Amereen77’s Weblog

The use of multimedia on the Web has greatly increased its capabilities by providing the end-user to experience various interactivities through video and picture.

For journalism, this technology means the expansion of ways to provide the news by bringing together news with multimedia. It also assists the user to receive the news in a number of different ways. It enables them to get their own idea about the news through video, graphics, sound, text etc.

Multimedia is certainly not a problem on the Web. If anything, multimedia has helped and turned another chapter for the Web. It has allowed the Web to look better and operate better by amplifying its potential and multiplying its users.

Video, sound and graphics have the greatest impact on people and that is why the Web is filled with multimedia. It influences people and draws their attention to the many different outlets of media on the Web.

Multimedia has also helped out business and education permitting them to develop various plans and lectures to become more successful. Businesses are helped out by slideshows and other multimedia-based proposals, while education allows students to engage and provides them with valuable learning opportunities.

Programs like Java and Flash allow multimedia to function on the Web. Without multimedia and its programs, the Web would still be interface and text only. The Web now is multi-functional and dynamic with many abilities and Web sites.

Multimedia has also given the option to the user to send feedback and provide comments. The Web publishers and designers are able to communicate to each other, using multimedia and email, providing just another contributor to the multimedia process.

If you are like me, sometimes a change in music is a good thing.  I can recall many instances where I open iTunes and when I start looking for something to play, nothing really looks appealing.  It feels like I listen to the same songs and artists again and again and I am in need of a change.

Since downloading and sharing music is illegal, the future of music has been in trial for some time now.  Few websites have provided music online, free of charge, which benefits the user in a number of ways that iTunes and other computer music players cannot.

Sites like Pandora and imeem have greatly innovated music listening.  They are Internet radio websites that enhance the user’s experience.

Pandora is part of the Music Genome Project, and has the user make playlists of the artist he or she likes.  The user can add as many playlists as he or she likes, but Pandora takes it a step further by automatically relating the artist typed in by having the playlist play related songs and artists to the artist the user typed in. 

This is cool because the user has the opportunity to hear new artists that is part of the same genre of music.  It also benefits the artist for getting the music out and heard, since Pandora does have to pay to play each song.

imeem takes it one step further by offering generally the same idea, but enables the users to interact and share content of all media types, and also features blogs. 

       According to Tim Berners Lee, “If it isn’t on the Web, it doesn’t exist.”   

       According to the Electronic Information Resources – Myth and Reality, this very same quote is seen.

       This is an unfair statement because not everyone knows exactly where to find what they are looking for online.  Web designers know a bunch of loopholes and tricks and therefore cannot expect the user to be able to locate something that is difficult to find.

       To people like today’s young, technology-savvy college student generation, Lee’s comments might go hand-in-hand.  When someone is watching TV, while surfing the Web, text-messaging and listening to music, it is pretty easy to know how to locate something on the Web, given their abilities to multi-task and technology experience.

       They pretty much know how to do MOST things on the Web.

       The World Wide Web has been in a constant shift, especially in the past few years, with technology advancing and the Web consisting of more and more information that can be uploaded in an instant.  The problem with Lee’s quote is that if it is not on the Web, it does exist, but most likely is just less important than items that are online.

      
       The quote generalizes that the Web is the future’s holding of all important information that is in the concern of society.  While this may be true, right now the Web certainly cannot take the position that things not online are extinct. 

       There is tons and tons of information available online, with most being unrealized of its status on the Web.  Just because something may not exist online, or just may be hard to locate, it sure doesn’t mean that it’s running around or seen in the real world.

There is the Internet, Microsoft Word and other basic software applications that I use to think were the main pain components of using the computer.

While the Internet is an important part of a computer and today’s streamline for information, the Web skills that go on behind in presenting this information were unrevealed to me until recently.

I was absolutely terrified when I was learning and reading about HTML, XHTML, CSS and all the different types of coding that make up the Internet to be able to work. All these coding operations work differently and have other ways to make a Website look and work differently in various browsers than other code.

It isn’t that hard to understand the purposes of each code.

As new technology develops, it brings the coming about of new code. While HTML is still the most recognized code, new code is being applied to newer Websites, which could be the most confusing and frustrating parts of learning code because it requires knowing most of the code and to realize when there is deprecated code.

I think it is not difficult to develop Web skills including that of coding. The typical older adult, like my dad, might have serious drawbacks or other reasons why they can’t or won’t use various skills on the Internet to help with daily projects. The concept of coding would literally blow their mind and look unattractive to learn by the older generation.

Whenever I am assigned to read an article on the World Wide Web, not only do I not necessarily want to read it, but when I am finished I have probably skipped over half the words within the article. Why is “scanning” over text the typical trend in today’s Internet users.

The answer is simply that Web users do not read “word for word” online. The compilation of different varieties of material including color, pictures, sound and video, as well with text, can alter the attention of the user causing him or her to scan and lose interest within the reading.

Mark Dykeman stated that “There’s no doubt that the way we read Web pages, and our online content preferences, have a major impact on what we read, how long we read, and how attentively we read when online.”

Reading drastically has to adapt to the advances in technologies. Since books are being readily available online through the sorts of e-books, as well as the development of “footnotes“,  online users are reading more than ever, but the way the text is being presented on a computer screen has produced “scanning”, ultimately leading to a decrease in quality of reading.

Because the Internet is the gateway to access information, more and more users are reading online. Dykeman also said that more and more material like magazines and journals are being generated online.

“The introduction of interactive elements into all media, offering television viewers in particular greater control and selectivity in their news and information consumption habits, thereby redefining the medium itself,” said Philip S. Balboni. Because information can be found with a click here and there, people have become accustomed to consistently updated material, and that’s what they want.

Blogging allows the audience to give feedback and corrections on news stories, and work with a more informal style, as journalists are basically information gatherers; they get information, process and present it.

“Technology – even in small amounts – is helping communities overcome convention and tradition to take leaps forward,” said World Bank/Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Journalists have to learn to adapt and apply some of these blogging characteristics into their worlds, and at the same time still continue to please their audience.

Other media outlets like television and radio stations are taking advantage of the Web, and some are not. Some television and radio stations have put up Websites and often, these stations work together to promote one another.

Traditional media learned the availability of and frequently updated and personalized news on Websites is what people were captured by.

The single most important thing that traditional media should do to keep audiences and gain new ones is to continue to present good and accurate news in the print edition, as well as keeping a Website maintained and updated, and keying in on important issues affecting its general audience.

       There will never be a general finishing point in the capabilities and style of online journalism.  It seems that newspaper companies with their online editions, and media are paving a new road down the path of journalism, leaving print in behind.

       With today’s younger generation adapting at a high rate to the technological advances in computers and the Internet, it comes with no surprise that they would consider online versions to receive the news than print. 

       Online editions to get the news include a great example from the Chico Enterprise Record.  Their new “E-edition” is one of many new ways that the newspaper companies are trying to create to keep up with the fast-growing installments of the Internet and media sources. 

       From USC Annenberg’s “Online Journalism Review”, online journalism has seen the control of the medium shift back and forth between owners and end-users through widely accepted and used ways.  Users have only seen a handful of techniques of online editions, but the rise of media forming new styles and looks for their pages are increasing at a moderate pace compared to the advancements of technology. 

       Internet has allowed the media to add another component to their business’ objective to get the job done, and not many job categories or titles could have been more helped than journalism.

       More than 10 years ago, John V. Pavlik from Columbia Journalism Review, provided a terrific example:

Imagine a library that carries the equivalent of 1,600 daily newspapers from all over the globe. Now stop imagining. It’s here: the Internet provides more news content than that every day, most of it free.

       It provides a rational explanation to the reason of why online journalism has launched the way it has and at the speed it has, forcing new methods to be considered. 

       Online journalism is being more considered than print because of the “Now” factor in satisfying people’s desires of “I want it now! I want the news now!”  And, people can be satisfied.

An online community is a group of people who communicate through the Internet. It is the opportunity one gets to reveal a second identity through this online world, and has sort of this “second family” within this technological environment.

An online community is different than that of the physical environment. Anybody can be someone in the physical world, but online, that person could be living a totally different lifestyle via online communities. The people within these communities have relationships with one another and take care of each other just like what were to happen in the physical aspect.

“I’m looking at new registrations, page views, RSS subscriptions, incoming links, thread volumes, post/thread tone, blog comment traffic compared to posts …Visitors can now interact with each other and with Cadence in a more conversational way, sharing and learning from the collective participation….. We feel confident that our incorporation of ‘New Social Media’ into the corporate site is accomplishing our business objectives both in terms of metrics and community interaction,” said Tom Diederich, online community expert with Cadence Design Systems.

Sites like Facebook and MySpace are not considered online communities. Online communities provide members their chance of being someone they want to be, while still living their real, day-to-day, 9-5 job consisting kind of lifestyle.

Online communities provide relationships between individuals, establishing trust within that specific community. They decide how new information will spread, and work on interrelationships throughout their community.

It is the “family away from the family”, you could say; your alias. It is the place where you can go to find other people of very similar interest, become friends if accepted without ever having to give your real identity.

In The Only Good Technology is No Technology – 7 Wonders of Invisible Infostructure, it states that we are going in a direction that the technology we are using and soon will be using is slowly becoming more andmore invisible because we don’t even know we are using it as much as we are.

Technology has grasped Americans and the way we live and the way our country runs and works.  A blackout of technology and Internet failure would send a panic attack throughout the country, leaving everyone with a sense of disconnection from the rest of the world.

“I suspect we are actually beyond a reasonable time frame where there won’t be some disruption.  It’s just a question of how much,” said David Conrad, general manager for the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, being quoted from IP address shortage to limit Internet access.

Businesses, universities, the government and other agencies would forget how they once ran without Internet.  People forget that yes, there was an age of time that Internet did not exist.  The problem is that people are unwilling to reverse the path of technology and the Internet.  As soon as it was invented, and then the birth of Web 2.0, the American people would find it extremely difficult to go back to the time before it.

With the economic crisis we are now facing and the presidential election coming right down to the wire, the effects of an Internet outage would be very damaging.  The US would be in a very vulnerable position to the rest of the world with the predicament of Internet causing commotion to the people and businesses and the overall operation of America.

Are technology and the Web, together, separating their distances from journalists? Blogging brings new ways to get information and in new forms.

There are many pros and cons in the argument of bloggers vs. journalists and to which one the future of journalism may apply. It seems that anyone can be a blogger if they really wanted to. It takes more than wants and needs to be a journalist; it takes a college degree, for example, and some real effort. Anyone can seem to be a blogger.

In Bloggers v. Journalists, journalists can choose to get into blogging, while bloggers can be journalists. The future in journalism rests within the walls of the World Wide Web. Blogging allows the audience, or the people, to give feedback and corrections to the certain news piece.

Going even further, the future of technology within the field of journalism may have been transformed by computational media. Blogging will lead to a unique thinking style where the Public Relations department is not the only place to receive information for the media. Information about a blogger is also more likely to be accessed than information about a journalist.

Bloggers could be a tremendous problem for journalists in the near future, as if they weren’t a problem for them now. The future of receiving the news rests within the walls of blogging.