Olympic Games 2008

 

I have started doing a news-based magazine on the upcoming Olympic Games in China and in researching this subject I have looked upon many interesting news-sites and blogs and signed up to the South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com) to learn more about a story regarding the arrest of their photographer Felix Wong who was involved in a scuffle with policemen who were forcibly removing journalists who where filming the chaotic scenes as thousands queued for tickets and it got out of control.

The amount of blogs and sites calling for the boycott of the games are too numerous to list here but a well-written one that gives facts and quotes from reputable news agencies is http//boycott2008games.blogspot.com/

It is obvious from reading through some of the posts just how many people are vehemently opposed to these games and I can see the protests continuing for the duration of the events.

slashdot.org and alternet.org

While I have looked at and analysed some of the more mainstream sites I feel I haven’t properly given the required and justified time to other websites like slashdot.org and alternet.org and thought that today I would browse through their layout and hopefully their use of external hypertextuality.

 

I expected both these site to be highly interactive however I was disappointed to learn that you must subscribe to become a member on slashdot.org to properly avail of their interactivity capabilities. Another weakness was found when I tried to find any external links that related to a story I was reading about the new American bill ‘the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008’ being proposed. There wasn’t any! While I would expect this of the mainstream site I was disappointed to find it here also.

 

The writing on alternet.org impressed me as it didn’t talk down to it’s readers but instead viewed them as being highly intelligent and well-read on the subject. The article ‘Massive Economic Disaster Seems Possible- Will Survivalists Get the Last Laugh’ was well-written and researched and some of the comments on the site helped to shed new light on the subject. Overall I was more impressed with alternet.org than slashdot.org as was able to read the reader’s comments without the hassle of having to sign up to the site.

Local Irish Sites

How do local Irish Newspapers deal with online journalism and the burgeoning demand for it? This was the question i asked myself as i looked through various sites including www.wicklowtoday.com and anglo-celt.com. I must say that i was immediately surprised at the depth and quality of wicklowtoday as I am more used to my own local papers such as the Cavan Echo and Northern Standard. The layout of WT’s homepage was what impressed me most with ease of access a major positive however once i clicked on the news section i was less than impressed as the last story posted on the site was from Friday December 14th 2007. When you compare this to other site it does not paint a pretty picture, i found the Anglo-Celt site to be better than i had thought with the opinion section reading rather like a weblog that detailed and discussed relevant local issues. Despite all these positives the lack of quality external links throughout the sites was a major weakness.

Popular sites- strengths and weaknesses

After looking at some local Irish newspapers attempts at online journalism I feel the best way to properly judge them is to compare them to the leading international competition by examining their strengths and weaknesses. I have looked at some of the most popular news-based websites including www.nytimes.com, www.the sun.co.uk and www.guardian.co.uk and scrutinized some of the following aspects:

IntInteractivity

<!Use of external links

<!Quality of blogs

UsUse of video

New York Times

When investigating interactivity on this website I looked at the main story on the homepage to see if the opportunity arose to make a reader comment and it does on the left hand side of the page. The ease by which you could do this greatly impressed me. On the home page they have also included an educational video of Radovan Karadzic which detailed the aspects of his crimes however all the links were internal which shows me an unwillingness to let the viewers leave their site. The blogs section included numerous and diverse sections. I have looked at some of these before and they tend to be well-written and researched.

The Sun

The Sun’s website differs greatly from the New York Times and the Guardian with numerous questionable aspects in relation to their online news output. To be honest I couldn’t properly critique this site as it contained no external links or blogs however there was a lot of videos and a discussion section.

The Guardian

The Guardian’s site was very easy to browse and contained easy links to navigate through various topics. It was also relatively easy to leave comments on their blogs however like the other websites dealt with it didn’t offer the browser any external hypertextuality with no links to related news sites and articles

Future for Internet Blogging

Blogging can be said now to be right up there with the printing press when it comes to sharing ideas according to Wharton legal professor Dan Hunter in an article on the website http://news.cnet.com/the-future-of-blogging

“At it’s most basic level it’s a technology that is lowering the cost of publishing” says his associate Kevin Werbach. Despite all these grandiose statements they never get down to the core issue and question of what is next on the horizon for the blog.

There is a piece on the website www.problogger.com that gets right to the point and answers the question “Whats next in blogging (or beyond blogging)?

On the article it is argued that blogs are not in the ‘past’ – but in a period of consolidation and extension and that these are the activities that a lot of bloggers are looking towards in the future

• adding authors – group blogs are the new black
• clustering blogs around verticals – bloggers extending their blogs by adding sibling blogs on related topics
• networking – 2006 was really the year of the blog network but it continues to happen in both loose and formal ways. Many of the blog networks didn’t really survive but there are quite a few that continue to bubble away and sustain themselves
• adding services and features - whether it be video, podcasts, forums, job boards, classifieds, chat features, voting tools… many bloggers are beginning to add interesting features to their blogs that attempt to add value to blogs. I think what we’re seeing is bloggers more willing to see the limitations of blogs and wanting to blur the edges of what is and isn’t a blog.

While this may be true at the moment it’s my opinion that it is hard to accurately predict the path that online blogging will take.