When we started this module, I didn’t have any experience of website building. But as the module progressed, I learned a bit of Dreamweaver and began to make my personal website from scratch. Then the group work started, and I had to change it into “The Protege”.  I have spent a lot of hours creating the layout and making all the links work. I also had to upload all the stories, add pictures and videos. If a story didn’t have a picture, I had to find it. Then there’s different sizes and formats… There was a lot to learn, but I know these skills will be very useful in the future. Thinking back, I should have spent less time working on the group website, and then I could have made a second one. But once I had started, I just wanted to get it into decent condition, and there was no end to that process.

I think my post about the 3pm TV news broadcast was short but precise. I was running around asking people about their work, and some of them were less than helpful, and seriously annoyed. Still, I managed to get some pictures of both TV and radio people at work, and got some understanding of the stories they were going to air.

Second post was trickier. I was supposed to write about University’s F:Urban music label.  Their website hasn’t been updated since 2009 and the office was supposed to be closed, so I contacted my friend who was creating a new website for them. I was hoping he could provide me with press releases and an artist roster, but the website had no content yet. He did, however, direct me to another person who sent me some documents and introduced me to Sharifa Marshall, the label director. I arranged and recorded an interview with her, and that served as a basis for my story. I wanted to fashion the interview into a podcast, but to my terror, the new microphone and recorder settings destroyed the audio quality. I had to amplify it 200% just to hear it, so it was unusable for my podcasting agenda. In the end I came out with a short, press-release style story.

The news day was a great exercise.  Although the finished result wasn’t that impressive, I did a lot of running around, writing, and using multimedia tools. I even had a technical issue I had to work around, just like in real life. Also, it was very clear that while the broadcasting people work in teams, the web people work mostly alone. This has its advantages and disadvantages, but generally I have no problem with working alone. I do, however, need an editor breathing down my neck to be efficient. And I’ve certainly learned to check my equipment performance before I try to use it.

The print ad market is in decline, and the internet advertising market is growing (see my industry update). So it comes as a surprise that only a quarter of Tencent income is produced by advertising. The rest ($719.1 million in 2008) was earned through so-called IVAS: Internet value-added services.

What is IVAS? It’s a telecommunications industry term for non-core services. It can be used in any industry where company provides additional services to promote their main business. On a conceptual level, value-added services add value to the standard offering, making the subscriber  use their phone or computer more, and consequently spend more money. Example: free Skype service provided by mobile operator 3 in the UK. IVAS can enhance your experience of a website, provide extra functionality for a bit of hard cash. Virtual gifts, a weak Facebook feature, is also an example of IVAS. Zynga, a successful MMO game developer, famous for FarmVille and Mafia Wars, provides games for free, but asks for real money to boost your performance or get rare items. IVAS are charged for through microtransactions: small sums of money transfered online with the help of systems such as PayPal, or charged to your mobile phone bill. Microtransactions can serve as a viable alternative to advertising revenue, but the concept is still developing, and there are varying degrees of successful use.

Another important reason for great financial performance of Tencent is in distribution of Virtual Goods. VG are non-physical objects that are purchased for use in online communities or online games. Virtual goods include such things as digital gifts and digital clothing for avatars. They don’t cost money to store or distribute, and have absolutely no manifestation in the real world.

Qzone is much more than just a social networking site. It’s a colossal structure which unites instant messenger, dating services, online shops, mobile applications,  multiplayer games and more. This broad spectrum of products allows Tencent heavy use of IVAS. Furthermore, the system uses single avatar service, meaning increased importance of signs of status. Yes, you can create a basic avatar free, but to make it truly unique, you will need to part with a bit of money.

The success of Tencent and similar companies makes me think about the changing nature of our world. We are still quite far away from The Lawnmower Man style virtual reality, but we have already started collecting virtual possessions. I believe that in our lifetime humanity will pack it’s bags and move online completely. The question is, how do we determine value in the virtual world? What is worth paying money for? Are microtransactions just a psychological trick, designed to make us spend less, but a lot more often? Are the Chinese more prone to invest in signs of virtual status due to their culture? Rapid internet development in China could make it the leading online society in the world. Which means everyone from tech enthusiasts to corporate CEOs should pay close attention to this country, and the weird but wonderful solutions it produces.

To make matters worse, Apple had launched the iPad. A lot of people didn’t take the threat seriously. How could this useless device harm the newspapers? But under all the silly exterior, iPad turned out to be a skilled assasin, spawning hundreds of imitations, creating a new slice of media market and bringing about the dawn of the e-magazine.

The message? Take your cross-platform journalistic training seriously. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst and never assume you will get work in print.

This is an award-winning documentary on Iraq war. Yes, it’s amazing. But the best thing about it is the technique- hundreds of photographs edited to the character’s narration. Simple and powerful, less intrusive than video, thus especially useful for documentaries. I was always interested in this method,  created one photograph feature from scratch and directed another one. But now I see this approach works a lot better with real material, real people. It’s definitely a direction worth investigating and experimenting with.

In short:

“A blogger who writes the Seismic Shock website has published articles critical of a Church of England Vicar, who has complained to the police over ‘harassment’ resulting in the blogger being paid a visit by the West Yorkshire constabulary, and his computer files at his University – who I believe is his emloyer – to be searched. The site linked above is the new one; the blogger deleted the old one “voluntarily” when the Constabulary had a “word”.

The Church of England Vicar is Rev Stephen Sizer, of the parish of Virginia Water. He is a known critic of the State of Israel, and of “Christian Zionism”, and a reasonably well-known controversialist on these questions.”

So what could be, and always was, dismissed as flaming, annoying but harmless internet abuse, is now classified as “harassment” and could earn you a visit from the police. Furthermore, your University, the place of knowledge, the sanctuary for the young, will provide your data in an instant.

This is the one to follow.

From the very start all of us tried to post according to the schedule. It didn’t always work out. I set out to post three days in a row for the first week… It was a bad idea. I also made our editor Jiten worry, because I mostly write at night, so I could start working on a tuesday post on tuesday, but end up posting it factually on wednesday, around 2 am. I’ve never delayed a post more than a day though. Because of the deadlines, some of my posts weren’t as good as they could be. But then again, it was all original material, not just retelling of the day’s news.

My role in the team was to write about the geeky gadgets and technology, and I stuck to it. I was also supposed to take care of the design of the blog. Here I failed miserably, only switching the ugly custom header for a nicer looking one last friday.  I enriched my posts with a lot of pictures, most of them I either took myself or Photoshop-processed to add new bits and pieces.

A lot of posts on our blog were time-sensitive, for example the “Google versus PRS” post, the “Google Steetview” posts and my “Robot girl” posts. We also wrote a lot of reviews, which are going to generate a guaranteed ammount of hits over the time. I think our approach to the Ben Gilbert exercise worked nicely as well. We managed to produce our own take on the story, relevant to the blog topic and interesting to read. Ben himself liked our questions, and we mostly used material brought about by our team’s questions.

Our blog was promoted through facebook and twitter, although I took no part in that.

  On friday morning, I was hungover. It was The Jam Night in the Undercroft bar of University of Westminster on thursday, and, although I wasn’t even supposed to be there, I was hitting it hard. So no wonder that I was late for my Japanese class on that friday morning. I didn’t want to go at all, but my coursework was due. Seriously, deciding to study Japanese while up to my neck with Journalism work was a bad idea.

  So there I was, at about 1o am, walking down the Oxford Street, feeling really bad, when I heard motorcycle roar. I turned my head and saw two men on their motorbikes in front of the Leslie Davis Jewelers shop. Black bikes, black clothes, black motorcycle helmets. And those guys were really making a lot of noise, as if trying to attract attention. So, naturally, there was a big crowd on the sidewalk, looking at what was happening. And what was happening was the third guy casually gathering jewelry  through a smashed window, with his both hands, and putting it in a black bag. And, man, was he taking his time! After about a minute, the fourth guy appeared from the shop. They were looking identical, all dressed in black. And very cool. The crowd was just watching from a distance, and, judging by the look on everyone’s faces, enjoying the show. Then the men got on the bikes. One of the guys actually saluted the spectators as they were going away! And people were almost cheering. The regret I felt about forgetting my camera that day was immense… All what was left was the sledgehammer lying on a sidewalk amongst the broken glass.

  The financial crisis has hit the country hard. Does this mean that the intelligent, carefully planned robberies are coming back? It seems to be a victimless crime, as good a way to earn money as any other, if slightly more dangerous. I say, hell yeah…