Youtube - Broadcast Yourself

YouTube is a popular video sharing website where users can upload, view, and share video clips. Videos can be rated, and the average rating and the number of times a video has been watched are both published.

Founded in February 2005 by three former employees of PayPal, the San Bruno-based service uses Adobe Flash technology to display video. The wide variety of site content includes movie and TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos. Currently staffed by 67 employees, the company was named TIME magazine's "Invention of the Year" for 2006. In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the company for US$1.65 billion in Google's stock. The deal closed on 13 November 2006.



And Now here's Bush's attempt :



Videos like this are posted up by members of the Youtube audience in hope that they will be found and watched by others around the world. Anything from a talking carrot or a giant rabbit to a mini elephant can be found on Youtube. People often try to make people laugh with these videos with their amazing use of computer animation and editing. Often controversial videos are the focus of an audience for a few days and this will be displayed as a popular video on the site.

Institutions are benefiting from the new idea of using macromedia flash to display and distribute videos for free. They can be pasted into emails and embedded into other companies sites for no cost at all. The promotion that is automatically given to Youtube is enough of a repayment for their uses.
They are also losing out in some ways. Film companies have to release DVD’s many months earlier because of the free and illegal distribution of them online. Television is gradually losing its appeal to the many millions of Youtube fans as they don’t ave to wait for the allocated time of broadcast on Youtube, people now have busy lives and like to have choice over where and when they watch what they want to watch. This may be why 40% of Youtubist’s are over the age of 30. Offices are overrun by the mountains of Youtube material that is distributed amongst workers that in some cases the site had to be barred from the office computers.

Youtube has been the replacement of TV for hardcore fans, feature length programmes being posted up get regular Niche audiences. Overall distribution and democratisation are the key concepts of the Youtube case study. Free distribution of videos and an allowance for people to express themselves for free and maybe get quite popular is the catalyst for this revolution.

The Free Metro Newspaper

Metro is the trading name of a free daily newspaper, published by Associated Newspapers (part of Daily Mail and General Trust) in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. It is available from Monday to Friday each week on many public transport services across the United Kingdom and Ireland.

The paper was launched in London in 1999, and can now be found in 13 UK urban centres. Localised editions are distributed in Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Sussex, Sheffield, The East Midlands, Bristol and Bath. A Dublin version, launched in conjunction with Metro International and The Irish Times, began publications on 10 October 2005. It is part of the same media group as The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday and the Evening Standard, although in some areas, the paper operates as a franchise with a local newspaper publisher, rather than as a wholly owned concern.

The website; ‘www.metro.co.uk’ is not only a place where obviously headline are displayed, just like any other respectful spreadsheet or even tabloid newspaper does but it is a place where interactivity is rife. It provides additional sections, including ‘weird stuff’ , ‘metrosexual’ and even blogs and podcasts.

The website strongly benefits from the strong base of the paper itself, they are distributed in various places (taking london for an example) on buses, tubes, trains & other forms of transport. When people wake up to commute to work, the metro along with other, less significant free London newspapers is what they encounter, being the most dominant & well known the reading of it becomes a daily ritual. There are sections that are divided just to suit the ‘average commuter’, or they can rely on the fact that they are so widespread in what they publish that anyone would have an interest in any particular section.

Issues are raised in the sometimes issued ‘Outrage?’ section, this involves them publishing a short story that can later on be commented on via the online blog room. Headings like ‘Chocolate Christ Sculpture’ which are designed to immediately catch the readers eye are often posted in this section. This section also displays another aspect of convergence as they allow the reader to text in on their mobile phone, maybe while on the way to work, school or wherever their place of work is. The newspapers publisher does everything to warm the reader to the newspaper to encourage them to use different medias to get involved.

The Metro are part of Daily Mail & General trust and although it is distributed as a free newspaper it does receive a lot of profit, solely due to the interactivity that is involved with it. The encouraged mass convergence leads to many texts & emails being sent in, competitions are involved also.

On the site many trailers, webzines & blogs are posted to correlate with what the reader of the metro may have read in the day, they can be saved & kept in a blog of the readers choice. Videos that readers have made themselves can also be posted on the site, even news videos that have been headlines in the newspapers. Even a man that killed his wife, then tried to hide in a hospital but was finally hosed out with a police hose. As it is a tabloid newspaper the website is open to advertisement also, including news on band concerts & films at the cinema at the current time.

Overall this website is a very good example of intractivity, as the newspaper is just something that was initially published to be a 20 minute read it has done very well for itself. People now, not only pick up and read the magazine but when they arrive home they comment on things they had seen earlier in the newspaper, post their thoughts and even videos recorded from their mobiles, which just shows the amount of convergence involved in the simple activity of reading a free tabloid newspaper

Blogging- New Media Activity

A blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.

Blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of most early blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media.

The term "blog" is a portmanteau, or, in other words, a blend of the words web and log (Web log). "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

The internet has been quite a developing phenomenon over the past few years & has started to divert down different pathways & is now not only seen as a large source of information but a place were you can socialise, chat, download & even share your views.

Blogs are an opportunity to interact with people who have the same views as you. Also information that is known by a member or participant of a particular blog can be shared, all in the interest of the other blog participants.

When a blog gets more popular & developed it may turn into a wiki, where actual proven facts that are shared by all the blog participants can be entered.

A wiki is a website that allows visitors to add, remove, edit and change content, typically without the need for registration. It also allows for linking among any number of pages. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. The term wiki can also refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a site, or to certain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (the original wiki) WikiWikiWeb and online encyclopaedias such as Wikipedia.

Metro – Blogging Podcast

Overall I think blogging is a vital tool in the development of the internet as blogging as an activity has brought all different parts of the web together. It has included the information seekers in the web, the people who just want to express themselves in the form of media; music, video & even games. Mass interactivity has been made available while democratisation has been what the blog creators have been striding to achieve, the successful can go onto being wiki’s – a place where we can edit entries into an online encyclopaedia, quite something eh?