http://www.wordle.net

“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”

Countdown's Keith Olbermann

When I was picking a podcast to examine, I figured, why not just listen to Olbermann?

So I downloaded the latest edition of the Countdown Podcast. I chose to look at how they take the audio-only edition of Countdown and make it internet-ready. I’ll start by looking at content quality.

Content Quality: How can a TV show be interesting after it is stripped of its pictures? Well, a show like countdown can pull it off. There isn’t too much graphics-based material, as the show is usually a dialogue between talking heads. However, there are lots of funny pictures in his “World’s Worst” segment where the jokes are definitely lost in translation. Overall, the content quality was mediocre because it is a made-for-TV show, not a radio or podcast show.

Production Quality: The audio quality is very sharp. Sound bytes are tight, and really it has the feel of a network show. The production value is very good, even though there are no images. The only problem here is that they keep in Olbermann‘s transitions into commercials. The problem; there are no commercials! So he transitions into commercial, and then it comes right back to Countdown after a quick sound. This was definitely awkward and not entirely smooth.

Length: Countdown on MSNBC is an hour long. Since there were no commercials, Countdown came in at just under an hour. This is a bit long, but there isn’t much they can do about it sense its a TV show that has a set time.

Online Extras: The only real online extra I could find is a discussion board where you can rate the Countdown podcast. Outside of this review system, there are no online extras.

Overall, I like this podcast because I think the content doesn’t suffer too much due to the format of the show. However, if you can help it, watching Countdown is way better than listening to Countdown. Next time I’ll get the vodcast!

The Office season 5 on NBC image from www.blogiversity.org

Pushing Daisies season 2 on ABC image from www.idsnews.com

Lipstick Jungle season 2 on NBC image from www.impawards.com

– colleenkay

Estimate 10 minutes or so for your presentation.

Below, you will find the criteria that I will use to evaluate and grade your final project.

Although the reason why many journalists choose to be journalists is the active, engaging, inspirational aspect of the profession, to put it plainly, it is nice to be able to feed yourself from time to time. With the emergence of digital information, ripping, remixing, and publishing information is easy for a consumer to carry out with only a few clicks of the mouse. Napster, one of the first file sharing programs to become popular and legal, basically offered free music to the consumer by ripping songs and albums off of the internet.

Advertisement for Napster on NASDAQ sign in Time Square (2004)

However, the producers are starting to catch on. Now Napster offers only a 7-day trial, after that it is $14.95 a month, money going to the people who created the content. Although Napster primarily concerns the exploitation of the music industry, the copyright infringement problem is involved. Edward Felton, professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University, sees the problem of infringement as the “irresistible force of changing technology hitting the immovable object of copyright policy”.

A study done by Felton found that 50 percent of the movie industry’s revenue in 2000 came from pre-recorded video. The shift from analog recording to digital was the reason for such a large percentage. With digital recording practices, audio, images, videos, and documents are all constructed by a sequence of digits, making it easy to reproduce. The internet itself is a digital database or network.

If the journalist is to be a producer, he must think like a consumer. As the line between producer and consumer thins with the progression of interactivity and Web 2.0, the journalist must remain professional. There will be times when he is jipped or not given credit for his work but he can not stoop down to the level of a “freeloader” if the profession is going to maintain its decency.

In the eyes of a journalist, the free-for-all is not good. It takes bread off our table. When information is ripped, remixed, and/or published by an unskilled person it is not legitimate. Not only can it be viewed as stealing but now the information is in the hands of someone untrained to the trade of journalism and can be further distributed in harmful ways.

Although perhaps a little extreme, Felton’s view on the VCR has some truth to it, or at least it provides the somber journalist with a laugh: “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”

Points for journalists to consider:

Community. Teens live their online lives connected within communities.

Rip, Remix, Share. Teens respond to information and culture by sampling and remixing it. They then look to their communities for reaction.

Multimedia. Teens want more than just text when gathering information and culture. They also expect self-taught multimedia expertise among each other, including video, audio, graphics, hyperlinks.

Check out the full report. Mizuko Ito is the lead author.