New Media - Podcasts

The emergence of new technology brings about new media, as more possibilities to further communication become available. One such media that has come about through the rise of technology are podcasts. I would like to use this post to try and explain what a podcast is and after that I will namedrop a couple of podcasts that I recommend, to give them free advertising.

Podcasts are a relatively new media. They are online distributed audio files that can be downloaded that uses an RSS feed to keep its audience up to date with the latest podcasts (Morris, 2006). Morris continues on to say that originally, podcasts were used as radio shows, but the uses for a podcast has blossomed to interviews and even lessons. The term itself is a portmanteau referring to Apple’s iPod, a popular portable media player, and broadcast (Oxford University Press, n.d.). In short, it is an online distributed show that you can download onto your computer, subscribe to be constantly updated with new podcasts, and put it on your portable media player if you want to listen to it on the go. It should be noted that there are also now video podcasts, which came about when iPods that feature video playback were introduced (Bowers, 2006). Same deal as podcasts, just with video added to it.

Now that we’ve got the technicalities out of the way, I’d like to recommend some podcasts to you. If vulgarity, wild ideas, and the inane conversations of a British comedian with his collaborator and uniquely logical producer is up your alley, please check out Ricky Gervais’ site for access to his podcast “The Ricky Gervais Show” and his occasional free podcasts (and some video podcasts too) available here. If you like comedy, particularly British comedy, you owe it yourself to check out Ricky Gervais’ work.

Ricky Gervais podcast promotional picture (Source: rickygervais.com)

Also, if you’re into chess, I’d recommend listening to Alexandra Kosteniuk’s Chess is Cool podcast. Alexandra offers many tips and explanations to the intricacies of chess and if you want to learn by yourself, this would be a good place to start. It should be noted that all the podcasts are audio only though, which I feel has the ability to hurt the quality and strength of the explanations somewhat. Nevertheless, if you are familiar with the chess board notation terminology, then this podcast is an absolute wealth of chess information.

References

Bowers, A 2006, “Textcasting,” anyone?, Slate, viewed 2 May 2008, <http://www.slate.com/id/2136959/>

Morris, T 2006, Podcasts increasing in popularity, Map Interesting, viewed 2 May 2008, <http://www.map100.com/mapinteresting.php/podcasts-increasing-in-popularity/>

Oxford University Press n.d., Word of the month: Podcast, viewed 2 May 2008, <http://www.oup.com/elt/catalogue/teachersites/oald7/wotm/wotm_archive/podcast?cc=global>

Print Media vs Online Media

You may be wondering why a self proclaimed blog based on publication design has successfully talked about blogs for three whole posts straight. Well, the idea is that, know your medium, know your tools in those mediums, and you shall be able to create wonderful affects with them. That said, it is time to look at the differences between print and online media.

We’ll start with what constitutes good design.

For print design, Walsh (2006 p. 24) states that the reader decodes the message found within a printed document. This means that the context, the style, the tone, the format of the message contained within a printed document are all understood by a reader. If the reader is familiar with the context of the printed document well enough to decode it, then the message can be understood and meaning can be made out of it (Walsh 2006 p. 28). Any text on a printed document must be coherently placed, with proper use of framing, colour scheme, textual mood, one could use print media to effectively bring its intended message to the audience clearly (Walsh 2006 p. 34).

I would like to highlight one sterling example of this, seen in an Absolut ad. Absolut is known for making ads using their bottle shape as a constant presence in all of their print ads. This one I would like to point out is no different, as it is one they did based on the Bangkok lifestyle. They used the boats to frame the shape of the ever popular Absolut bottle, and at the bottom it says Absolut Bangkok. Pretty self explanatory, and everything in the design reflects this.

Absolut Bangkok ad (Source: Absolutads.com)

Moving on to web design, Nielsen (1997) said that people do not read websites, they scan them, seeing single words or sentences. This is because reading things on a computer screen is tiring, web browsing is a fast moving activity where stopping to read could be seen as detrimental, there are so many other web pages to see, and of course, time is a factor where not everyone has the luxury to surf. Due to those factors, online pages have to be designed with scanning in mind, perhaps utilising and employing techniques such as highlighted keywords, relevant headings, bulleted lists, an idea per paragraphs, beginning with the most important idea first and a much lower word count compared to writing on print. These would help contribute to a user’s understanding of a web page when they scan it, though good design does not stop there.

Since web pages are in abundance with little tells as to its authenticity, credibility is an issue and to get that credibility a website needs to establish trust towards its audience. Nielsen (1999) states that design quality, up-front disclosure of information, a lack of server downtime, and outgoing hyperlinks all contribute to a site’s trustworthiness.

Let me illustrate this. I love getting my hands on free MP3s, and I am a gamer. Therefore, I frequent two game music remixing sites, Overclocked Remix and VGMix. Overclocked Remix is a professionally designed website, with music indexed by composer, remixer, remix name, game name, and more. It also features a latest remixes column on the right side of the page, some of the latest forum posts on the front, their latest communal remixing project, all that on just their homepage. Also, their server is hardly ever (practically never) down.

Overclocked Remix homepage (Source: Overclocked Remix)

VGMix on the other hand, has been…less than stellar the past couple of years. Bogged down with an unintuitive interface a few years back, they took time to reconstruct the site from the ground up and replaced it with very simplistic forums in the meantime while they worked on recoding the whole site. The managed to gain create a much better, faster and intuitive site at the end of their endeavour, roughly a whole year later than their projected and promised date. While the interface is much better now, it still lacks many of the features of Overclocked Remix, such as a latest remixes column for instance. This bogs down usability and frankly, having to wait a few years for a proper upgrade from a below average site layout to a more workable but still flawed site design for its purposes hardly helps matters. Thus, I am a regular visitor of Overclocked Remix and only a rare, sporadic visitor of VGMix. It is much easier to find what I want in Overclocked Remix, and to me, ease of use is an exceedingly important factor in any online document, and VGMix could well do with some improvements.

VGMix homepage (Source: VGMix)

Now, assuming something was published both on print and online with identical content, which would be better?

Spyridakis, Schultz, Bartell (2005) have found that as far as reading comprehension goes, understanding printed text is easier than understanding online text, regardless of text design. They surmised that it could be that since online reading comprehension is in its infancy as opposed to printed text comprehension, the user’s familiarity with the medium may be a contributing factor, as well as other factors outlined by Nielsen earlier. Regardless of cause, this brings up the issue where at this stage in time, putting up lots of information or text online may not be a very good idea, as user understanding for heavy texts is easier when it is printed. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why e-books have not really taken off that well and that bookstores like MPH and Popular still thrive on selling actual books with paper in them. Compare this to the music industry, which is currently experiencing a shift in power from hard copy CDs to online MP3 purchases from sites such as the iTunes Music Store and Audiogalaxy. Thus, the amount of text is an important consideration, especially if you were to design it for the web.

Here is the tl;dr version (or too long, didn’t read for those not used to that acronym):

- Good design for print involves great use of all design elements to bring a message to the reader
- Good design for web involves building ease of use and credibility and trust to the user
- Printed text is easier to comprehend and is more suited for longer text
- Online text is better for quick and easy information across a variety of sources.

And that’s that.

References

Walsh, M 2006, The ‘textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37

Nielsen, J 1997, How users read on the web, useit.com, viewed 2 May 2008, <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html>

Nielsen, J 1999, Trust or bust: Communicating trustworthiness in web design, useit.com, viewed 2 May 2008, <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990307.html>

Spyridakis, JH, Schultz, LD, Bartell, AL 2005, Heading frequency and comprehension: Studies of print versus online media, viewed 1 May 2008, <http://tc.eserver.org/out/29651/http://www.stc.org/ConfProceed/2005/PDFs/0032.pdf>

Blog, o Sphere

Ever heard of the term blogosphere? It is defined as the total collective network of blogs (Kirchhoff, Bruns & Nicolai 2007). You got a blog? You’re part of the whole world’s blogosphere.

So how big is the blogosphere? While we had numbers for the amount of bloggers in America in the previous post, let us take a look at a more international level.

Sifry (2006), founder and chairman of the popular blog search engine and indexing site Technorati, has said that as of November 2006 there are more than 57 million blogs tracked. That is the size of the blogosphere according to Technorati, and it sure is a hefty number. Sifry also notes that the rate at which the blogosphere doubles is within the 150-240 days range, which is also very impressive.

Chart shows the total number of blogs (Source: Technorati)

Chart shows the rate of doubling the blogosphere (Source: Technorati)

So, now we’re sure that the blogosphere is gargantuan in nature, and it breeds really fast. What of the blogging communities present though? What do different blogging communities, or different blogospheres, talk about?

America for instance is having their general elections this year. A quick look at the top tags (which are keywords used to identify topics discussed in blog posts) over at Technorati show that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and politics are amongst the top tags, alongside more general tags like technology and video. This shows that the American political scene is hot right now and is a strong topic of discussion.

Another place which politics is a hot topic is Malaysia when it comes to blogging topics. Horribly constrained in other, moderated mediums such as the newspaper or television, the Malaysian public have taken it upon themselves to tell what they think about Malaysian politics in blogs and they are fairly open about it too (or as open as they can be without this happening). I myself read a political/personal blog, Crossroad Creeks, with its many, many posts on politics and law issues that are relevant in Malaysia today.

Blogging communities of course may not necessarily be defined by their geographical location, but also by their topicality. This can be achieved by using blogrolls, which LeFever (2003) defines as a series of links on one’s blog to link to other blogs that are relevant. This helps the community of that particular interest to be notified of each other’s blogs, and shows the issues at hand for a community as a whole. Blogging index sites like Technorati mentioned earlier and Topix separate their blogs by category of content so that you can find the kind of blog you are interested in. Should the blog you view be not that suitable, well, chances are, that blog will have a blogroll, or outgoing links, to other sites and blogs with the relevant information. That is the idea of the blogroll, and that is why it is a useful tool to bring blogging communities of any kind together.

To wit, the blogosphere is a huge web of information and opinions, and linking blogs allows communities to reach out and get together. Makes life easy for blog readers to know what they want. And even if they don’t know what they want, chances are if they click on the links long enough, they will eventually find what they want. Hopefully, anyway.

Oh, and if you were wondering, this blog falls under the "It's an assignment" community. We don't have a webring up yet, but we're working on that.*

* We are not really working on that, as it is not part of the assessment.

References

LeFever, L 2003, What is a blogroll? Why would I want one?, Commoncraft, viewed 1 May 2008, <http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000427.html>

Kirchhoff, L, Bruns, A, Nicolai, T 2007, Investigating the impact of the blogosphere: Using PageRank to determine the distribution of attention, viewed 1 May 2008, <http://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/EXPORT/DL/38960.pdf>

Sifry, D 2006, State of the Blogosphere, Technorati, viewed 1 May 2008, <http://technorati.com/weblog/2006/11/161.html>