iPhone v. Android

yourtechlib.com

I know this argument is an age old argument, but it is time for me to give my opinion on this topic!

Everyone likes to believe that what they have is the best, well I am here to really give you my verdict, which should be the final verdict cause I’m awesome.

Both of these brands have their perks and downfalls.

I will start with the Android.  Team Android phones, being led by the Samsung Galaxy phones, are pretty neat.  They always come up with new advances in their phones. Like the music sharing ability and facial recognition and more.  They are typically bigger than iPhones.  This can be both a plus and a downfall. Bigger Phone means Bigger Font which is easier to read.  However, this could be seen as a downfall because, these phones just seem to be getting bigger and bigger and honestly, they are trying to take us back to the ages when you couldn’t fit your phone easily into your pocket. Because of all the different companies that make android phones, they are typically open and not as exclusive as iPhones.

maypalo.com

iPhones are also great devices.  Unlike androids that have many companies who can create different phones, iPhones are exclusive made by apple and apple alone.  it is exclusive in everything they do.  Their interface is unique only to iPhones, and many apps are exclusive to iPhones.  iPhones are typically sleek and long rather than large.  This is a perk because you can still get the functionality of a smart phone and it can still fit in compact places. iPhones are known for bringing out updates slowly to keep audience enthusiasm up.  Many people don’t like this but from a business aspect it is very wise.  In response to the facial recognition that androids have, iPhones came up with a touch recognition, where the phone reads the fingerprint of the user in order to unlock the phone for use.  They also updated the camera to have the ability to take slow motion videos.

maypalo.com

I personally am an iPhone user, so I am very biased on the matter but as for which one is better, each person will just have to research on the perks of both and make a decision based on their preferences.  While many people tend to compare them, I feel like they are completely different types of phones made for different types of people.

maypalo.com

I know i didn’t necessarily pick one but hey, that’s my verdict. Take it or Leave it.

Cannon T3 Review

I know for most of my posts now I have been giving tips on being a better digital reporter and just generally talking about elements in our digital age but I want to do something different with this post.  I want to review the Cannon T3 camera.

I wasn’t much of a photographer, until I got my hands on one of these babies.

It is very user friendly.  I have experience with the panasonic camcorders so it wasn’t hard for me to figure out how to manually adjust the camera to do what I wanted it to do like shallow focusing and more.  However, it is very easy for non experienced users to catch on to it as well.

To test this Idea, I gave the camera to one of my inexperienced friends to operate, without giving her much instructions other than the zoom button and capture button but within 2 hours of having the camera, she caught on to the manual adjustments as well.

The picture quality of the camera is simply amazing.  I believe it captures images in HD

but all I know is that I fell in love with it.

I attached an album of some of the pics I took on a trip to Athens with the T3

I really recommend it to anyone trying to get into photography.

Video in the DigiWorld

Chapter 8 in Journalism Next does a good job explaining the importance of video in the digital reporting era.  The comparison of the two people was wonderful because it shows how different techniques can be acceptable when it comes to video content in digital reporting.  Each technique has an ideal audience.  However, when you try to report an incident without video, it is harder to keep your audience’s attention.

http://www.textalibrarian.com

Video Reporting adds to the visual qualities of News reporting.  Because of all the digital advances in our world, people don’t have the attention span to read past a certain point, so videos do a good job of completely reporting a story while keeping the audiences’ attention.

(BTW This was the very first package I shot and edited in college… Skills have definitely improved ALOT)

Crowd Sourcing

(http://www.infosurv.com/insider-blog/is-crowdsourcing-right-for-your-organization/)

This will be a brief post that talks about the importance of crowd sourcing.  I personally feel like crowdsourcing is important because it gets the general public more interested in the News industry.  When they see that they can contribute to the information being given to them, they want to pay attention and contribute what they can.  Interning at WSB-TV and working at the assignment desk, I have learned just how important tips from the general public and pitches from them can be.  They can generate huge stories.

Importance of Blogs

Chapter 2 of Journalism Next covers the importance blogging in today’s digital age.  I personally have failed at keeping up my blogs but I do know the importance of blogs.  It is a great way to build an audience even before you graduate and enter the work force as a journalist.  The good thing about blogs is that there are so many different topics that you can choose to concentrate your blog on and it would still be relevant experience for a journalism career.  The chapter said that many reporters nowadays also keep a blog on the side that helps them maintain their audience and also helps them with their stories.

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After reading this chapter, I definitely know that I need to go back and start up my blog again.  One thing that people forget about blogs is that it is hard work to maintain.  I definitely underestimated the amount of work it took when I started my blog.  You have to constantly come up with material to post and write it in such a way that relates to the general audience.

 

One great thing about blogs is that you are free to take any tone that you feel like using in your blogs.  It is not formal news.  As a matter of fact the more relaxing your tone is, the greater the audience you pull in.

 

I vow to start my blog again before the end of the semester… (BTW its about being young in the city, many lifestyle pieces and love and relationship trauma pieces. Wish me luck)

 

 

Track your Posts

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org

The News industry realizes that it must make a move from traditional News forms to the digital age and it is doing all it can to get there

More and More news media have been adopting the digital age.  They are reliant on digital reporting to boost their followings.  Many news forms post stories online on their websites; they post stories of social media websites and they have even taken to creating blogs and video blogs as forms on News outreach.

But posting these things aren’t the only things that need to be done for them to fully transition into the digital age.  They can post all they want but if they have no idea of how they are ranking and how they are doing among the consumer market, they cannot improve so News media have taken to tracking their digital presence in order to see their standing.  They do not just track their stories; they also track their employees to see what they are doing to increase their company’s presence in the digital age.  At my internship at WSBTV, I notice this during every morning meeting.  After talking about their presence and ratings amongst viewership on TV, they tackle their online presence.  They track every story posted within the previous day through them, whether on their website, Facebook, Twitter or even intsagram posts.  They talk track and talk about the traction they received on those stories and those with low traction they talk about what can be done to improve on them.  One day when I went to help a web lady post a video on one of their blogs, she showed me a tracker that predicts the amount of viewership that they predict the post will get.  This tracker goes up or down as she plugs in different title ideas for the post.  The idea is to use that tracker to come up with a title good enough to pull in viewers to reach or pass the predicted amount.  This was all surprising for me to see what all is done in a Newsroom to increase relevance and stay on top when it comes to viewership and following of the station.

Insta Insta Instagram

My last stop on my social media-learning quest is Instagram.

news.doddleme.com

 

I was most excited to view the Instagram presentation.  It has grown to be my absolute favorite social media-networking site.  It is a way for people to give others a little insight into their world through pictures and videos, even quotes and funny grams.

I knew a little bit bout instagram going into this presentation but not nearly as much as I did about Facebook and Twitter.  I knew mainly only how to operate instagram, which the presenters did a good job at showing as well.

 

They delved into the history of instagram in a fun and cute manner.  I didn’t know who the creator of instagram was and thanks to the presentation, I do now.   I also didn’t know that it was created in 2010 and that it generated over 100 million users in less than a year of it being up.  I knew that it was a fairly young social media medium but I thought it came out maybe in 2011 because that was when I started really noticing it.  The number of users it generated in that first year is also mind boggling because it was only available to iPhone users in the first couple of years of its existence.

I feel like they could’ve also broken up its history a little bit more into a timeline because like I previously stated, Instagram was only available to iPhone users when it was first created.  They did not state that it became available to android users in 2012 and officially became available to windows users for free in 2013.

They talked about the Instagram Direct function but they did not note that it became available to its users in November 2013.

They also did not state that Instagram did not always have video.  The video function became available in instagram in the summer of 2013.

The presentation did a great job at showing the interface of the app and the site.  They explained what each tab in instagram was used for and they showed how to operate it.

I wish they did say when instagram developed a website online for people to actually visit because for a long time it was only an app for mobile devices.

All in All instagram is still a young and growing app and site and many features are yet to be made and released.  For what it is, the presenters did what they could but it could’ve been a little better.

FaceBooking

http://www.webpronews.com

Continuing on my social media tours, the next presentation I listened to was the one about Facebook.   Now, much like twitter, I believed that I knew everything about Facebook. And unlike Twitter and Google, I knew, for sure, that I was very knowledgeable about the history of Facebook because I saw “The Social Network,” which is a film about the creation of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg.

money.cnn.com

So going into the presentation, I was excited to see what they could possibly teach me about this site that I have been using for over 6 years. I was confident that in my knowledge.

They first spoke on the history, and I basically knew 95 percent of what was said.  I even had a ballpark figure about the net worth of the company and I was fairly close to the number they gave in the presentation, which was $125.5 billion dollars.

 

Tweet Tweet!!

http://www.artensoft.com

I just viewed a presentation about twitter.  Much like the Google presentation, I felt like OK, I know Twitter.  The way that the presentation was set up, I feel like I did know most of what I needed to know about twitter.

They talked about the history of twitter, which was about the most new information that I gained from viewing this PowerPoint Presentation.  They talked about the four men that worked together to create twitter.  They spoke about the first tweet, which was sent out by Jack Dorsey, one of the four men who created twitter.  I also thought it was interesting that even though he sent out the tweet, Noah Glass was more invested in the twitter brand than Dorsey.

After this new information about twitter, I was excited to learn more new information, but I didn’t really get much else from the presentation.  I expected as much but I feel like if the presenters did more to make the presentation more snazzy, at least it would have been fun to see what I already knew about twitter.  More videos and clips could’ve made the presentation fun.

This goes back to what I said in a previous post.  Making things visually compelling, attracts more interest and viewership, regardless of what you’re selling or talking about.

Google

I just saw a class presentation about Google. When I saw the title of the presentation, I thought to myself, what could they possibly say about Google that I, or most people, don’t already know? Well, the answer is A Whole Lot.

The first part of my new knowledge about Google was the history. The presenters took us all the way back to when the founders met and everything that they have done to enhance Google till now. They put a time stamp on everything. I thought I knew the order of the new Google updates and inventions, but I quickly learned that I did not. I also was impressed at the statistics of users that they included. I never would’ve thought that Google+ was the second largest social media forum that was used in the world today. I always thought it was Facebook, then twitter, then instagram. You know, like most of us young folks use.

hipgenius.com

I want to talk more about the Google+ aspect of Google. Like a lot of people, I have a Gmail account and I always see people inviting me to join their circle in Google+ and many more, but I always ignore it. Mainly because I feel like I can deal with another social media website, but this presentation really opened my eyes to exactly what Google+ is and what it can do. I didn’t know that the circles meant having the ability to separate your followers and editing who can see what. Why doesn’t Facebook have this feature again? I also didn’t know that through Google+ and Hangouts you could just have a group video conversation with as many people you want in the conversation. Why doesn’t Google advertise this more???

I never bothered to deal with or look at Google+ but this really opened my eyes to it and now I am more willing to use this social media site. (They have sucked me in smh).