I've been bed-ridden deathly ill out sick the last couple of days and as you can tell from the last post, I've had a lot of DVDs to help me through. I've long admired the subtle connection between DVD menus and interactive/multimedia projects created in Flash, which are often styled and laid out in a similar fashion. Below you'll find screengrabs of some great DVD menus that are designed well and can be related to a online multimedia package.

NOTE: I'm more than a little wary of using Flash to design an entire multimedia project because Flash is not search engine friendly. There are some things you can do if you want to produce a self-contained Flash piece and still increase your SEO. Instead of having an entire project designed in Flash, simply animate the things that need animating (do not animate text) and insert the smaller files into a more searchable HTML document. If the entire project is created in Flash, include a text description that contains keywords about the content of the .swf file. Also, it may be cumbersome, but try breaking up the Flash project into multiple files with text links to the different .swf files. CNET has great advice on helping Google "see" your Flash content. More information on creating a Google friendly website can be found at Digital Inspiration.

On to the menus:

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy





More DVD menu goodness after the break

Click thumbnails to enlarge the screengrab.

William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996)



Artificial Intelligence: AI



Rent



The Simpsons Movie



War of the Worlds (2005)

Labels: flash

Been out sick today. In honor of the many DVDs I've watched today here are great movies about journalism. Do you have a favorite?




From the top: Citizen Kane, All the President's Men, Shattered Glass, Capote, Good Night, and Good Luck, Anchorman, The Paper, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Network

There are a number of sites popping up that will help you determine who you should vote for, based on your stance on a number of political issues, including The Candidate Match Game from USA Today, Connect2Elect and glassbooth. I've taken a couple of these quizzes and though I won't tell you who I'm voting for (this isn't a political blog), I will say that each online quiz I've taken has given me the exact same answer so I'm pretty confident going to the polls.

Wired ran a great story about how event sharing site Eventful helped bring John Edwards to Kentucky, a state oft neglected by presidential candidates. Sounds like the web is working, but Mashable points out that presidential candidates aren't actually personally invested in social media.

For those who want to take politics into their own hands, the good people at THUP have created an online game that lets users pick their candidates and the team behind them and campaign their way across the country, staking out political territory.



The Associated Press asked some of the presidential candidates their favorite and least foods (with amusing results). This naturally led Chow, a site for all things food previously mentioned here, to create an "Eat Sheet" that compared the candidates' tastes in one nifty chart. Mitt Romney loves hot dogs and Barack Obama loves chili. A match made in heaven?

Are you registered to vote? Are you sure? VotePoke will help anyone confirm if they are registered to vote for the upcoming election. I am newly registered after moving to a new home and the site did not have my information up, so I cannot verify if it actually works or not, but its worth a try.

Need more politics? Check out this previous post on tracking the presidential candidates online.

Labels: citizen journalism, maps

The interactive map is the cornerstone of multimedia journalism. Here are some great online maps worth emulating:

Google is taking maps where no map has gone before with the addition of Google Moon, an interactive map that functions much like the company's other mapping technology. Amid the dark and cloudy surface of the moon are markers that show where previous space explorations have landed. Zoom out further and you'll see an ominous collection of craters.



Google Moon isn't the only map that rocks. Gruvr is a handy online tool for anyone searching for local music. The map plots out concerts happening near you and links to the bands' websites if they aren't exactly on your radar.



Rotten Neighbor lets users post comments about the people who live around them which are then plotted on a map. Some of the comments are alarming and a few are vindictive, but overall the site is a great place for a searchable database of not-so-neighborly rants.



Even more terrifying than a bad neighbor is the Global Incident Map which catalogs "terrorism and other suspicious events" on a surprisingly robust map. Surprisingly there are just about as many suspicious events happening in the US as there are in Europe and the Middle East, according to the site.



Ushahidi mashes up first hand accounts of violence in Kenya with a sobering Google map. Incidents including riots, deaths and looting and rape are plotted and accompanied by the tragic stories behind them.



Finally, the folks at World Wide Webfoot have painstakingly combined US Census Bureau data and interactive maps to great effect. The result is a visual idea of how the country is broken down by such as factors as population density, age and race.




Check out this previous post for nine more notable maps.

Labels: maps

Stay with me on this one. I was channel surfing last week when I landed on G4's coverage of the Adult Entertainment Expo and a group of panelists discussing how technologically advanced the adult film industry had been and become.

"Everybody knows that porn drives technology; sex drives technology," said one panelist.

Statistics vary on how much of the internet is made of porn, but there's no denying adult themed websites had a greater presence on the internet long before news ever did.

Porn has already begun to conquer the mobile web, allowing users to view their favorite photos and videos on the go. And yet only a conservative number of media sites are optimized for cellular devices (kudos to Fox News, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun-Times, CBS News and others for their mobile optimized sites).


I remember hearing stories of people watching porn on their iPods and digital devices on the BART trains of San Francisco, but in my time living there I rarely saw somebody reading news content from anything other than the traditional newspaper. If we could more assertively rush content to mobile devices we could not only capture the average business traveler, but also save the BART system from cleaning up the large piles of newspapers left behind.

Video on demand has been a boon to the porn industry for years now. Instead of going to the video store and sifting through shelves to find captivating titles, users can download or stream a variety of adult films in a diverse number of niches that surpasses even what's available in brick and mortar stores.

In the G4 interview, adult film director Richard DeMontfort argued that porn sustained the early stages of video technology, including VHS and DVD, because people could enjoy the films from home. "When video came out, porn was the first one there, porn kept video growing like crazy," DeMontfort said. "The method of transmission changes every few years... now it's changing faster than ever."


Very few online news sites are providing large amounts of video content produced exclusively for the web that is not derivative of a print or broadcast story. Right now that isn't a bad thing because you get more bang for your buck if the package is available on more than one platform. But it doesn't help to change the prevailing ideology that print/broadcast consumers and online consumers are the same group of people. Often the online user is in a completely different market than the target audience of the news site and requires more sophisticated content than what is being offered to the traditional news consumer.

The journalism industry is often reactive instead of proactive when it comes to new technology platforms. We see some cool technology that many times has been out for a long period of time and figure out how we can copy it and make it our own. Instead, we the media should be on the forefront of how our content is delivered, instead of waiting for Joe Porn to figure it out.

Tod Hymes, publisher of XBiz World, offered salient advice: "The smartest people in the world are looking at the internet and all these delivery platforms figuring out how to capture the demographic they want and how to get them to pay money."

Finally, one panelist said that no matter the transmission, it all boils down to people watching other people have sex. And for journalism, it boils down to the written and spoken word. The news will never die, we just to need adjust how it's presented in order to stay on the forefront of the technology that's changing our work and our lives.

Labels: news on the news

Like most multimedia journalists, I pride myself in being able to wear a lot of different journalism hats. But the one thing I have never gotten a grasp of is writing headlines. I can write a 1,000 word story in my sleep, but ask me to write a couple of words to sum up what I've written and I draw a huge blank.

I've asked around and searched for advice and here is what I've learned. The first rule of writing web headlines is that they differ incredibly from print. Whereas a newspaper or magazine piece can be given a flowery, pun-filled headline, an online headline has to be concise, attention-grabbing and chock full of keywords that will grab the casual reader. Take the Arizona Daily Sun headline Fire-prone homes under fire. It caught my attention, its great for anyone searching for "fire" and "home" and it has the word fire twice! Gotta love that.

If the headline must be flowery because it, for example, is identical to a print story, it is wise to have a subhead that has the keywords in it like the Newsweek story "He's Not as Smart as He Thinks" where the subhead reads "A British researcher reports that the male ego is often larger than his actual IQ. But you might be surprised by what women think of men's intellect."

Now when I'm struggling to come up with the perfect headline I think of the keywords that are in a story and then put them together in a cohesive sentence. In the end its all about search engine optimization. Because a lot news traffic comes from search engines like Google and social news sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, the headline is a huge factor in whether a story is read or not. But no pressure. The New York Times has a great article on the importance of SEO in online headline writing that is worth a read. And I'll keep working on my copywriting skills.

Labels: site management

Are you plan on covering an event that will captivate a large audience. Sure you could write a traditional encapsulation of the goings-on, but why not liveblog it?

Liveblogging can provide up to the minute coverage of any interesting event for online readers to follow, including award shows, political events, natural disasters, court proceedings, sports events, you name it.

Whether the blog is presented in chronological or reverse chronological order is up to you, but depends largely on how many live visitors you are expecting. If a great number of readers follow the liveblog as it is updated, it is best to put updates at the top, so they can be seen quickly without the need to scroll to the bottom of the page. It may seem disappointing if there aren't a large number visitors aren't reading the liveblog as its being posted, but keep in mind most users read liveblogs well after the event as a recap of what they have (or haven't seen).

CoverItLive also provides an instant message-like approach to liveblogging and allows the blogger to include real time photos, video and audio clips along with the text. Read extensive reviews of the service at ReadWriteWeb and Webware.

If you don't have a laptop handy (or even if you do), its easy to send updates from your cell phone or text messaging doodad via microblogging tool Twitter. Find out more about the journalistic applications of Twitter at Poynter's E-Media Tidbits.

For those who are covering a live event and need a little extra help with their lines, CuePrompter is like having on your own teleprompter in the field. If you have a laptop handy, simply type in your copy into the space provided and select the speed at which you read. Place the laptop near the camera and you're ready to read.

Labels: blogging

One of the reasons I love multimedia journalism is because of the mix between the old and the new. Computers and writing: a match made in heaven. Along those lines, I present to you one of my favorite iterations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Here it is mashed up with the classic house track "Can You Feel It."

The speech was delivered August 28, 1963, when multimedia was still in its infancy. Check out what reporters had to use before the inundation of technology we have today.



Alas, some things never change.

The days of flashing, look-at-me, animated hyperlinks are long gone when web designers realized they were eyesores and just plain tacky. But how do you get a user to "click here" without making the link overbearingly obvious? Here are a couple of tips to making your web pages and multimedia elements easily navigable.


Hyperlinks should be a color that is distinguishable from the rest of the text. More often than not, blue is chosen, but they can be any one color. Links should also be either bold, underlined or both for quick scanning. Most importantly, Make sure your links are easy to click. When a font or link is too small, it requires the user to click precisely on a small area of pixels which can be very frustrating.

There are two schools of theory when it comes to using the directive "click here" to indicate a hyperlink. Some say the phrase, or variations of it, is unbeatable in indicating something is clickable or important. Others use a group of words as the link instead to creating a continuous flow of conversation. You'll find 10,000 words subscribes to the latter theory, but really its up to you and your company style.

Many web sites, especially news and banking sites use drop down to streamline a massive number of links, but in most cases they obscure a particular link your visitor may be trying to find, leaving them scouring the entire page. I'm guilty of using drop down menus (in one case, some 60+ California neighborhoods were grouped by county), but I always consider the alternatives before using the navigation style.

Finally, the links on both the web page and any multimedia elements should be similar so as not to confuse the reader. You can find more link usability tips at Coding Horror and Wake Up Later.

Labels: site management

The ongoing strike by the Writers Guild of America has changed the media world as we know it. Major awards shows have been revamped, scores of TV shows have been put on hold, and movie scripts are being stockpiled. The result is a proliferation of reality shows and online content and a boom in online advertising.

Where does your average news site fit in with all this? Now, more than ever, users are turning to the internet for original content. That means its time to push video and multimedia content to the forefront to snatch up visitors who now have a little more time on their hands.


There are a number of online services offering TV programming on the web, including my faves Joost, LikeVid, Mogulus, video giant YouTube and the still-in-beta, NBC/News Corp. venture Hulu. Be sure to check out this mashupof Google Maps and live TV streams from around the world and visit Mashable for an exhaustive list of TV on the web.

Online programming also trumps TV because the user's close proximity to the computer decreases passivity and negates the use of Tivo, the enemy of television advertising. The aforementioned sites should provide some inspiration on how to present your original content on the web, if you haven't done so already. If you have, what's your strategy for showcasing online video and multimedia?

Labels: video

One of the greatest differences between a traditional broadcast or print story and a story run online is the ability of readers to comment instantly on breaking news or a hot topic. At the beginning of the multimedia journalism bubble, many news sites were resistant to allowing open discussions on their online stories for fear of the internet "crazies." Now, all but a few holdouts see the benefit of a free flow of discussion to the local and global communities.

The problem is user comments are sometimes far from civil. Comment-enabled websites sometimes have to deal with overly passionate users insulting each other, foul language, and of course spam comments.

There are a couple of options that keep the comments section more Founding Fathers and less bar talk:

• Moderate comments (requires a dedicated staffer which may or may not be in the budget)
  
• Necessitate that each comment be reviewed before it is posted (which hinders the immediacy of the conversation)
  
• Install a foul language filter like Devowelizer (WordPress)
  
• Require registration in order to comment (allows users to be tracked, and if necessary, be blocked)
  
• Install a spam blocker like Aksimet (WordPress)

Just one word of advice: DON'T turn the comments off across the board. We're living in a Web 2.0 world where users expect to be able have their say about your content. Though the challenges of an open discussion may seem daunting, in the end the contribution to the story is well worth it.

Labels: site management

First row: Kent Brockman (The Simpsons), Murphy Brown, Ron Burgundy (Anchorman),Clark Kent (Superman)

Second row: Carrie Bradshaw (Sex and the City), Charles Foster Kane (Citizen Kane), J. Jonah Jameson (Spiderman), Rita Skeeter (Harry Potter)

Third row: Gale Weathers (Scream series), Carl Kolchak (The Night Stalker), Chuck Darling & Kelly Carr (Back to You)

Fourth row: Tricia Takanawa (Family Guy), Rory Gilmore (Gilmore Girls), Les Nessman (WKRP in Cincinnati), April O'Neil (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles)

Fifth row: Borat, Lois Lane (Superman), Howard Beale (Network), Bridget Jones

Anybody can create a list of links to top news stories. Same boring blue hyperlinks, different stories. But the news doesn't have to be displayed in the same way it was when the internet was invented. Here are some sites that make the news POP!

· Digg Labs' bigspy, along with its counterparts stack, swarm, arc and pics, are live, visual representations of the news and non-news being dugg on the site. The technology is also available as a series of screensavers so instead of searching for the news, the news comes to you.




· The Marumushi newsmap (which I have covered before, but I love so much) displays news stories in color coded boxes that become darker when the news becomes older.




· Newsknitter is more of a Ten Commandments, written in stone kind of approach to the news. Political news headlines are stitched into surprisingly cool (albeit nerdy) sweaters. Think Grandma + CNN.




· It has an antiquated feel and Buzztracker does the same thing better, but I still love NewsQuakes where concentric circles map out the news similar to the patterns of, you guessed it, earthquakes.




· Mappedup.com takes the newsmap concept even further with its ever changing map of the world in which yellow dots representing various locales mark the news and its location as its happens.




· Popurls displays the top links from social news sites like del.icio.us and Digg in one convenient page. Popurls.tv takes this concept one step further and displays the most viewed stories in the last hour, day and 78 hours. Most viewed stories are also displayed on a Google Map that refreshes every few seconds.




· Finally Textmap analyzes the heck out of any given new subject, providing relationship maps, popularity charts, heat maps, you name it. Its all very impressive.

There are about 112 million blogs floating around the internet, according to blog tracker Technorati. And while a significant number of those blogs are run by established media organizations, there are plenty of journalists who are alarmed by anyone other than a credentialed journalist reporting the news.

I was recently watching a rerun of The Colbert Report when I saw author Andrew Keen touting his book The Cult of the Amateur. "Oh cool, a book about the internet," I thought. That is until he said: "The internet trivializes culture to such an extent that everyone is broadcasting, everyone is writing blogs, everyone is putting music on the web."

"But isn't that the point of the internet (and citizen journalism)," I thought?

Keen continued: "I think we need objective professional journalists who responsibly collect the news rather than anonymous bloggers who are often in pay of corporations and foreign governments. That's the crisis of this media."


It not only didn't make sense, it was a very elitist viewpoint. To dismiss the millions of people who write daily about issues they are passionate about as subpar journalism is to miss out on a wealth of resources. I'm not saying that everything written on a blog should be taken as golden, but I do admire the considerable amount of well-reported journalism that exists on the internet.

The crisis of this media is not bloggers. It's adhering to old methods of journalism, uninventive reporting... and not reading 10,000 words, of course.

Labels: news on the news

Anytime a site visitor types in an URL incorrectly or clicks a broken link he or she will most likely receive a 404 error message indicating the page was not found. This is especially common on news sites that archive older stories.

For most sites this 404 page redirects to simple page with a banner and perhaps a standard menu bar, but if a visitor is looking for something specific, this often won't suffice.


You only have a few seconds to capture the user's attention so if they don't find what they want, it's off to the next site. If the user hasn't found what they are looking for, offer them something they might find interesting. Include links to your most popular section or recent news stories, anything other than a blank page and your standard menu bar.

A quick poll of the websites of the nation's 25 largest newspapers (though this applies to any site, regardless of the medium), showed 16, including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times have relatively blank 404 pages. Most of the pages have a message indicating the page is unavailable, a link to site map and/or to customer service.

Two of the 25 had an automatic redirect to the main site (The Denver Post and The Seattle Times) and three had absolutely nothing. No redirects, no search boxes, no links (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The San Diego Union-Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times).

Only four, including the New York Daily News, the Arizona Republic, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had links back to useful or interesting content.

The golden rule for most news sites is keep the visitor on your page. Having something else for the casual visitor to experience when they don't find what they want is a sure way to do so.

Changing the 404 page is relatively easy to do and should be created collaboratively to fit your sites needs. The actual changes to the .htaccess file which regulates the 404 page should be handled by a web administrator. For more info on how to change your 404, check out Mighty Coach or HTML Source.

Smashing Magazine also has collected some pretty clever and/or well-designed 404 pages (which may or not be appropriate for a major news site, but are nevertheless fun).

Labels: site management

The Queen of England has one. So does the Japanese Prime Minister. And nearly every presidential candidate has one. Does your local politician have one?

It's pretty easy to set up your own YouTube channel and potentially reach millions of viewers so it makes sense that many politicians have their own videos on the crazy popular video site. There are many local, national and international politicians staking their claim on YouTube, but if your local politicians aren't one of them, why not put your own video on YouTube?


Chuck Norris stumps for Mike Huckabee in the Republican
presidential candidate's YouTube vid.

If you already have footage of local candidates' speeches, rallies and forums put them on YouTube and watch the users flock to the videos (and if you don't have footage, shame on you). YouTube visitors looking for information on their fave candidates will very likely be drawn to your content and, if you include a link back to your site, traffic to your related content. Controversial or though-provoking videos are likely to inspire discussion and debate even after the 2008 election is over. Uploading to YouTube is simple and is the height of community and hyperlocal journalism.

Labels: video

Because of personal reasons, I had to unfortunately stop blogging for awhile. While I was away I realized what a void I left behind so to make it up to you, I present to you the best television, online, magazine and blog-based journalism I personally encountered and enjoyed this year. (And yes, 10,000 words is back, baby!)


Best Online Journalism: U-Haul, Los Angeles Times

I, like many other Americans, rarely read newspaper pieces that are spread across a gazillion pages. When faced with never-ending columns of text, I usually read the first few grafs and keep it moving. But I was so intrigued by the Times' piece on the do-it-yourself moving company's low safety standards and the resulting mechanical catastrophes that I read the three-part series from beginning to end.


The print story included a refer to latimes.com/uhaul where I found heart-wrenching video stories of the folks whose encounters with faulty U-Haul equipment left them in dire straits and a brilliant Flash interactive that painstakingly detailed a major accident involving a U-Haul trailer. In the interest of full disclosure, I was working at the Times during the story's production and though I had nothing to do with its creation, I applaud the team for an excellent feat of journalism.


Best Blog: The Consumerist

I currently subscribe to about 40 blogs about journalism, design, entertainment, etc. most of which I quickly scan using RSS/Google Reader. Those that I can't immediately read I "star" or save for later. Besides the entertainment news repository ShowHype there is no blog I star or enjoy more than The Consumerist.



The Consumerist is what I expect most online newspapers will look like in the future: a daily blog that delivers useful, well-written newsy content that personally affects its readers. The blog is constantly updated with tips like how to buy cheap glasses online and how to avoid tax planning mistakes and airs the grievances of readers' shady dealings with retailers like Best Buy and Sprint. The site has quite a following and its stellar content keeps its readers (and me) coming back.


Best Television Journalism: The Secret World of Haute Couture, BBC

I'm a sucker for reality shows and fashion-related shows like America's Next Top Model and Project Runway guarantee that I am on my couch Wednesday nights. While these shows allude to "haute couture," or the elaborate and costly fashions created by high end designers like Karl Lagerfeld and Valentino, I had no idea of the industry's devoted following and detailed production until I watched the BBC documentary by Margy Kinmonth.

I must admit I had no intention of watching a documentary on women's fashion, but after a tiring day in New York, I popped into my hotel bed and turned on the BBC with the intent of going to sleep soon after. An hour later I was still wide awake, captivated by Kinmonth's exploration of a notoriously closed society of women who purchase millions of dollars worth of gowns that they extol as pieces of art and wear very rarely. As a journalist, I understand how hard it is to get to reclusive sources. Therefore the documentary's humanistic interviews with the designers and patrons of haute couture were astounding and made for remarkable television.


Best Magazine Writing: Britney Spears, Radar Magazine

I threw Radar magazine, a relatively new addition to my magazine arsenal, into my bag and hopped on a plane. I planned to quickly scan what I thought was another US Weekly/In Touch/OK! but was surprised at the gripping stories of human drama, including one on Kentwood, Louisiana, the hometown of singer Britney Spears. The story recanted the stories of the town's residents whose hopes of turning the small town into a Graceland-like shrine of Britney fell tragically short.



Reading the piece (whose actual title and author I cannot recall; a Google search returned zilch), I felt the emotion of those who watched a young Britney turn into a pop sensation and later a troubled woman. A museum in Spears' honor remained relatively unvisited and the singer herself rarely returned to the town. I have read a lot of excellent journalism this year, but none so much as this piece that still remains on my mind.

And there you have it. 10,000 words is back and I encourage to you subscribe via RSS or email to stay updated on the latest in journalism technology.