic, you’ll find them on Flickr. Even though they are all personal, they usually display exactly what you want shown.

I use Flickr sometimes for presentations. I was once looking for pictures of the City Lights Book Store in San Francisco, but wasn’t able to find satisfying results. So I went on Flickr, trying to find out if people visited it and took pictures of it. I soon found what I was looking for and I even found more pictures that neatly fit into my presentation.

Another plus for Flickr is the copyright. These pictures are put online for a reason and the copyright belongs not to a company, but to individuals who usually don’t mind if you use their picture. Otherwise they probably would not put them online. And even if you do, it’s easier to ask an individual for permission then a company. Usually users encourage downloads of art they made. A platform that focuses more on art-photography would be DeviantArt.

As for Twitter, most of the possibilities of Twitter are included on other platforms such as StudiVZ or Facebook. There only your friends write down what they are doing at the moment. It would be fun to watch what everybody’s doing in a given area, but I would suspect it getting old pretty soon. The problem with those platforms is, that usually not all people use it. I think if you would look around, you would find more pages that have the same service, sometimes, they only differ in Language. There’s never a monopoly and somebody is always using other platforms and want you to join their community.

The Blogosphere

As far as I see it, the term Blogosphere does not really apply. It is true that blogs can be linked with each other, but there is never a sense of sharing the same sphere, much like the author of a website who can not be held responsible and usually has little to do with the links he provides. I believe those links, except specifically pointint to a certain site, were hardly followed.

Except for the pages that monitor the interconnections of blogs (Wikipedia mentions Technorati, BlogPulse, Tailrank, PubSub, and BlogScope) these links or connections can hardly be recognized We saw the same thing happening in class. Instead of forming a little community, where the blogs could be accessed and compared easily on a given platform, every member will have to follow links in order to look at somebody’s blog. There is no instantaneous recognition of blogs, but simply Stud.IP would be the Platform that joins all are blogs together. This list of links is not a very user-friendly way. Moreover, I somehow doubt, that each class member will look at the blogs the other people wrote, simply because the others blog sites are not easily available. The problem is, that only one person writes a blog and the others can only look at it. However, those pages are good for research and too explore the vastness of blogs.

Additionally, too many websites offer blogs and there is no universal point where all the blogs can be connected. The mere abundance of blogs, makes them very hard to compare or differentiate. Every site is its own microcosm of blogs. They try to build up a community of users. This becomes apparent if one looks at their homepages, which show the most recent blogs in a given community.

The internet now has so much data on it, that blogs are hardly interesting if you have no or little connection with the author. Blogs also usually don’t have significant meaning, but only resemble what a person is thinking at the moment or commenting on a certain topic

However, there are some sites that focus on blog entries which are written by a group of others, such as the Bild-Blog. Here authors share their findings and commentaries they have about the “Bild Zeitung”. This is fun to read, because it is, once again, a community-based approach to blogs.

Maybe I have too little knowledge on the subject of blogs and haven’t explored the Blogosphere enough to find it appealing to me. It is an excellent way to keep friends informed about your thoughts and about your life, but I doubt that blogs are interconnected and share one sphere.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is not so much a technology, as suggested by the suffix 2.0, which is usually associated with software, but stands for new methods in utilizing the World Wide Web.

Earlier websites always functioned the same way. There was a company or single person, usually a webmaster, who was responsible for the information on a page. The content of the page represented what the owner wanted on it. In other words, internet pages were only to be looked at. With the dawn of new technologies, however, certain sites widened their spectrum to content that was not corporately created, but was subject to change and individuality.

By the end of the 90s, sites like “Freenet” or yahoo’s sub-site “Geocities” already made it fairly easy, with knowledge of HTML, to create your own web-sites

A few years later, companies were not the sole proprietors for information, but single individuals with personal web-sites. Helpful was also the dawn of computer technology and the easy access to the internet.

Web 2.0 represents the next step of user-based web-sites. Individuals formed little companies and only gave users the tools to make a website, and/or create content for a website. A platform is provided and the user can decide what he wants to do with this platform.

Additionally, communities play a more important role on the internet. Grouped by special interests, websites are made to cater to their needs, providing them, again, with a platform to express themselves. “Flickr” or “DeviantArt”, for example, were made in order for amateur photographers to share their pictures with other people around the world. Suddenly, the internet has become a huge collection of data. This ranges from professional to personal data.

Web content now caters specifically to the individual user. If you are registered with “Amazon” or “Ebay” you get suggestions on what to buy. Interestingly enough, most of the time those predictions are correct. This is possible by data-collection and the documentation of your surfing habits. “Amazon” in particular, documents very detailed on which site you spend how much time and what you clicked on. This results in a personal profile that is used to show you advertising that fits your exact needs and wishes, and mirrors you surfing habits.

Also, sites were created where information or knowledge is collected and shared, such as “Wikipedia”. The idea behind “Wikipedia” is that everybody has a little knowledge about certain topics, and some have more precise knowledge on other topics. If all of this knowledge is put together, we would have a very accurate representation of specialised knowledge. This information is subject to change and the users govern themselves and decide what is right and what is wrong.