Almost every time when I type my blog in front of my friends, they are curious about me writing blog. And when I tell them I'm actually writing blogs for my EN course, they are all pretty surprised.
(They are even more surprised when I tell them I have created a video and a game for EN :P)
In fact, writing blog entries is not quite new to me. I've experienced writing blogs when I was still in secondary one or two(more than 10 years!) The first one I used was the blog on hkflash. Users are allowed to draw their own pictures on their friends' board and blog is another function. After that, people shift to xanga. It is a more advanced kind of blog as people can add java script, music and customize their own blog with beautiful pictures and programming languages.
(As my VIP membership has already passed for a long time,
feel free to check out my friends' hkflash board if you're interested!
http://www.hkflash.com/gb/gb.asp?id=pighill)
Anyways, it's really nice to find the past memories from the blog.
And for now, I'm going write something about my blogging experience for my school subject.
It is quite a fresh idea for students to write blogs and share their ideas online freely. I am not very familiar with the case overseas, but it's definitely new for students in Hong Kong. It is not boring; we can insert whatever we want, e.g. pictures, videos, music, games. It became a lot more casual and a user-friendly platform for students. Students can choose whatever is related to the given topics and share their own favourite things. Moreover, we can meet someone who has similar interest on blogs (I found my classmate who are playing in a band and is interested in the show my society is organizing. How nice!). The commenting function does help a lot which sometimes we feel shy to talk about the topics in class with other unfamiliar classmates.
I sincerely hope that this idea can spread over other subjects which students can have a more "free" platform to express their ideas. But I also hope that if blogging has become more common, teachers won't make it too formal or it may lower the students' interest in blogging!
Thursday, 10 November 2011
Friday, 28 October 2011
New Media Journalism in Hong Kong
In the past few decades, TV news, newspapers, and radio are the main sources of news.
With the rapid development of the Internet and new technology, a lot more sources are now available to the audiences and there are two big categories: free news online and citizen journalism.
With the rise of Internet usage, as what I've said in the previous blog entry, people do everything in front of the computer and with their Internet. Thus, some parties, including the news agencies and Internet users, perhaps me and you, have started to provide news online and have transformed the way how the traditional reporters report the news. The most popular sort of news is that the traditional newspaper agencies have created their own kind of TV news report.
Here are the two most famous ones:
Next media from Appledaily News On.cc
http://hk.nextmedia.com/ http://home.on.cc/news/
These two news agencies are famous for their videos and animation. Different from the traditional TV news report, the reports from these two agencies are a lot more casual in style: they usually report with a teasing tone and are much more entertaining. They love to criticize the people being interviewed which attract audience to have further discussion. In addition to the traditional kind of video, for Appledaily News, they even create their own animation when the video of the certain case is not available. They normally create animation with very realistic avatars. The avatars will act in different scenes where the case happened, e.g. murder, rape and etc. On the official sites of the news agencies, the videos are automatically played in a sequence which users are bombarded with a series of entertaining videos unless they stop the videos. The videos are not only published on their own official website but also on Youtube, which are very convenient for Internet users.
Undoubtedly, the videos are a lot more attractive than the traditional TV news reports. However, it is said to harm the mind, the cultural and the educational level of the audience. Base on the investigated words, the animations are created with the reporters' own imagination. Imagination in this case is no longer negative. The audience may have cultivated a bad habit to believe in those imaginations, which are not necessarily true and are very subjective.
Other than the truthfulness of the videos, the news agencies are always cross the boundaries that they have created a lot of sensational clips, including obscene and violent animations. The following video clip is a typical negative example from Taiwan:
These videos maybe fine for entertainment, but must not be a role model and learning materials for children. What we can do is to avoid believing what is reported in visual and be more critical.
Another new category of new media is citizen journalism.
As a vivid contrast to the past twenty years, audiences are no longer passive. They do not only receive news from the news reports, but also begin to produce their own news. The most common tools are blog, forum, Facebook, Twitter and Weibo. With the assistance of digital camera and the camera function embedded in mobile phones, people are allowed to record 1st hand videos, take 1st hand photos and immediately share them online. It is also a transformation of the traditional news that the citizen reporters may not be as professional as the traditional news reporters: the videos recorded are blurry and shaky; the words used are too casual and may have grammatical mistakes. Other than these, from my point of view, citizen journalism should be appreciated.
It is true that the news reported are most likely created by the professional journalists who have received professional training previously. They are taught to take the right perspective, taught to include the most exciting and sensational shots and quotes which will attract the greatest number of audience. But all these chosen shots and words may not be enough to constitute the whole picture of the news stories.
Take a look on this picture.
This is a picture posted on 9gag.com, collected by an Internet user.
What the two pictures the user would like to use them to emphasize is that the picture from the traditional media is captured from Google Maps and retouched. The streets are claimed to be crowded with a lot of protesters. But turn out, of course, it is not a real one.
What I want to say is that, with the rise of citizen journalism, the reason why we should appreciate is that there are too many loopholes we can find from the traditional media: the figures they are protecting, perhaps government officials, what citizen journalism is now doing is that they can report the news online with their own true and raw videos and texts. Perhaps the news may not be reported in a very objective tone, but the traditional news may only be framed and pretend to be very objective. With the development of new media writing, there is going to be a long wrestling between citizen journalism and traditional journalism.
With the rapid development of the Internet and new technology, a lot more sources are now available to the audiences and there are two big categories: free news online and citizen journalism.
With the rise of Internet usage, as what I've said in the previous blog entry, people do everything in front of the computer and with their Internet. Thus, some parties, including the news agencies and Internet users, perhaps me and you, have started to provide news online and have transformed the way how the traditional reporters report the news. The most popular sort of news is that the traditional newspaper agencies have created their own kind of TV news report.
Here are the two most famous ones:
Next media from Appledaily News On.cc
http://hk.nextmedia.com/ http://home.on.cc/news/
These two news agencies are famous for their videos and animation. Different from the traditional TV news report, the reports from these two agencies are a lot more casual in style: they usually report with a teasing tone and are much more entertaining. They love to criticize the people being interviewed which attract audience to have further discussion. In addition to the traditional kind of video, for Appledaily News, they even create their own animation when the video of the certain case is not available. They normally create animation with very realistic avatars. The avatars will act in different scenes where the case happened, e.g. murder, rape and etc. On the official sites of the news agencies, the videos are automatically played in a sequence which users are bombarded with a series of entertaining videos unless they stop the videos. The videos are not only published on their own official website but also on Youtube, which are very convenient for Internet users.
Undoubtedly, the videos are a lot more attractive than the traditional TV news reports. However, it is said to harm the mind, the cultural and the educational level of the audience. Base on the investigated words, the animations are created with the reporters' own imagination. Imagination in this case is no longer negative. The audience may have cultivated a bad habit to believe in those imaginations, which are not necessarily true and are very subjective.
Other than the truthfulness of the videos, the news agencies are always cross the boundaries that they have created a lot of sensational clips, including obscene and violent animations. The following video clip is a typical negative example from Taiwan:
These videos maybe fine for entertainment, but must not be a role model and learning materials for children. What we can do is to avoid believing what is reported in visual and be more critical.
Another new category of new media is citizen journalism.
As a vivid contrast to the past twenty years, audiences are no longer passive. They do not only receive news from the news reports, but also begin to produce their own news. The most common tools are blog, forum, Facebook, Twitter and Weibo. With the assistance of digital camera and the camera function embedded in mobile phones, people are allowed to record 1st hand videos, take 1st hand photos and immediately share them online. It is also a transformation of the traditional news that the citizen reporters may not be as professional as the traditional news reporters: the videos recorded are blurry and shaky; the words used are too casual and may have grammatical mistakes. Other than these, from my point of view, citizen journalism should be appreciated.
It is true that the news reported are most likely created by the professional journalists who have received professional training previously. They are taught to take the right perspective, taught to include the most exciting and sensational shots and quotes which will attract the greatest number of audience. But all these chosen shots and words may not be enough to constitute the whole picture of the news stories.
Take a look on this picture.
This is a picture posted on 9gag.com, collected by an Internet user.
What the two pictures the user would like to use them to emphasize is that the picture from the traditional media is captured from Google Maps and retouched. The streets are claimed to be crowded with a lot of protesters. But turn out, of course, it is not a real one.
What I want to say is that, with the rise of citizen journalism, the reason why we should appreciate is that there are too many loopholes we can find from the traditional media: the figures they are protecting, perhaps government officials, what citizen journalism is now doing is that they can report the news online with their own true and raw videos and texts. Perhaps the news may not be reported in a very objective tone, but the traditional news may only be framed and pretend to be very objective. With the development of new media writing, there is going to be a long wrestling between citizen journalism and traditional journalism.
Thursday, 27 October 2011
Writing for new media - Something about promotion on the Internet
Writing for new media
You might have already seen this comic recently.
Yeah.
These few pictures have already explained a lot about how our lives and habits have changed -- we can do almost everything with our computer.
Moreover, what attract people most on the computer, of course, is the Internet. Writing for new media has thus become an important skill for many companies. To keep the customers' loyalty, a lot of companies have created their own Facebook page, Twitter, weibo, and blog. They must change their writing style from traditional to modern in order to attract the audience's eyeball.
Internet users are always multi-tasking: listening to music, watching American drama, doing homework, blogging. They are not as willing as people in the past to spend much time reading paragraph by paragraph, word by word. Therefore, in order to attract more audience,
we have to pay more effort to
learn how to write better for
the new media.
My experiencing in writing for new media, as well as how I utilize the new media
Don't know if anyone of you know, there's actually a Band Society in CityU.
This year, I am one of the committee members of the society(the 16th Band Society).
Being band music enthusiasts, we do not only go out together for band shows or playing in bands, but we also organize band shows.
The very last show we are organizing will be a reunion(relaunch) band show of a local indie band, Chochukmo.
(Feel free to contact me if you are interested in our show!)
As a general secretary of the society, my friend and I are responsible for finding media for promotion. The media we're finding include traditional media (e.g. radio, magazine, newspaper) and new media (e.g. Facebook, discussion forums, weibo).
In the last two to three weeks, we have been trying really hard on promotion on the Internet. And we found that the effect is actually a bit different among different new media.
Facebook
1. Create an event
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=268204539886067
This is very convenient for the guests to check what the date, time and venue are, when and where they can buy tickets.
What we found most important is that as the people being invited are more likely to read the information at first glance and will not bother to read it twice. So, we better not have any information corrected after we invited people to attend our event.
2. Posting the event onto our wall
It works quite effectively when our Facebook account has over 1000 friends that are interested in band sound.
3. Adding the suggested persons or people who are attending other band shows
Continuing the second point, we add some more music lovers and let them know about our event.
However, we have to pay much attention in adding people. Facebook has already blocked us for more than three times because people are not always accepting our friend request and may not be accepting our request immediately. Facebook will record our "spam" requests which our friend request and inbox message function will be blocked for several days. (First time it's 1 day, then it's 2 days, and this time it is a 4-day block!)
4. Posting Youtube links of the band
Nowadays people are more likely to watch motion pictures than reading words. It'll be more attractive to our target audience, who are band lovers, to watch music videos than only to read our event details.
Discussion Forums
1. Start a new topic about the event.
This is actually quite hard to think of a topic. Yes! It IS HARD!
The users of the forums most probably have their own habit in using the forums.
For example, adding emotion icons:
(from hkgolden)
OR having their own special online slangs, like LOL(means laugh out loud) in the western countries.
We have to pretend not to be the new users in order to let more people read our threads.
2. Leaving comments on related posts
This works better than posting a new thread. The tone we use to start a new topic may look too much like advertising or propaganda. People normally ignore these posts.
We can also post the Youtube links and let more people know our bands.
Weibo
1. Following people
In terms of the function of "friend request" of new media, this is a lot better than the one on Facebook.
On the first day when I open an account, I've already followed over 200 people.
2. Using keywords
Like the hashtags on Twitter, people can type their status with keywords, which other users will see their status if they search the corresponding keywords. We use 'band shows' both in Chinese and English to attract more people's attention.
We are pleased that other than discussion forums, the other new media seem quite effective in raising the number of attendees. We hope to see more people know about our event after we have the help of the traditional media, including magazine and radio.
You might have already seen this comic recently.
Yeah.
These few pictures have already explained a lot about how our lives and habits have changed -- we can do almost everything with our computer.
Moreover, what attract people most on the computer, of course, is the Internet. Writing for new media has thus become an important skill for many companies. To keep the customers' loyalty, a lot of companies have created their own Facebook page, Twitter, weibo, and blog. They must change their writing style from traditional to modern in order to attract the audience's eyeball.
Internet users are always multi-tasking: listening to music, watching American drama, doing homework, blogging. They are not as willing as people in the past to spend much time reading paragraph by paragraph, word by word. Therefore, in order to attract more audience,
we have to pay more effort to
learn how to write better for
the new media.
My experiencing in writing for new media, as well as how I utilize the new media
Don't know if anyone of you know, there's actually a Band Society in CityU.
This year, I am one of the committee members of the society(the 16th Band Society).
Being band music enthusiasts, we do not only go out together for band shows or playing in bands, but we also organize band shows.
The very last show we are organizing will be a reunion(relaunch) band show of a local indie band, Chochukmo.
(Feel free to contact me if you are interested in our show!)
As a general secretary of the society, my friend and I are responsible for finding media for promotion. The media we're finding include traditional media (e.g. radio, magazine, newspaper) and new media (e.g. Facebook, discussion forums, weibo).
In the last two to three weeks, we have been trying really hard on promotion on the Internet. And we found that the effect is actually a bit different among different new media.
1. Create an event
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=268204539886067
This is very convenient for the guests to check what the date, time and venue are, when and where they can buy tickets.
What we found most important is that as the people being invited are more likely to read the information at first glance and will not bother to read it twice. So, we better not have any information corrected after we invited people to attend our event.
2. Posting the event onto our wall
It works quite effectively when our Facebook account has over 1000 friends that are interested in band sound.
3. Adding the suggested persons or people who are attending other band shows
Continuing the second point, we add some more music lovers and let them know about our event.
However, we have to pay much attention in adding people. Facebook has already blocked us for more than three times because people are not always accepting our friend request and may not be accepting our request immediately. Facebook will record our "spam" requests which our friend request and inbox message function will be blocked for several days. (First time it's 1 day, then it's 2 days, and this time it is a 4-day block!)
4. Posting Youtube links of the band
Nowadays people are more likely to watch motion pictures than reading words. It'll be more attractive to our target audience, who are band lovers, to watch music videos than only to read our event details.
Discussion Forums
1. Start a new topic about the event.
This is actually quite hard to think of a topic. Yes! It IS HARD!
The users of the forums most probably have their own habit in using the forums.
For example, adding emotion icons:
(from hkgolden)OR having their own special online slangs, like LOL(means laugh out loud) in the western countries.
We have to pretend not to be the new users in order to let more people read our threads.
2. Leaving comments on related posts
This works better than posting a new thread. The tone we use to start a new topic may look too much like advertising or propaganda. People normally ignore these posts.
We can also post the Youtube links and let more people know our bands.
1. Following people
In terms of the function of "friend request" of new media, this is a lot better than the one on Facebook.
On the first day when I open an account, I've already followed over 200 people.
2. Using keywords
Like the hashtags on Twitter, people can type their status with keywords, which other users will see their status if they search the corresponding keywords. We use 'band shows' both in Chinese and English to attract more people's attention.
We are pleased that other than discussion forums, the other new media seem quite effective in raising the number of attendees. We hope to see more people know about our event after we have the help of the traditional media, including magazine and radio.
Friday, 21 October 2011
Our video is finally out
We were so happy to have this chance to record and edit this video clip for Writing for New Media.
Hope you enjoy it. :)
Hope you enjoy it. :)
Friday, 23 September 2011
My Digital Life
My everyday life is full of digital media.
I just can't imagine if I live without my cellphone, the Internet, digital camera, MP3 player and my macbookpro.
There's no doubt that my all time favourite digital media would be the Internet.
I think I am actually already an Internet addict who should really get some help.
I can do almost everything on the Internet that I think the Internet is the most powerful invention in the world.
(YES! Almost EVERYTHING!)
Let me share with you my favourite website:
Tudou: http://www.tudou.com/ (Chinese Youtube)
Whenever I am interested in any movies or dramas, I need not to really buy it in shops, but I simply have to search them online or download it somewhere(I'm not sure if it's illegal....).
The dramas that are being broadcast on the TV channels in Hong Kong are no longer updated.
People from the mainland China have their own way to record the latest episodes and add subtitles.
They will share the files every week to other users on the discussion forums that are specially founded for TV programmes.
If you do NOT want to watch the programmes illegally, you can search for the episodes online.
I just can't imagine if I live without my cellphone, the Internet, digital camera, MP3 player and my macbookpro.
There's no doubt that my all time favourite digital media would be the Internet.
I think I am actually already an Internet addict who should really get some help.
I can do almost everything on the Internet that I think the Internet is the most powerful invention in the world.
(YES! Almost EVERYTHING!)
Let me share with you my favourite website:
Tudou: http://www.tudou.com/ (Chinese Youtube)
The dramas that are being broadcast on the TV channels in Hong Kong are no longer updated.
People from the mainland China have their own way to record the latest episodes and add subtitles.
They will share the files every week to other users on the discussion forums that are specially founded for TV programmes.
If you do NOT want to watch the programmes illegally, you can search for the episodes online.
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