Schedule Update

Please note that I’ve changed the readings for next week. Sorry for the last minute–kinds sneaked up on me. Remember to do signalled stopping on one of the two readings.
Also, be ready next Thursday to present a compelling and exciting topic for your final whitepaper. Be ready to sell it in under 2 minutes.  Meant to do this tonight, but it totally slipped my mind. I’m expecting that by the end of the evening, you will be in your groups and ready to get moving on the project.

“Dating Post”?

A couple of people have asked about the “dating post” assignment on the syllabus. Ignore that please! You should be editing the wiki instead. And remember that next class meeting, you need to:

1. Print out someone’s blog post and be ready to talk about it (argue with it, etc.).

2. Be ready to share a very preliminary idea (a sentence or two) about an area you would like to do a whitepaper on for the course. We’ll talk a bit about what the project entails on Thursday, and go around the circle for folks to throw out ideas.

Linkages

Willow caught that the link to my chapter (the optional one) was wrong. It’s fixed now:

Optional: Halavais, A. (2006). Scholarly blogging: Moving toward the visible college. In A. Bruns & J. Jacobs, Eds., Uses of blogs. New York: Peter Lang.

Be sure to head over to the wiki to update the Tapscott outline.

Missed vids

In preparation for tonight, I ran across a couple of videos that I didn’t need to use.

About eight years ago I used to teach a multimedia course in which students had a range of projects (HTML, video, Flash). One of those was to remix trailers. I found the demo I did. (Can’t show the student work, since I don’t have their permission.) My excuses: this was on an old G3/Media 100 system. Pretty top end of the consumer machines when we bought it, but still took an hour or so to render something this length. And this is after several generations of video tape, then imported and transcoded three times or four times . If I had to do this today, it would probably take me about 15 minutes from start to finish, using only free software. The tech has changed tremendously.

Second, I liked this because it was an almost instantaneous remixing of what has become an iconic meme:

Need $10,000?

It might be too early for some of you who have just started blogging, but if you’ve been at it for a while, you might take a run at a $10,000 scholarship for student bloggers. Deadline for submitting your blog is October 6.

Remix != mash

On the video side, I’m liking the new Bob Dylan viral campaign that allows you to remix the iconic music video. Here’s mine.

That said, I don’t think this really fits the definition of a mash-up, since it only consists of one original work, not in combination with any other *completed* media. I suppose that if you combined it with another work (poetry? corporate slogans?) it might be getting closer, but I don’t think it is. I think the combination of two streams that work on their own is necessary.

My favorite mashup

It’s difficult to choose a single favorite mash-up, but I am really a fan of things that are done with the Google Maps API. What this does is basically allow you to use Google maps to display whatever data you feed it. I think my favorite, at the moment, is the way it is used in Google Book Search.

Take, for example, how it is used on the page for The Catholic Encyclopedia. If you go to that page and scroll down, you will see what place names appear in the book. As you can see, it’s pretty Eurocentric! One could be forgiven for not recognizing where Christianity got its start…  Contrast that with the 1919 Encyclopedia Americana. Can you guess what that map will look like? (I bet you’re wrong…) How about The Iraq War? Or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Wanderings of a Spiritualist? Dibbell’s My Tiny Life (about virtual worlds)? The Network Revolution? A book called Mexico’s Pacific Coast? (OK, that last one is a lot more like what you might expect.)

There are a lot of really cool Google Maps mashups. I use the pedometer all the time, and a number crime mashups are great examples of using mashups in journalism, but there is something strangely compelling about converting a book to a map of the world.

Jakob Neilson makes your blog better

I mentioned in class a couple of short articles by Neilson that can help your blogging. Here they are:

> How Users Read on the Web

> Write Articles, Not Blog Postings

On the latter, I keep beating myself up over wondering who the “world leader” was. My money is on  Ahmadenijad.

RSS Super Combiner-thingy

I think I’ve already mentioned this, but everyone’s RSS feeds are combined into one mondo-feed:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=XIVSUDJc3BGYt6tnX0sBXw&_render=rss

If you put this feed in your RSS reader (aggregator), you should get a combination of the posts of everyone in the class, including my blog and this blog (the class blog). Also included in there is a feed from del.icio.us, for the tag “icm501.” So, if you have an account on del.icio.us, and you tag something “icm501″ it will also show up in this feed.

Fixed links

Hi, all. Fixed those links on next week’s readings, and added a link to Wikipedia…