On 28/11/2007, Sean DALY <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On the subject of citizen journalists, if I could generalize, I'd say > it's quite true that we work for free and have to support ourselves by > other means. Yet we feel that some stories should be covered that both > the mainstream press and the specialised press cover superficially, or > not at all, or from a traditional angle which misses the mark. And the > Internet offers very inexpensive worldwide distribution without the > usual space constraints, and led by Google fairly reliable text > indexing so people can locate articles.
Not being a journalist actually has it's advantages. Given that the profession is held in low regard by most people these days, you might almost suggest that blogging rises above print journalism. For example, no-one can say that they will ring your editor and get you sacked. The only one I have is inside my head and no-one but me knows his phone number. Also, you often fall under the radar. PR people were, and still are, quite snooty about using "professionals" for their filthy trade. Bloggers are not mass-market enough for them! And the advertisers who pay my hosting fees do so on a page-impression basis, so there is no cosying up to a single advertiser interest. It's almost impossible to do, in fact. Although I have had difficulty obtaining accreditation once or twice, > most of the time press contacts are more concerned with track record > and professionalism than the press card -- the Internet lets them find > out very quickly how a news "blog" reports. I've had two knock backs from accreditation, one from ITV and the other from Virgin Media. Both rejected my online application for access to their press site, but both reversed their position when I made a phone call. In this regard, what does concern me is the sorry state of metadata in > audio and video, both on the creation side and the indexing side. > Almost all podcasts I listen to or download have the bare minimum of > metadata, if at all. Video is not much better. Of course, when MPEG-1 > was published in 1992, metadata was not a chief concern; the MP3 ID3 > initiative has been a useful hack, but I will always prefer Ogg Vorbis > and Ogg Theora since metadata can be flexibly added at or after > creation with FOSS tools. Of course, Free containers by no means lead > today's proprietary and patent-encumbered formats, which all propose > some kind of metadata stocking scheme; it's just much harder to find > and deploy tools to get to metadata reliably, especially in a > workflow. But then, the effort expended to stock metadata such as IPTC > -- the most interesting bits of which are often human-keyed at the > source, such as names of people, captions, copyright, contact > information -- goes to waste, since neither Google nor anybody else > I'm aware of indexes it, even on the desktop. I think it's a > fundamental problem for finding audiovisual content in any > computer-based system. Even machine generated EXIF goes ignored. In > this light, Adobe XMP seems to me an interesting approach, to federate > media metadata with XML (CC likes it too). I am convinced the > solutions to these two problems, at the source and by indexers, are > fundamental to developing media online, that it will be far more > worthwhile to indicate copyright than to rely on DRM encryption > schemes. It really does my head in that we can't have access to the subtitles that are produced by the BBC and others, it would be great to find bits of video by text search. One of the best features of Facebook - the one that sold it to me in the first place before it got covered in terrible childish sub-mobile-phone "applications" - is the fantastic ability to tag photos with multiple people's identities. I dream of the day when every bit of TV content is tagged, down to frame level, with the actor, presenter, character and other details like the location, date, time etc. I still dream of having the BBC News 24 Aston outputs as a data feed. But dreaming's all I do, if only they'd come true.. ..I should be so lucky Sean. > - > Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please > visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. > Unofficial > list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ > -- Please email me back if you need any more help. Brian Butterworth http://www.ukfree.tv
