The 2009-2010 school year is over. Summer is here, and you might have some time to catch up on what’s going on out in the world. So here are a few links for your perusing pleasure.
• Hearst Collegiate Journalism Multimedia Winners: The projects for the top three winners for the multimedia awards are linked from this page. Winners were John W. Adkisson, UNC-Chapel Hill (1st), for a package on the economic hardships facing the southeast region; Alexandra Garza, University of Kentucky (2nd), for a package about Kentucky’s tobacco farmers; and M. Colleen McDevitt, University of Missouri-Columbia (3rd), for a package about survivors of rape. Congrats to the winners.
• Ottawa University (in Kansas) has been using student-produced videos (link to Facebook video page) as a recruiting tool Social Media Specialist Annie Noll describes the effort:
Ottawa University has a new student Facebook group called BravesTV. Their purpose is to create videos for our Facebook Fan page. We have noticed that we have many high school students and parents as our fans. These videos are serving as in-direct recruiting tools.
Our tag line is “What if you gave eight students Flip Cams to show what life at Ottawa is really like?” Braves TV is a student group dedicated to making videos for our Facebook Fans. With these videos, Braves TV members do everything from create video events that get the entire student body involved to simple day-in-the-life videos. This is Ottawa in real life.
• UPIU’s Building the J-Future Blog should be on college journalists’ reading list. They have recently been focusing on international student journalism. Recently, they held a live chat for international college journalists. The archive is here.
• Last month, Len Witt interviewed Jesse Villanueva, who won the first National Sustainable Journalism Concept-2-Reality competition sponsored by the Center for Sustainable Journalism. Villanueva’s company aims to create a content management system that will publish content across multiple smartphone platforms. Read the interview for more.
• Dan Reimold at College Media Matters continues to crank out a wealth of material about what’s going on around the nation on college campuses. But recently he also focused a six-part series on the first student newspaper in Iraq. Part one is here.
• Just for fun, Daniel Bachhuber points to the Super Analyzer, which analyzes the data on the music files in your iTunes library and gives you some information like which albums and songs you listen to most, and what words are included most often in the songs, etc. Pretty nifty Java app.
• Also from Bachhuber, CoPress has open-sourced the College Publisher-to-Wordpress conversion script.
Right off the bat, I’d like to say that the most awesome bit about the conversion script is its ease of use. Granted, you do have to run it on the command line and it does often throw mythical, unintelligible errors if your data is screwy, but it’s about 100 to 1,000 times easier than what Sean Blanda or Brian Schlansky had to go through. Furthermore, it spits out WordPress eXtended RSS files that WordPress imports natively. Depending on the size of your archives, you could even do the entire migration in less than a half hour.
• Alfred Hermida remarked recently about the BBC’s revised guidelines for social media use by staff. It’s always useful to see how media organizations are adapting to the changing face of social media.
• Mindy McAdams recently put up a series of posts about the transition to HTML5 (it’s what runs the video on iPods/iPhones/iPads) – I’ll be reading these in the next few days: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6. I’m not sure if she’s finished with the series yet, so check for future installments.
• New software to try: Also via McAdams, two pieces of software to try out. typewith.me, allows several users to “collaborate seamlessly on documents in your Web browser.” It is somewhat like a GoogleDoc, although, last time I tried to use a Google Doc to collaborate with several people, it would only allow 10 users at a time. I haven’t tried typewith.me yet, but a plan to in the near future. And Feedly, a browser plug-in that repurposes your RSS reader into a magazine-style format. I’ve been trying it out and it definitely has its attractions once you figure out the user-interface. It’s not unlike Google Reader, but more visually appealing.
