Intro Interactive – ICM501a

I really like to eat Spam.

Sorry for the epic fail in class. Congratulations to those of you who have already posted, in spite of this.

What you need

You’ll need some hardware and software to do this. If you have a recent laptop, you probably already have a built-in mic. This may work–some built-in mics are better than others–but the single most important thing you can do to improve the audio quality is to improve your mic. The lectures are recorded using a good headset mic, but still are not great quality. I recently have a Snowflake that I’m fairly happy with, but it’s not cheap. (Or, rather, it is cheap as microphones go–if you plan on doing some podcasting or other computer-based recording, it’s not bad at all–but it’s more expensive than most decent headsets.) For the purposes of this assignment alone, you can probably make use of your built-in mic, if you have one, but try to get close, without speaking (blowing) directly into it. Also, try to maintain the same distance from the mic throughout.

You will also need software. If you have a recent Mac, you are likely to have Garage Band already installed. Go ahead and use it, it’s a great product, and tutorials abound.

If not, I’m assuming you don’t have a recording program. You may–if you’ve done video before, you may have a copy of Protools already on your system. Or, if you’ve purchased the Production Premium suite from Adobe, you have a copy of Soundbooth, which is really overkill for what we are doing. I don’t have experience with Soundbooth, but you are welcome to give it a run.

Most podcasters use a piece of free, open source software called Audacity. Audacity is great–relatively easy to work with and powerful. And it’s free. There is a small hiccup. Because the MP3 format is not an open format, you have to actually install an MP3 encoder in addition to the Audacity software. Actually, if you want to publish in the free alternative to MP3, called OGG (ogg vorbis), that’s great with me. Otherwise, you’ll need to download the LAME encoder to create the MP3. This is the whole tortured AR-15 full auto thing I was talking about.

Mic: check. Software: check. On to recording.

Wait, you didn’t say check? If you have no mic, and want to be a little adventurous/tame, you might give one of the podcast-by-phone options a try. You can literally “phone it in.” There are a number of providers: Gcast, Phonecasting, Slapcast, Talkshoe, Hipcast, Yodio, and Gabcast, among others. If you go this route, let me know how it works out–I haven’t had much experience with them (I’ve been interviewed via a phone for podcasts, but never actually did the podcast).

Produce

I would recommend that you use a script. If you make a mistake, just wait a few seconds (so you can easily find it) and start again, you can edit out the error.

You want to keep the audio file to a reasonable size. Let’s say less than 8 Mb. If yours is bigger than that, cut some of it out. (No, not really, you can follow directions here for decreasing the bitrate of your mp3.) The smaller the file the better–and the less time it will take to upload. WAVs are great, but take up substantially more space. You may have already touched on lossy and lossless compression in 502–the same goes here. MP3 is a lossy algorithm, and a good choice for the web.

If you want, you can edit the ID tags, either in Audacity or in Winamp (or whatever player you use that will allow you to do this, or even just in Windows properties for Vista).

Hosting / Uploading

This should be the easiest part, but unlike a good cooking show host, I didn’t try the recipe first before inflicting it on you. Basically, I failed to click the “File URL” button on the “Link to” line. If I do that, it works fine. I blame the lack of caffeine!

There are, again, other hosting options, from the Internet Archive to Odeo, but the easiest (if not most usable!) way is to just click on the media upload on Wordpress, but remember to click the “File URL” button.

Finally, I ended up scrapping this reading, but encourage you to pursue it on your own, if you are interested in the audio side of things. It is a short graphic-format (comic book!) tracing how Ira Glass puts together “This American Life,” called Radio: An illustrated guide.

I may of mentioned that I don’t keep up with my aggregator as much as I used to. Part of the reason for that is that I use my friends as filters. Those I know pass along things I may be interested in via Twitter. And I can get at the larger communities interest through something like popurls.

For example, Thursday night’s popurls contained a treasure trove of materials relevant to 501 (not to mention a bunch of stuff–like the potential discovery of water on the moon) that was interesting but not as directly relevant.

• HOW TO: Launch Your Own Indie Journalism Site is an article written for Mashable by two recently laid off reporters.
• 10 Sites to Learn Something New in 10 Minutes a Day – I think that one of the least understood pieces of the social web is what it is doing to learning. This is another great post on Mashable about several sources of online, bite-sized learning.
• 30 Great Sites Using Wordpress as a CMS – As I’ve mentioned, I think Wordpress can be a great alternative CMS. Here’s a round up of organizations, including places like WSJ Magazine, Texas Tech, and Ford, who are making use of it that way.
• How I Got 294 Comments is an article on how to build buzz for a blog post.
• 50 Beautiful & Unique Twitter Profile Designs is one of those inspiring posts. I’ve now got a plan for my new Twitter background.
• Bionic Eye story in Wired.com describes this impressive iPhone app that is dragging us finally into Augmented Reality at the consumer level.
• 37 Signals Valuation Tops $100 Billion leaves me little doubt that I, too, can be a ridiculously successful entrepreneur.

jab

A few people have asked where they can find games. This seems like a strange question to me: where can’t you find games? But if you are at a complete loss, here are some starters.

Shipped With

There is a long history of including a game with an operating system or with hardware so that the new user could actually do something. This is the reason that you can immediately play Minesweeper on a Windows machine, or a Chess on the Mac.

As noted in the lecture, a couple of games were included with earlier computers: Spacewar (play an emulated version here) and some version of Adventure or Zork (try it as the most distracting 404 page ever). Zork is the quintessential text based adventure, worth trying if only to know why geeks sometimes come out with “You are likely to be eaten by a grue.”

Occasionally

My guess is that many of you have already spent more time than you would like to admit on something like Snood. Games like these, that you can theoretically play for a brief time and set aside, have done really well. Whirled has some fun Flash-based games. Or try something more collaborative, like iSketch.

Classics

A lot of people like to play the classic arcade games. You can find some here. Or, you could download MAME to play all sorts of video games.

First-person shooters

There are, of course, lots of first-person shooters out there. If you want to go classic, you can track down DOOM. Alternatively, your tax dollars have already paid for America’s Army.

Deep but shallow

Here are two very simple games intended to make you think about life & death: Passage or Christian.

Other

I encourage you to go beyond the computer, and try or talk about other forms of gaming: Play Magic: the Gathering, or get someone who LARPs to take you along.

I’ve gotten some questions on how (and why) to use Delicious. Since we didn’t get to it last class, a quick post. (I was thinking about a screencast, but that seems a bit much for just this.) Several of you have already posted about your experience with the system, so be sure to take a look at some of the blogs while you’re at it.

Delicious is–like Twitter–a very simple tool that has unexpected social outcomes. At the simplest level, Delicious is a way for you to record bookmarks you want to come back to later. I still often will drag a URL to my desktop, and then will end up throwing it out weeks later when I can’t remember why I tried to save it this way. Delicious lets you bookmark something, and then when you need to “re-find” it–when it is just at the edge of your memory but Google isn’t helping you find it–all you have to do is search through your bookmarks.

Rather than storing these bookmarks in folders, you can tag them. That means that if I find a great site on content management systems, I might tag it with “cms” and also with “icm505″ and maybe with “webdev”. Later, when I’m looking for information on any of these topics, including prepping for a class, I’ll be able to easily come up with the sites that I have tagged.

One tag that is often used on Delicious is “inspiration”. When designers–and you are all designers now!–find something they want to emulate or that makes them say “wow” they may add it to their collection of inspiring sites. But even more interesting, you can see what others find inspiring by looking at what everyone has marked as inspiring. More than a half-million examples of things people are being inspired by. Or you can see what just those in your network find to be inspiring. In either case, you’ve created a kind of “accidental” directory.

As with Twitter, you only need to bookmark something once. Now, I should note that I have been away from Delicious for a while, and when I tried to install the Delicious toolbar in my Firefox 3.5 browser, it didn’t work. That’s OK, it’s still up there as an item on the menu, and by hitting CTRL (or APPLE) D, a Delicious window pops up letting me make a quick note and save the site for later.

It’s really that simple. Download the toolbar. Go somewhere cool on the Web. Hit CTRL-D. Fill in the form (and include 501a as one of the tags). Done.

Update: For more information, take a look at this guide.

Interesting piece over in Ad Age about the major networks ganging up to try to come up with a better system for measuring audiences. The issue is that it becomes really difficult to measure integrated and cross-media approaches, but these are the marketing approaches that seem to matter most.

Have a solution? Frankly, this is one of those cases where someone with a good idea and a willingness to really plow some time into a solution could have a real effect on the industry.

That’s what I should be saying in the first paragraph of your response paper.

“Response paper” (or post) is a terrible name for these things, but it’s what they are called in every graduate seminar in every school in the world. Nonetheless, I probably have to come up with a new name for the next time I teach it. Maybe “thought mines” or “idea darts.” Or maybe not.

There are some things these shouldn’t be. They shouldn’t be a tour of your immediate reaction to the things you read (”And then, after I ate breakfast with Jimmy, I sat down to read Kierkegaard while mowing the back lawn. Man, that guy needed a trip to Disneyland.”) This initial reaction, however, may lead you to something of an original thesis (”Despite the common view that Kierkegaard’s philosophy was influenced heavily by his early family life and his father’s strained piousness, Kierkegaard was probably far more influenced by the weather and architecture of his home city, Copenhagen. By sketching the relationship of climate patterns throughout Europe and the resulting hyper-local philosophical effects, it becomes easy to see familial psychohistory as an absurdly facile explanation for Kierkegaard’s thought.”) The two examples I’ve given are a bit misleading, since they suggest that I’m concerned with tone–I’m not, especially. What I want to see is a clear, original hypothesis or idea that is then teased out in tension with the readings.

Well Comm does a good job of this in his “Let’s call it ‘profit determinism.’” As it happens, I don’t agree with his premise, but I do agree that he has one! And taking the step of being bold in a thesis is a good way to go, because it sets up some tension: can the writer actually convince you of the thesis? Even if they don’t the attempt gets you hooked. When I took ballet, from a fairly accomplished dance instructor, his theory was that people came to ballet performances, in large part, for the same reason they went to auto races: for the crashes. At any moment, a dancer crash to the floor, or snap an ankle. Be reckless in your ambition, and then follow through.

Even if you you are adopting an existing thesis (see, for example, Twunked’s argument that we are all now cyborgs), being very clear about what it is, and then using the readings to help illustrate, exemplify, or argue against in tension, is the way to go. Twunked also draws in evidence from other sources to help support the argument. Ian’s POV also takes a thesis and does a good job of using it to interrogate the other materials.