CNN announces Second Life Reporting Endeavor

CNN today announced that it is launching an I-Report hub in Second Life to report on events and stories happening in Second Life.

This is how it works: SL residents submit reports and CNN I-Report producers decide on what stories to run, and then publish them in SL. Here's a video explaining it all.

So in essence, a virtual news station to cover virtual news.

Greenpeace's social media campaign for a greener iPhone generates publicity

We've already discussed how Greenpeace used social media technologies to pressure Apple into producing more environmental computers. We also briefly examined their latest attack on the iPhone and the lawsuit that was filed against Apple last month. (Below is the Greenpeace iPhone video that sums up their charges against the iPhone:)



Looks like Greenpeace was rather successful in generating publicity for their latest campaign, as CNN ran a major story on it today - the same day that Apple finally launched the iPhone in Britain and Germany.

Honor Hunger Week by Entering the UN World Food Programme Viral Video Contest

As St. Edward's University is getting ready to honor national Hunger Week, you can participate in your own way by practicing your newly acquired viral video production skills and producing a 30 or 60 second video that raises awareness about world hunger.

The United Nations World Food Programme is calling on amateur video producers to put their creativity to good use in an effort to influence public opinion about world hunger. The detailed call for entries can be found on the Hunger Bytes YouTube page. The submission deadline is midnight August 1, 2008 - so there is plenty of time to get your entries in and make your contribution to the fight against hunger.

Here's another fun (and educational) way to honor the spirit of Hunger Week and improve your vocab at the same time. The FreeRice website donates 10 grams of rice to the United Nations World Food Programme for each word you get right on their vocabulary test. According to their site, "When you play the game, advertisements appear on the bottom of your screen. The money generated by these advertisements is then used to buy the rice. So by playing, you generate the money that pays for the rice donated to hungry people." A creative idea IMHO!

Social Advertising on Facebook

On Tuesday, Facebook unveiled its somewhat controversial plans to launch an advertising system based on social networking (see the press release announcing Facebook Ads, and a CNN story explaining how the system will work).

The announcement has let to concerns about privacy issues (see the Techcrunch story). It will be interesting to see how Facebook will go about convincing its users to embrace this new advertising format, especially considering the anti-social advertising groups that have already started to pop up on its site.

Social Media Resume for Students entering the PR or Advertising Industry

In the newest Forward podcast, Bryan Person discusses the idea of a social media resume for PR and advertising students (11:36 minutes into the podcast). Bryan also elaborates on the need for a social media resume on his own blog and provides a couple of examples.

These examples are very close to what I would like you to do for your upcoming SMNR assignment in which you are supposed to "announce” your qualifications, career goals and job expectations in form of a SMNR. The point of this assignment is to demonstrate your social media skills to prospective employers in a creative manner and to tie together all the different technologies we have explored in this class (such as blogs, podcasts, web video, social bookmarks, etc.). As you explore the examples posted by Bryan, pretend that you are a potential employer looking at these resumes. Which type of resume would make a stronger case for a candidate's social media skills? A traditional resume, describing the skills, or a multimedia resume displaying them? Loaded question, I know.

Wikipedia Vision: See who is editing Wikipedia in what parts of the world

This neat web application, named Wikipedia Vision, displays anonymous edits to the English Wikipedia as they are made. The data map displays "the title of the article, the summary of the edit (if the person who made it gave any summary), link to the changes that were made to the article, geographical location of the wikipedia user and the time the edit happened".

It works by matching Wikipedia users' IP addresses to their corresponding geographical locations and mapping them on Google Maps.

Resources for capturing web video

Here are some web applications & add-ons that will allow you to capture web video:

• Media converter: A simple 5 step procedure to download & convert media files.


• Online FLV converter: Just type in the URL of the video you want to capture, and Vconvert will convert it into a number of formats (.mov, .wmv, .flv, etc.)


• You Convert It: Convert any file or online video to any number of formats.


• YouTube Video Saver: Same idea: Just paste the YouTube URL in a form field and it will save it to your desktop


• KeepVid: Download videos directly from most video sites


• Firefox Download Helper: A Firefox add-on that allows you to download video files with one click


• A list of even more web applications that allow you to download web videos

For free video stock footage, try this site.

For free stock photos, try the Stock.Xchng.

And finally, for help with iMovie, check out Apple's iMovie tutorials.