Tuesday, April 6, 2010
My dream for the future
Our prof showed this during class earlier this week amidst all the others, but this is one that struck me the most. Perhaps, it is because it is what Singapore is attempting to dream and achieve by the year 2015. ALthough I think it is pretty impossible, at least by the 2015 they are thinking of, I think it is possible especially with the way technology is improving in the world today. A lot of the seemingly impossible things are now possible because of dreams.
What I like most about the video was the part the driver could just ask the computer where the nearest carpark was and the number of lots as he was driving. How convenient! If I were to have such a program, I would want the added feature of where the CHEAPEST carpark lot is, considering the high cost of parking in Singapore!
I thought the present the boy gave to his mom was also so special. It would be really cool if one can just go to a place, take many photos, place it into the machine, and all those present can experience what it would be like if one were really at the place. How amazing would that feeling be!
Personally though, my dream for the future of the internet would be having an application to call robots to clean the house for me exactly the way i want it so that I don't have to hire a maid in the future. A robot with the sole purpose of doing that comes and goes quickly when it has done all the work that it is needed. I think all homes should have one of those! It can be so readily available and affordable for everyone to purchase one.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Social Networking, the online community and you
A people network. A people highway. What an apt way of explaining what social networking is all about.
Or is that really it?
Do you know that now, Social networking sites have become so popular not only for reconnecting with old friends and even meeting new ones, but police have found they can also be useful when tracking down suspects and are using them to track them down! How amazing is that?
I couldn't embed the video into this blog entry, so please click on the link to watch the video..
Social Networking Sites Aid Police In Suspect Searches: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkaX1x4iBVA
I think it's so cool that social networking sites can be used not only for staying connected, making new friends but catching criminals. I guess, it's just pretty awesome that social networking sites can be used for even greater purposes than the shallow purposes of people seeking attention with what they post. I guess as I've mentioned it before on my first couple of posts that social media has changed many people today.
What I think it has done most are the connections that people can have from every part of the world. If you have a facebook account, just take a look at the number of people you're connected to somehow, and where they are currently; and yet with a click, or a status update, you know exactly what they are up to.
Isn't it true that the world is getting so small nowadays?
How is the internet shaping the future of journalism?
There are two camps with regards to whether the internet is improving journalism or whether it has killed journalism. Let me present these two views and how they came to the conclusion.
Internet has killed traditional journalism
Internet is killing journalists, or at least news organizations like newspapers and television news shows that no longer provide the same value to their customers.There are even websites like Newspaper Death Watch and a Google Maps project that tracks job layoffs at newspapers across the United States. November marks seven consecutive quarters of declining advertising revenue for U.S. newspapers.
Journalism started dying when people stopped looking to newspapers and television for news. It is as simple as that. Mindy McAdams, the current Knight Chair for Journalism, recalls that in 1995 people turned to television for coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing, but by 2001 public demand crashed CNN’s online servers in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks.
The Internet has slowly, but surely taken over the role of “see it here first” journalism. Even 24-hour news stations like CNN, MSNBC and FOX News do not have the ability to show news as it happens anywhere in the world. The Internet does. For example, The Virginia Tech shootings, the 2004 Indonesia Tsunami and the bombings in Mumbai, India were all shown online before television. Printed newspapers don’t even have a chance. "In a poll of prominent members of the national news media, nearly two-thirds say the Internet is hurting journalism more than it is helping. The poll, conducted by The Atlantic and National Journal, asked 43 media insiders whether, on balance, journalism has been helped more or hurt more by the rise of news consumption online. Sixty-five percent said journalism has been hurt more, while 34 percent said it has been helped more."
“The Internet has some plusses: It has widened the circle of those participating in the national debate. But it has mortally wounded the financial structure of the news business so that the cost of doing challenging, independent reporting has become all but prohibitive all over the world. It has blurred the line between opinion and fact and created a dynamic in which extreme thought flourishes while balanced judgment is imperiled.”
The Internet is shaping journalism
The ability to interact instantaneously with people from all over the world in both print and on video is the strength of the internet. "Journalism will do more than survive the Internet Age, it will thrive. It will thrive as creators and publishers embrace the collaborative power of new technologies, retool production and distribution strategies and we stop trying to do everything ourselves."
It has been found that for ever half the firms questioned there was a fall in advertising income of more than 10%. However, it has also been found that many do not regard the internet as the future of journalism. "32% of the journalists think that the publication, or TV/radio channel they work for might disappear from the market, while fewer than 10% reckon that their publication, radio or TV channel will survive online."
With the presence of Internet, new forms of distribution such as Twitter and Facebook are widely accepted and increasingly used, and the internet is obviously still not a medium for which journalists create specific content. Just 43% of them say that at least half their online content is originally created for the web. From the European Digital Journalism Survey, more than 66% was found to have no kind of training at all in producing journalism for the new medium. No wonder that within most publications the interaction with user-generated content can be still regarded as passive: 68% accept comments on stories online and only 23% quote bloggers. User-generated content is widely neglected.
Although it is currently not accepted as a medium for actual journalism as of yet, this will probably shift and move as seen from the fact that the internet allows the transmission of information and news in a more real-time manner, quicker and more efficient. Basically, with the internet, everyone can be a journalist!
Now that I have given you two sides of the coin, what do you think is the future of journalism with the presence of the internet?
Information from:
1) http://blogs.reuters.com/from-reuterscom/2009/12/11/how-will-journalism-survive-the-internet-age/
2) http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/04/media-insiders-say-internet-hurts-journalism/7410/
3) http://newspaper-journalism.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_the_internet_killed_traditional_journalism
4) http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/sep/17/digital-media-future-of-journalism
Internet has killed traditional journalism
Internet is killing journalists, or at least news organizations like newspapers and television news shows that no longer provide the same value to their customers.There are even websites like Newspaper Death Watch and a Google Maps project that tracks job layoffs at newspapers across the United States. November marks seven consecutive quarters of declining advertising revenue for U.S. newspapers.
Journalism started dying when people stopped looking to newspapers and television for news. It is as simple as that. Mindy McAdams, the current Knight Chair for Journalism, recalls that in 1995 people turned to television for coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing, but by 2001 public demand crashed CNN’s online servers in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks.
The Internet has slowly, but surely taken over the role of “see it here first” journalism. Even 24-hour news stations like CNN, MSNBC and FOX News do not have the ability to show news as it happens anywhere in the world. The Internet does. For example, The Virginia Tech shootings, the 2004 Indonesia Tsunami and the bombings in Mumbai, India were all shown online before television. Printed newspapers don’t even have a chance. "In a poll of prominent members of the national news media, nearly two-thirds say the Internet is hurting journalism more than it is helping. The poll, conducted by The Atlantic and National Journal, asked 43 media insiders whether, on balance, journalism has been helped more or hurt more by the rise of news consumption online. Sixty-five percent said journalism has been hurt more, while 34 percent said it has been helped more."
“The Internet has some plusses: It has widened the circle of those participating in the national debate. But it has mortally wounded the financial structure of the news business so that the cost of doing challenging, independent reporting has become all but prohibitive all over the world. It has blurred the line between opinion and fact and created a dynamic in which extreme thought flourishes while balanced judgment is imperiled.”
The Internet is shaping journalism
The ability to interact instantaneously with people from all over the world in both print and on video is the strength of the internet. "Journalism will do more than survive the Internet Age, it will thrive. It will thrive as creators and publishers embrace the collaborative power of new technologies, retool production and distribution strategies and we stop trying to do everything ourselves."
It has been found that for ever half the firms questioned there was a fall in advertising income of more than 10%. However, it has also been found that many do not regard the internet as the future of journalism. "32% of the journalists think that the publication, or TV/radio channel they work for might disappear from the market, while fewer than 10% reckon that their publication, radio or TV channel will survive online."
With the presence of Internet, new forms of distribution such as Twitter and Facebook are widely accepted and increasingly used, and the internet is obviously still not a medium for which journalists create specific content. Just 43% of them say that at least half their online content is originally created for the web. From the European Digital Journalism Survey, more than 66% was found to have no kind of training at all in producing journalism for the new medium. No wonder that within most publications the interaction with user-generated content can be still regarded as passive: 68% accept comments on stories online and only 23% quote bloggers. User-generated content is widely neglected.
Although it is currently not accepted as a medium for actual journalism as of yet, this will probably shift and move as seen from the fact that the internet allows the transmission of information and news in a more real-time manner, quicker and more efficient. Basically, with the internet, everyone can be a journalist!
Now that I have given you two sides of the coin, what do you think is the future of journalism with the presence of the internet?
Information from:
1) http://blogs.reuters.com/from-reuterscom/2009/12/11/how-will-journalism-survive-the-internet-age/
2) http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/04/media-insiders-say-internet-hurts-journalism/7410/
3) http://newspaper-journalism.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_the_internet_killed_traditional_journalism
4) http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/sep/17/digital-media-future-of-journalism
Saturday, April 3, 2010
NewsML
NewsML is an XML language designed for the news industry; a standard way for the tagging of news stories and associated documents. It provides a media independent and structural framework for multimedia news. It is a common way of describing and publishing the content where there are various formats at source, various platforms at the end, flexibility to build packages of content and integration of feeds with machines. NewsML was developed by the IPTC and is popular in North America, Asia and Japan.
XML is also know as eXtensible Markup Language. It is a set of rules for encoding documents electronically. Its design goals emphasize simplicity, generality, usability all over the internet. It seperates content from the information about the content, is of structured definition and thus understood by machines.
IPTC is the International Press Telecommunications Council that is based in London, United Kingdom. It is a consortium of 70 of the world's major news agencies and news industry vendors. They are responsible for developing and maintaining technical standards for improved news exchange that are used by every major news organization in the world.
NewsML is the structure used to publish news in any format. It can be used by news providers to combine their pictures, video, text, graphics and audio files in news output available on web sites, mobile phones, high end desktops, interactive television and any other device. It is however, not a text or image mark-up format; it has no way to mark paragraphs or headlines, for example. Instead, it is an envelope and organizer for one or more files of almost any type.
Everything the recipient might need to know about the content of the news provided can be included in NewsML’s structure. For example, NewsML enables publishers to provide the same text in different languages; a video clip in different formats; or different resolutions of the same photograph. NewsML’s rich metadata concept can help with things like revision levels that make it easy to track the evolution of a NewsItem over time, status details (publishable, embargoed, etc.) and administrative details, such as acknowledgements or copyright details.
NewsML has default metadata vocabularies to ease implementations but it does not dictate which metadata vocabulary is used (IPTC Subject Codes, ISO country codes etc.) – a providers just haves to indicate which vocabulary they are using. Multiple vocabularies can be utilised within the same NewsItem.
NewsML is flexible and extensible and uses standard Internet naming conventions for identifying the news objects in a NewsItem. As such, content does not have to actually be embedded within a NewsItem; pointers can be inserted to content held on a publisher’s web site instead. This means subscribers retrieve the data only when they need to and this makes NewsML bandwidth-efficient.
Which NewsML do YOU want?
NewsML 1 - Released first in 2000, this is the first design of the NewsML approach to exchange news. It was adopted by big news agencies around the globe and is still in use. However, because it is intended for use in electronic production, delivery and archiving it does not include specific provision for traditional paper-based publishing, though formats intended for this purpose - such as the News Industry Text Format (NITF)- can be accommodated. Similarly it is not primarily intended for use in editing or creating news content, though it may be used as a basis for systems doing this. The current version is 1.2, an XML standard.
NewsML G2 - This is the next step in the NewsML evolution. First released in spring 2008, it builds on a framework which is common to a whole family of news exchange standards while its focus remains on the exchange of general news. NewsML G2 acts as an envelope for one or more news items (such as a text article, a photo, or a video clip) or a structured package of links to news items, and contains metadata to describe the relationships between the items. NewsML-G2 is a business-to-business standard that is intended to help news agencies create complex packages of multimedia news into a single cohesive bundle. It uses standardized XML building blocks and metadata. These building blocks are used in other IPTC G2-Standards, so that system programmers can reuse their code. Also the handling of metadata values has been improved. The current version is 2.1.
Information from:
1) http://www.iptc.org/cms/site/index.html?channel=CH0106
2) http://www.iptc.org/cms/site/index.html?channel=CH0111
3) http://about.reuters.com/newsml/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
