OJR has created a Wiki of *mostly* free tools and web services that journalists can take advantage of to improve their storytelling and multimedia skills. The Wiki is divided into several subsections including multimedia, blogs/CMS, picture & video services, forums, RSS, newsletters and HTML/CSS references.
Although I’d say that in its current state the Wiki appeals more to new and recently converted online journalists – since the tools that are listed are not new to most of us — it has the potential to grow into a valuable resource of what’s out there for those of us practising in this field and it’s great to see OJR (and hopefully ‘old media’) paying attention to the vast pool of highly effective tools that exist for online journalists.
So go ahead and add your own top online tools to the Wiki…
Most of you probably know that I’m not the greatest fan of $Google and I think they’re evil and most of their products suck — there I said it. However, there is one product/service/beta offering that I’m pretty found of and that is Gmail, even though this may be due to a lack of a quality alternative at the moment. What I like most about Gmail is the 2GB plus space it allows you and the very good spam filtering. I’ve also found the search to be extremely useful on more than one occasion — although I’m pretty dubious of $Google indexing all my email.
The Gmail Mobile Application has been around for a while, and I finally decided to give it a go over the weekend and let me tell you I was pleasantly surprised. Installation was a cinch and involved nothing more than browsing to gmail.com/app on my mobile phone and downloading; then installing a java file. The Gmail application opened quickly and immediately resized to fit my phone’s screen resolution. So far I’ve found it to be fast and responsive and you can pretty much take advantage of all the same features that appear in the web client as well as same valued-added mobile offerings such as the ability to open certain file formats within the application. The option to pre-buffer all email body, which is enabled by default, works great and simulates a desktop email program, but can get costly if you receive a lot of mail and don’t want to read everything.
Although Gmail has featured POP access for some time now, so it’s possible to receive email from your Gmail account using a desktop email application or supported mobile device, this new java application essentially makes it foolproof even for Luddites and Stork Margarine Moms. Finally, Gmail becomes accessible to the majority of South Africans who don’t have fixed Internet connections — and did I mention it’s going to be great for the beach this summer?
This takes it to a whole new level. With competition in the mobile phone sector increasing all the time in South Africa, it’s not uncommon to find phone contracts bundled with ‘free’ gadgets like digital cameras, mp3 players, televisions and even Xboxes; but a quad bike? Maybe it’s just my warped understanding of economics, but shouldn’t you be getting the cellphone free when you purchase the quad bike?
I mean what’s next? A free tennis racquet when you buy a tube of toothpaste or ‘sexy’ lingerie with every pack of chewing gum? Somebody please explain this to me!!!
Residents of the extremely popular MMPORG ‘Second Life’ have been up-in-their-virtual-arms since last week, after an in-game ‘tool’ was made available for download which not only threatens their virtual identities but also potentially their livelihoods’ reports InformationWeek.
CopyBot, which was initially designed as a debugging tool for the game’s developer Linden Lab, was reportedly modified and ‘leaked’ within the game. It has the ability to replicate people’s avatars as well as entire objects and in-game possessions.
The two main issues here are identity theft and stolen intellectual property. Nobody wants to have another ‘Bob’ wondering around who looks identical to them and could commit ‘crimes’ on their behalf which results in them getting kicked out of the game or worse, losing out on a date. Virtual ‘bling’ such as clothing and jewellery is bought and sold by avatars in the game on a frequent basis and considering that more than $7.4 million worth of business transactions took place within Second Life in September alone according to the InformationWeek article, one can start to see the ramifications of having your stock effectively cloned.
Apparently more than 600 shop owners in the game went on strike in protest of Linden Lab’s slow reaction to this threat and are threatening them with a class-action lawsuit. The question of democracy, and who really governs ‘their world’ has also become part of the debate with many Second Life residents arguing that Linden Lab has too much control over the game and are responsible for constant meddling.
The questions I ask are could we see a virtual revolt as this meme starts to take traction and would a game developer ever consider handing over their intellectual property ‘to the people’ to democratically govern? Probably not.
PC users have had more than 5 years to debate over what cool features and benefits the next release of Microsoft Windows will have since XP was launched and it seems that Vista is going to be a huge disappointment on many levels. In the 5-year window period since XP (the longest ever between Windows releases), not only have their been countless problems and delays, but ‘the competition’ – made up of Apple and the various Linux distributions – have continued to innovate and redefine the desktop OS.
When we installed Vista Beta Candidate 2 on a desktop machine in the office a couple of months ago, I had pretty high expectations and was expecting to see something extraordinary based on the amount of hype and development that is said to have gone into it. Instead I was left with the impression that it was slow (on a new P4 with 1G+ of ram), incompatible with a lot of Windows applications and devices (granted it was still in Beta), and generally full of ‘bells and whistles’ which didn’t equate to a more productive or innovative working environment. In my opinion most of the ‘new’ features on Vista have been cloned from OSX and re-branded with Microsoft-sounding names. Hardly innovative.
The straw for me, however, is the new DRM that is embedded in the operating system from a software and hardware level, effectively handing complete control to Microsoft and their partners in the Entertainment Industry. Not only will this be a major cause of frustration and inconvenience when you want to listen to ‘legal’ music off another device for example, but it will also mean that you’ll probably have to buy a whole new rig just to watch movies off next generation media discs, such is the extent of the DRM built into that technology. Oh — and don’t even think about watching content off legitimate backups either. When software vendors start to take control of my expensive hardware, that’s when they can go get screwed!
Computerworld have written a very good overview of the DRM issue in Vista and added additional insight into who stands to benefit from it. I’ll let you be the judge.
All I know is that it’s clearly time to make the switch to an Apple Mac Book Pro, which is not only the coolest looking laptop on earth with countless great features, but thanks to the Intel Core 2 Duo chipset it now runs on, can also handle Windows XP if the need arises. I predict that when the next release of Mac OS X v10.5 comes out early next year, it will be an even bigger improvement on Vista and the catch-up-game will continue to widen.
Recent Comments