Who blogs anyway?
Blogging has exploded in popularity over the past 2 years which has a hand in changing the internet by the second. Millions of people all around the globe participate in a common web linked “blogosphere” which has a huge impact on navigation of the internet by any web user. Anybody can start a blog within minutes and begin sharing their thoughts, fun videos and links with the world. Photographers, writers, painters, poets, musicians, and filmmakers can all benefit from using a blog to promote their art whenever they want at zero cost. Many politicians and celebrities have begun blogging as a way to connect to fans and supporters. Presidential candidate Barack Obama has launched mybarackobama.com , which is a social networking site which allows users to create their own blogs, read about Obama’s campaign and you can even connect with him and other user’s on the site. Electronica musician Moby has his own blog that he shares on his website www.moby.com/journal .
What is Web 2.0?
Web 2.0 is a fairly new concept that is just begining to make headlines in mainstream media since it is reshaping how media is being delivered to the consumer. Basically web 2.0 is the idea of using weblogs, social bookmarking, wikis and RSS feeds to cross reference each other to create a new layer on the internet which many people refur to as the “blogesphere”. If you’ve ever noticed the vast amount of linking in popular blogs, or even this one, chances are the blogger understands the concept of web 2.0. Citing references to wikipedia, news articles or even videos has become the fundimental driving force behind the web 2.0 movement. Bloggers are also tagging news articles and videos which in turn, organize news history by subject, date, country…etc. Here is a great video which briefly describes web 2.0.
source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
The explosion of video websites like youtube, google video and metacafe, also plays a huge role within the web 2.0 realm. Interest focused video sites have spawned from these sites as the ability to embed videos in blogs has become available. RSS feeds provide instant communication between websites which allows information to automatically update. There are many RSS feeds which provide video feeds to any RSS aggregator which provide tv show feeds such as The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and MSNBC news. Most video podcasts include RSS video feeds as well. One of the best video RSS aggregators available right now is called Democracy. With the Democracy player, you can download these RSS video shows and podcasts automatically, and if you have an xbox 360, you can stream wmv video files right to your television.
If you live in the Fredericton area and you’ve thought about starting a blog to promote yourself as an actor and/or filmmaker, then take a look at Civic-Fidelity Fredericton. Ci-fi.org is a Fredericton based and focused project which is working on uniting artists within the Fredericton area using free services such as blogs, photo galleries, video and audio. If you’ve ever thought of creating an audio or video podcast, Civic Fidelity is a great place to host your media. The Fredericton Media Commons section of the website is an experimental project in which users of the site may upload video and music files to be shared with other users. Ci-Fi is encouraging users to download other users’ music, remix it, then repost it to the site. This process is possible via Creative Commons licensing. With Creative Commons licensing, users do not have to worry about copyright infringements because the license dictates what people can do with the media. This encourages collaboration between strangers who live in the same city. The Fredericton Media Commons will serve the city as a media resource centre. If you are a film maker looking for free music to use in a film, then head over to the Media Commons, download an mp3, place it in your film and just give the credit to the user, you don’t even need to ask for their permission! Civic Fidelity’s free services can be found here:
Blogs: http://blogs.ci-fi.net/
Photo Galleries: http://galleries.ci-fi.net/main.php
Fredericton Media Commons: http://commons.ci-fi.org/
More info on Ci-fi.org: http://ci-fi.net/
Here is a video which sums Creative Commons up quite nicely:
http://commons.ci-fi.org/people/testuser/testuser_-_Building_on_the_Past.mov
Filed under: Blogs
