Educational CyberPlayGround ®

Find Definitions, folksonomy and Resources for Podcasts, webcasts, audiocasts, Blogs, audioblogs, social networking, odeo, flicker, RSS, wiki, web 2.0 and smart mobs.

Power - if everyone has it, then no one has it.

The people formerly known as the audience are publishing on the net, both the audience and the media sources are publishers. From now on, the norm is a potentially hostile interview situation where everyone can read what happened from both sides. There is someone monitoring every word who can and will produce the transcript.

"Freedom of the Press belongs to those who have the presses." The presses are everywhere now, anyone can say anything without an editor!

Not even 50% of people who have access to the Internet are checking email on a daily basis. And Only 3% have made travel reservations or looked at someone's blog on any give day. Source

The FTC's Advertising Guidelines for Bloggers and Podcasters
Bloggers should disclose if they are paid to review a product or blog about it. Some bloggers never disclose their secret relationship. So you can't believe what they say. They may have been paid to say it. However, the FTC is not planning on investigating individual bloggers, guidelines are just that -- guidelines. "They are not rules and regulations, and they don't have the force of law," Engle said. "They are guidelines intended to help advertisers comply with Section 5 of the FTC Act," which covers unfair or deceptive practices.

What are all these new words? Blogs, feeds, push, webcasts, audiocasts, podcasts, videoblogs, aggregators, and rss feeds maybe a lot of hubub over nothing.
In the scheme of things are these important to know about or spend time to understand? Is it in anyway better to read these words on a blog somewhere than on the webpage you are looking at right now?

SOCIAL NETWORKING What every parent and educator should know.

how did we get here?


Yadda Yadda Yadda Much Ado about Nothing New
The Rush To Pledge Phi Beta Blogger

Humans love gab, love to be communicators, transmitters, and feel what they have to say is just so very important, special, unique, cutting edge, creative.
There is just so much to say, by so many people, and how will you get the attention from the public that will make your voice heard over the white noise using endless broadband?

A lot of talk, a lot of publishing, a lot to watch, but is anyone listening?

2006 The latest study, completed by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, found that about 12 percent of Internet users have downloaded a podcast at some time. Only a tiny fraction of people who have tried out podcasts actually listen to them on a regular basis. That jibes with the results of an earlier study -- conducted by the Diffusion Group, a technology-consulting firm -- that concluded that more than 80 percent of podcast downloads never reach MP3 players.

All we are talking about is talking, just more and more ways to transmit.

EXCELLENT FLASH MOVIE showing the future of news. The NYT is reduced to a mere newsletter.

JOURNALISTS VS. BLOGGERS WAR

The Professional News Media
owns a license
to broadcast over the TV and Radio to the public.

WHAT ACTUALLY DOES MATTER

THIS IS REALLY ABOUT FREEDOM.

What you hear is unregulated by the FCC so you know how amazing that is. This is the promise of the internet fullfilled.

Bless the founders of the net.

Who Owns Big Media and how P2P will dominate the Media monopoly?

This is also about money and the agencies used to pay copyright royalties to publishers who own the rights to the content.

IMO: If you don't own the license you aren't a professional broadcaster.

Webcast aka Netcast aka Podcast

Issues - the effects of blogging on journalism as an industry, including ethical issues, journalistic standards and law. "There has been, and there is right now, a power-shift right now, from the producers of media to the people formally known as the audience," Rosen continued. "Mostly because of the Internet.... This has led to a loss of sovereignty by the press... a loss of exclusive control. You are not the boss anymore; what you say is no longer the law."

WEBCASTING, PODCASTING, STREAMING AUDIO, INTERNET BROADCASTING

Webcasting now rivals traditional, terrestrial-based over-the-air radio stations. There are thousands of unique streams on the Internet and this archive house articles and informational pieces on webcasting, webcasters, streaming audio and Internet broadcasting.
(v.) (1) To use the Internet to broadcast live or delayed audio and/or video transmissions, much like traditional television and radio broadcasts. For example, a university may offer on-line courses in which the instructor Webcasts a pre-recorded or live lecture, or an enterprise may Webcast a press conference in lieu of or in addition to a conference call. Users typically must have the appropriate multimedia application in order to view a Webcast.
(2) To use push technology, to send Web-based information to an Internet user. (PUSH ME PULL YOU TECHNOLOGY ala Dr. Doolittle)

BLOGS AND DISCUSSION BOARDS

BLOG invented in 1998
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting#Blogs
is not a website it is only a webpage that you post content to - starting at the top the newest info is first - viewer scrolls down the page to see the old content.
Blogs and wikis are simply forms of mass communication. Blogs are a medium, just like a webpage, paper, or e-mail. And they can be used for evil. They can spread lies. And as with any medium, people can do good and useful things with them or ridiculous and bad things with them. You can't stop technology from evolving but you have to educate readers about the dangers of believing everything they read.
In short, this is a perfect illustration of the increasing need for Information Literacy skills in the general population. But the "blog" as an entity is simply a medium, not the cause of the problem. Children fail to realize, the internet is conventional word of mouth on steroids.

Web 2.0 Blog tools

Where to find Blogs?

How to get your Blog Found?
Classification is the hierarchy of terms used for information that you would use if you are a librarian or the library of congress or a database designer. Taxomy is practice of classifying plants and animals according to their presumed natural relationships like how we ordinary normal humans would think about it.

FOLKSONOMY

Thomas Vander Wal, the information architect credited with coining the term "FOLKSONOMY".

Normal ordinary humans = FOLK
SEE FOLKMUSIC
Scientific Classification = TAXONOMY

FOLKSONOMY - According to various speakers at Online, folksonomies and tagging are becoming increasingly important. Web 2.0 presents exciting opportunities for networked information of the future - see The Hive Mind. "Many recently developed concepts and technologies are seen as contributing to Web 2.0, including weblogs, wikis, podcasts, rss feeds and other forms of many to many publishing; social software, web APIs, web standards, online web services, AJAX, and others."). See popular tags used for music

Tags give you subject related Metadata

Tags add value to the giant piles of data that are already out there. What are tags? Thousands of members use tags to give some contextual meaning to more than 3.5 million pictures that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle. You can give your photos a "tag", which is like a keyword or category label. Tags help you find photos which have something in common. Let folks loose categorizing their own stuff on their own terms.

Furl, MetaFilter and the blog index Technorati are generally considered folksonomy trailblazers.

TOOLS

TECHNOLOGY TOOLS FOR K12

How and why do you Integrate Technology into the Classroom?

Phonetags, an experimental internal service that we've been running inside the BBC which allows you to bookmark, tag and rate songs you've heard on the radio with your mobile phone.Now I want to talk briefly a bit about one interesting way of using folksonomic tags that we developed conceptually while building the system.

Blogging doesn't don't do diddly for most people's businesses. After four years of research, MarketingSherpa reporters estimate only ".03% of the 34.5 million existing blogs are driving sales or prospective customers to their bloggers".

Blogger.com
This is one of the most popular free blog hosts. Users can create a personal or a group blog for free - either by using their hosted service (BlogSpot) or one's own web host.

More FREE Blogs

WordPress has a setting so that all replies to postings have to be moderated by the blog administrator... a reply is held and not posted until the admin / owner / moderator approves it. WordPress at Open Source CMS (http://www.opensourcecms.com) set up on the web server. Blogsome http://blogsome.com/

FLICKER - social networking with tags but it's all about photographs that are public for all to see whose purpose is that people with similiar interests can connect. Like Marissa Mayr of Google leading to Global X

PODCASTING

Gabcast - http://gabcast.com
Hipcast - http://hipcast.com
Gcast - http://gcast.com brought to you by the garageband guys.

GET SMART -- AUDIO BLOG Please record your American Playground Poetry, the folksongs, jump rope chants, kiddy rhymes, circle games, play parties, call and response songs, using your ipod, shoe phone, or computer.

Audio Blog

GET SMART

Please record your American Playground Poetry, the folksongs, jump rope chants, kiddy rhymes, circle games, play parties, call and response songs, using your ipod, shoe phone, or computer.

TRY IT NOW

Podcasting was invented by Dannie J. Gregoire, who registered the domain name podcasting.net.
Podcasting is the creation and aggregation of discrete, downloadable media files from internet radio, internet audio programs, or phones. Typically, audio files are created on a computer and then uploaded to a web server on the Internet. These recordings are then made available for download to a portable digital audio device. You can then listen to the podcast internet radio program while you are away from your computer or at a different time than the original program was broadcast.

The term podcasting is meant to rhyme with broadcasting and is a derivative of the iPod platform. While not directly associated with Apple's iPod device or iTunes music service, they did both contribute the desire and the technology for this capability.

A podcast is a radio show that listeners subscribe to online. Every time a new program is posted, it automatically feeds into the subscriber's computer. From there, the listener zaps it onto a digital music player and hits the road: Think of it as TiVo for your MP3 player. This is very portable and you can dump a whole bunch of programs on your iPod and take it with you. Apple supports podcasts in the latest version of iTunes for subscribing to podcasts, audio recordings. Software called iPodder, allows listeners to route audio files to digital music players by sending audio files through RSS feeds in place of text to any digital music device.

The term podcasting plays upon the terms broadcasting and webcasting and is derived from the name of the iPod portable music player, the playback device of choice of many early podcast listeners (though podcasting is not directly associated with Apple's iPod device or iTunes jukebox software.) Podcasting is similar to digital video recorders (DVRs) such as TiVo, which let you record and store TV programs for later viewing. Podcasting differs from DVRs in that it is mainly used for audio content (though it can be used to pull any kind of file, including software updates, pictures, and videos.)

Warning: podcasts -- the newest trend in underground radio. A billion computers that can play these mp3 files is the market. Podcasts are essentially usually free radio shows that can be downloaded from the Internet to your computer or digital music player, where you can listen to the show whenever you want to - like using your vcr to capture your fav tv show to watch whenever. Former MTV personality Adam Curry, widely credited as the pioneer of podcasting (or "podfather"), has joined forces with Sirius Satellite Radio.

PODCAST
HOW TO OVERVIEW


Podcasts are a unique combination of subscription and publication. Podcast Creators have to figure out their recording and editing software, licensing issues for music, difficulties in capturing phone conversations, and the technical details of creating the podcast-aware RSS feed.

Public radio podcast directory

RSS: podcasts are syndicated, meaning listeners just have to find them once, and receive them every time a broadcast is issued.

Record Audio / Mixing the Audio

1) Use the internal microphone on my laptop, and

2) Audacity editing tool to save files as mp3

3) Handheld digital recorder with 128 megs of RAM, that holds almost six hours of high-quality audio in Windows Media format and the

4) Open source tool Easy WMA to convert it into an MP3 and compress it.

Compression

Video Compression 3ivx
Accessible when using Final Cut Pro as File/Export/As Quicktime Compression option in the drop-down menu.

click the options button and make a variety of adjustments, setting the codec to 3ivx,lowering the audio quality and setting the frame rate to 15 frames per second.

Video Editing

1) To mix music with your voice - Final Cut Pro, or Audacity

2) editing - Final Cut Pro or iMovie

Capture Video

1) digital camera (two megapixel or higher) that shoots AVI format video at 15 frames per second, or shoots Quicktime video at 30 frames.

Free Unlimited Hosting for the public interest.

ibiblio.org and ourmedia.org

Create a Channel to serve up audio casts

VIDEOBLOG / VLOGS

Video blogging Learn how to video yourself with your own webcam and then put it up online somewhere.

Webcast Listings or Directories

RSS

THERE IS NOTHING SIMPLE ABOUT RSS IT IS DIFFICULT. What is RSS? and Publishing RSS Feeds?

Dave Winer invented RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast
RSS feeds will be the next major ICT literacy challenge for the general public, particularly when only five percent of people on the Net use RSS and they tend to be white, well-off, and very well educated, according to the folks at Pew.

 

Make an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosure tags which is then amended each time a new media file is published, including a URL linking to each enclosure. Client software (such as iPodder) is then used to aggregate the RSS feeds, automatically downloading the enclosures and organizing the files based on the user's preferences.

Security experts disagree about the possible threat of computer worms transmitted via RSS feeds. While no virus has yet used this method, some worry that when any network becomes large enough it will become a target. Although it may not be an immediate threat, theoretically exploited RSS data feeds could direct users to malicious websites. Worms that could use RSS readers to spread are a more comlex threat that currently does not pose a practical danger as the feeds generally do not have large enough subscriptions.

SMART MOBS



Definition of The smart mob
is a new form of social coordination made possible by the usage of modern technology, in particular the Internet and wireless devices (e.g. mobile phones, PDAs). A "smart mob" is a group that, contrary to the usual connotations of "mob", behaves intelligently or efficiently because of its exponentially-increasing network links. Parallels are made to, for instance, slime moulds. It's basically a practical implementation of Collective intelligence.Howard Rheingold's notion of viral-like social coordination enabled by information and communications technologies.
There is nothing automatically smart about mobs. Just because a large group of people decide to do something doesn't mean it is a smart thing to do. Remember Nazi Germany was a mob of people too.

WIKI

The Wiki.org site defines a Wiki as "the simplest online database that could possibly work." It is a "piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser.
Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly." Some uses of Wikis in education include collaborative writing projects, discussion forums, project spaces/libraries, and interdisciplinary projects.

JSPWiki

In "Making the Case for a Wiki" (ARIADNE, issue 42, January 2005) Emma Tonkin explains what a Wiki is and how to choose and deploy a Wiki implementation. The article is available online at
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/tonkin/.