Final Exam Post 2

Hello Internet!

In case someone out there besides my professor is actually following my blog, I apologize. The following post is for my final exam, and nothing else. Kindly disregard it.

The following is a Google Map of Vancouver, showing various sites where the Olympics are taking place. One of the venues (BC Place) has a YouTube attached!


View Vancouver Opening Ceremonies in a larger map

Final Exam Post 1

Hello Internet!

In case someone out there besides my professor is actually following my blog, I apologize. The following post is for my final exam, and nothing else. Kindly disregard it.

I read a very good article on Canada the other day. It was written by Rick Reilly of ESPN, who is covering the Vancouver Olympics. In it, he lists reasons why the city, and country, are messing up the Olympics. They include:

• The fact that the Olympic torch looks like four big marijuana joints.
• The fact that one of those joints malfunctioned during the opening ceremony.
• The Olympic Organizing committee probably over-exaggerated the number of worldwide viewers the opening ceremony received.
  
• Canadian pool boys cannot be trusted.

Read the full article here.

Embedding Things Makes Articles Better

I love embedding things. It's like taking parts of other people's websites, or your own imagination, and slapping it onto your own web page. Embedding works in two ways.

One, its informative. If you're writing about something, and you're having a hard time describing a scene, chances are that scene is on YouTube. For example, say I was a hockey writer, and I had to describe a breakaway, one-handed goal by San Jose Sharks forward Devin Setoguchi. Now I could talk for pages and pages, and still not do the goal justice. But just by posting this...



Words cannot beat that. This goes for charts, maps and widgets as well. Any time you can display information graphically, I recommend you do it. Especially if it looks good.

Embedded material also helps you break up a long string of text. For example, I've been talking for a while now, so I'll break up the constant stream of thought with a graph.



See? The reader is more likely to keep reading because they are intrigued by the pretty graphic. As you were no doubt intrigued by my nonsensical graph. Normally I might take up space to explain what is going on in my hastily-created graphic, but since the act of you merely reading this sentence proves my point, I'm not going to bother.

But you get it.

Embedding Charts to Your Blog

It snowed for a few days in DC. I didn't have class. Instead I had fun. This is a graph of exactly how much fun I had.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

How To Embed A Map in Your Blog

In case anyone forgot, the Olympics are coming up. I made a map of Vancouver. Why? Just because.


View Vancouver Olympic Village in a larger map

New York Times Photographer Profiles Olympic Atheletes

As part of the run-up to the 2010 Winter Olympics, NY Times photographer Ryan McGilney has created this photo essay , titled "High Fliers," profiling some of the bigger American competitors. The essay shows the dedication and creativity these athletes bring to their game, as well as the guts. Slides 11 and 12 are good examples of what McGilney is trying to do, letting the athlete blend into his or her background.

McGilney makes a point of zooming in on the athletes, but at the same time, distorts the image using colors and blurs. In many of the shots, the "High Flier" blends into his or her background. As a result, there is no focal point. Slides 4, 5 6, 10 and 15 are trying to be dramatic, but are far too distorted and monochromatic to affect me.

I also question the way McGilney framed some of the shots. In general, the empty space works, because the whole point of the photo essay is "flying." But for the snowboarding and ski jumping shots, the subject seems too distant. I would have liked to see close-ups of the action as well, like he did with figure skater Johnny Weir. Also, I'm not sure what effect McGilney is trying to create by hiding in the trees for slides 8 and 9.

Your Online Life Is Public, Even If You're Not

Some people think that Facebook is safe. You can say whatever you want, because you manage your privacy settings regularly and only "friend" people you trust. Well, consider this true story.

I attended a small, public charter high school in Santa Cruz, CA. Basically, the school received federal funding, but was to free to operate under its own power, and not answer to any county superintendent. As a result, the parent board made most of those fiscal and ideological decisions that would normally be made by the school district. And, long story short, I came to distrust them. And I made a Facebook group about it.

Next thing you know, the board forces the principal to resign over semantics, and people begin to get suspicious. And then I get a message in my Facebook Inbox from a news reporter, asking me if I could be interviewed for an upcoming piece. Turns out, the opinions I had posted on this Facebook group was pretty inflammatory, much more so than I had meant.

This didn't matter to me so much as a student, but the situation made me think about what Facebook can do to a person's reputation. You never know how your words will be misinterpreted online. Or when a friend suddenly posts pictures of you at a party, drinking out of Solo cups that look pretty suspicious.

Again, I'm not really in a position to be scrutinized. But if I ever become someone of worth, this whole social networking thing is going to keep me up at night.

CNN Twitter Goes All Out for State of The Union

I always go to CNN for my political coverage, mostly because I think they do the best job of ignoring the 'partisan hackery," to quote Jon Stewart. But I also think their use of social media, especially Twitter, is really cutting-edge.

Not only are all of their anchors on Twitter, but CNN forms and deletes Twitter accounts for every big story, and the State of the Union was no exception. The handle @cnnsotu was managed by John King, and allowed viewers to comment on Obama's speech at will, while receiving sporadic updates on CNN's coverage. But later, King used one of CNN's infamous "magic walls" to break down the Twitter page, analyzing reactions state-by-state. Not only did we see exit-poll-style numbers almost immediately following the speech, but the examples King read showed us how the proposals were interpreted locally and personally across the nation.

I think CNN did a good job of managing and editing their Twitter front for this big event. Viewers were not forced to suffer through hundreds of thousands of mindless tweets, like the YouTube viewers were in their comments section. CNN sifted through and chose an appropriate sample from a geographically and ideologically diverse range of users, and the result was appropriate and painless. In the future, I would have liked to see more blogging on their part, like what they did on their State of the Union ticker, but I think they were focused on making their analytical technology work. And I think what they ended up doing was pretty cool.

And I have to add this as a broadcast major. I noticed that the CNN TV feed got rid of all those annoying titles and charts other text at the bottom of the screen. If I wanted to read and watch at the same time, I knew to go on the internet.

Online Text Gets Smaller, Eyes Hurt More

I like to be able to see what I'm reading. My brain just hurts less when I try to read things that are easily visible.

This is why I am not a fan of the web versions of print newspapers. The dominating trend is to put as much information on the home page as humanly possible. They want you to read as much as possible while clicking as little as possible. Check out some of the links, which lead to NYTimes.com and my small-town paper's website, SantaCruzSentinel.com. Just look at the home pages, and see how much stuff is on there.

Now, I understand that there are some stories that are bigger than others. At the top of the page ("above the fold" in computer terms), there are five or six main stories that draw your attention right away. And most of the information I'm talking about is "below the fold" when your scroll down some. However, I feel like the website tries to look like the front page of the paper. You got headlines, followed by the first paragraph of the story. And that adds up to a lot of text.

This crowding has two effects on me as a reader.

First, I get distracted from the headline, which is what I want to read first. If I don't care about the headline, then I just skip over it. The sites I'm talking about don't let you skip over it - they foist half the story onto the page anyways, making you read it.

This brings me to my second point. The long blurb crowds the page, and makes all the other text smaller. And the instinct is to lean in to the computer screen to read smaller text. This has adverse effects on my eyes, and my head. As you lean in closer to the screen, your eyes just start to hurt.

What the newspaper companies need to figure out is that web text is different from print text. A newspaper does not generate light, it only reflects light into your eye. A computer screen, on the other hand, generates lots of little light waves that shoot off in all directions. The closer your eyes are to the screen, the more of these light waves hit your eye. This causes eye strain, brain overload, and in general, me quickly closing my web browser.

In contrast, I love the Washington Post's website because they take away the subtext. There's only a few words beneath the headlines, which can now be in bold font, which I can read from across the room. Which is what I ask for, when I'm scanning a page to see what stories I do and do not want to read.

More news sites should follow the Post's lead, and make the website and the newspaper two different entities.