If I came from a prestigious university like Cambridge, Oxford or many others were the university is steeped in century old traditions then I would feel a great inclination to go to my graduation. As things stand I don’t feel any need. Everyone else would go to lectures and leave as soon as they could, same with practical work. As a result there was never that great university feeling from those on my course.
Dziga Vertov is an interesting personality because of his ideas of the Cinema eye. His notion was that with the cinema eye, the Kino Glaz you could capture life unawares whilst being involved in the creative treatment of actuality. After making some quick money by answering some social networking questions I dropped by the apple store only to find that computer games are far too expensive for what they are. I dropped down via the usual streets and got to waterstone’s.
Whilst in Paris I was given a coffee due to a misunderstanding between the waitress, a friend and I and as a result this was the first coffee I ever finished. It’s almost a week later and I’ve just been to see the documentary Black Gold which discusses the plight of Ethiopian coffee farmers. The documentary is shot in an observational style with the use of intertitles rather than voice over.
The digital era of communcation is a great one because research for video material is no longer restricted the archives of the INA, France television, BBC, TSR and other archives to find footage you’re looking for. A producer from steamboat films was working on a documentary about the walkman and found a lot of historic footage to make the subject come alive. She aslo needed some comtemporary representation of how the modern walkman is used and came across silent disco and my footage.
As I write this I am happy that I have been to watch quite a few interesting documentaries at the Frontline Club. The two most recent were made for Channel 4’s Unreported World. This is channel four’s “acclaimed foreign affairs series” and covers a number of topics. The two documentaries I watched were South Africa: Children of the Lost Generation and Jamaica: Guns votes and money.
Both are investigative observational documentaries showing the progress made by the journalists as they try to uncover the stories that other documentary channels cover.
Today’s news is as follows. Having seen that Bill Palmer of the Iprong podcast and website would add the 300th friend on Facebook I decided I would take this opportunity to add him. His podcast is “for the ipod generation so take the time to listen to it. It’s mainly about iphones and ipods but mixes in quite a few artists in the process. The second event was becoming the 3000th person to use twittermail.
I’m online from 10-15hrs a day on average and as a result I’m used to having everything available within a short amount of time. I also had access to a PVR with a hard disk upgrade for quite a long time. As a result of both these developments anything that is not available to me when I want to watch it goes unnoticed. That’s because “It’s an on-demand world” as was concluded in one edit I worked on for a client about the future of broadcasting.
Having a website is essential in today’s media landscape for one simple reason. You don’t exist until I can hyperlink to a website containing examples of your work and describing what you do. This is particularly true in today’s new media landscape. For the minimalist among you a facebook or myspace page is the bare minimum. For those of you that take your work seriously though a website is more efficient.
In today’s Twittervox episode we had Nik Butler talking about his idea of the flatlister. The concept is based around the idea that when someone is promoting themselves and building their own persona they are a flat lister. In other words they are in charge of their own persona and their own reputation. This carries on from a topic that was discussed by Jeff Pulver when he asked whether we prefer to use our real name or a nickname.
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Hey, your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience." (Facebook as of this morning) Reliability is the single most important thing for a website. If, as they suggest, facebook is down for a few hours then that is demonstrating one of the key reasons why my web presence is spread across so many different sites on the World Wide Web.