AudioBoo

To most people AudioBoo would sounds like a collection of scary sounds (or is that just me?) In fact, i had never heard of this social networking site before Tim introduced it to us.

The basic principle behind AudioBoo is the fact that we are too busy to be bothered to blog or type about what we are up to, so, AudioBoo skips the effort of having to write something down to post. AudioBoo lets you record from your internal microphone on your computer or your microphone on your phone and upload what you are saying straight to the website.

This is a brilliant concept and I can’t believe it is still fairly new. It is somewhere between Twitter (which you can’t write a lot on) and blogging (where you can write a lot but takes a lot of effort). You can just upload your ideas and thoughts straight into the web by just speaking what you are thinking.

It also is an extremely handy tool for conducting quick interviews when you don’t have your microphone on you. AudioBoo has an app for smartphones and the majority of smartphones have a pretty decent internal microphone so if you bumped into Brad Pitt without your recording equipment, you can just record it on your smartphone and upload the interview you conducted straight away without having to worry about getting it off the Marantz.

As a result of this brilliant new social network, I have signed up to AudioBoo so you can find me waffling on somewhere on the internet, i’ve always been told I talk too much, so this may be a way to express it.

Week 2 – Audio/Video

This week we had a lecture from Tim Heffer about the general principle of sound, the science behind it and how it has evolved along with the internet in the past couple of decades. It was great to be reintroduced to the basic principles of the science of sound as I haven’t spoke about science since secondary school. The lecture was a bit basic as all the history and the programmes that have developed involving sound were introduced around our lifetime so we are all familiar with it.

The afternoon lecture with Reza was interesting as he is a character!
As many people may not know, my background in television and film as I studied a BTEC in school in media production so the things that he was telling us sounded familiar like the different types of mode in documentaries and how to set up composition of video shots. The things that was most painful for me was the basic introduction to Final Cut Pro, it hurt to do a step by step guide to bits and bobs of it as I am fluent in final cut. Though I am quite excited at making a video piece for this project, would be great to dive back in the video medium again for a project. I look forward to developing some ideas for it.

Twitter

As we all know Twitter is an extremely useful tool for being kept up to date with the things that interest you in real time.
But like most social networks there is always something that makes it not so great.
With people getting bored with Facebook, in the past 12 months there has been a massive influx of my friends that are now using Twitter rather than Facebook. Which meant that my Twitter feed was being cluttered with diary like entries which was one of the reasons i moved to Twitter, to avoid pointless updates and actually be informed by a social network.

But there is a solution to solving this issue! And it is the most productive thing that I have done in ages.
There is a facility on Twitter that allows you to organise Twitter feeds into lists which allowed me to put all my friends and pointless people into one list and have technology, sports and music in another. This was the first time i’ve used this since being on Twitter since 2007 so I had a lot of people that I was following to go through and it took me at least two hours to sort them out as you have to do them individually.

Having these lists makes it so much easier to find the kind of news that you are looking for and I would completely recommend this to anyone that has a Twitter account, as it has made my feed a much more informative one then attempts by friends at being funny.

Top Tech Stories

Due to my absence from last weeks lecturer I was informed what the class was up to so I set off to carry out the tasks included, which was to set up (another) blog, creating a delicious account, setting up Google Reader and organising Twitter.

Using these sources that I have just set up, we had to find and share the lastest this stories of this week. I will be looking at stories from the past week, instead of the ones from a couple of weeks ago.

Searching online for a top story is simple if you know how. The majority of  the users of the internet would go to their favourite search engine and type in what they are looking for. The majority of the time it does bring up something that you are looking for, sometimes exactly what you are looking for and other times your results display nothing to do with what you were looking for.
An easier and more effective was is to go directly to a news site so you don’t have to filter through the different search enginge results. Following technology journalists on Twitter also comes in handy but you have to organise your Twitter feed so you can quickly search what you are looking for. A new website that I hadn’t come across was the website Delicious, using a search on bookmarking site Delicious gives us access to a world of technology stories that may be of interest to the class.
I was familiar with RSS feeds from my days of blogging and developing websites, but I am new to the website Google Reader where you can organise all your RSS feeds in one place.
Having all these sites set up to journalists, websites and bloggers that write about technology is really helpful as it makes my network really specific to what I am looking for.

Sharing the stories for others in the class to see was simple, we was told to use the hashtag #aomedia2012 for anything that we posted on Twitter and told to use the aomedia2012 tag on Delicious.
The technology stories I found are:

On the BBC’s tech website it published how military experts gathered in London this week to discuss the growing threat of cyber attacks to international security. The US is aiming to recruit 10,000 “cyber warriors” to try to combat the problem, which poses risks to everything from power grids and water supplies to businesses and individuals.

The Guardian’s tech blog had published about how Twitter has refined its technology so it can censor messages on a country-by-country basis. The additional flexibility announced on Thursday is likely to raise fears that Twitter’s commitment to free speech may be weakening as the short-messaging company expands into new countries in an attempt to broaden its audience and make more money.

I think that Twitter and Google Reader are excellent sources for finding stories online, however I am still not convinced by the usability Delicious.