Sunday, February 26
Weblog Post #5 - The Podcast Review
Albany Poets Podcast
An interesting, lively and appealing program, the Albany Poets Podcast is podcasted live from different cafes and clubs in Albany.
The show features an open mic event where poets and songwriters take the stage to perform for the crowd in the club and for the crowd around the world.
Ω Technical Review
The sound quality of the podcast is not spectacular but it gets the job done. The stream captures each performer’s intonations, accentuations and feeling in a grainy, almost garage sound. The recordings sound like they are not soundboard but that element – in a way - adds to the feel and nature of poetry in a city café.
There is no studio magic either. Several singers fearlessly step to the microphone and their miscues and sharp notes are very noticeable. The whole experience is very raw.
The site is quick and streams well. There was very little buffering time and downloading was quick. The group’s main Web site http://www.albanypoets.com is accessible and offers information about the poets, the events and all the other creative things the group does in upstate New York.
To date, there are three available casts on the Web site. The latest is half of a show that was held at Valentine’s, a café in Albany, on Jan. 3.
This event featured a performance by local musician Krysta Dennis and the names of the open mic poets and musicians were Billy, Jared Funari, Matt McWatters, and Katherine Zaleski.
Ω Content Review
Get this Podcast streaming, put on some headphones and close your eyes and you are in a poetry café. The show is uncut and features all the pauses and applauses of every poet and singer’s performance.
To start it off, the MC opens the event with a poem, and immediately it’s apparent that this isn’t kid’s hour with Dr. Seuss. In the latest Podcast, the opening poem is by Allen Ginsberg and is a striking blow to the country’s pollution and oil dependence problems.
“(That poem) was written in 1974, it’s kind of fitting today,” the MC says. “Welcome to Albany Poets presents…”
A large variety of styles of both music and poetry are featured in the podcasts such as beat poetry, satirical commentary poetry, folk music, alterna-folk and female folk singing.
It’s interesting to hear the reactions of the crowd and how they take to certain performers. It seems like their attention is something that each performer has to fight for, as some artists barely receive a clap as others will get roars and whistles.
This type of podcast is important for creative writing and performance. In a time where poetry and the atmosphere of a poetry reading are out of date, this podcast updates that atmosphere and brings it to the Internet and to people's pods.
More people will be able to appreciate modern poetry, storytelling and acoustic music. It will be able to expose artists to a large amount of people and also expose the type of lifestyle these particular poets live.
It’s like the small “in” crowd that everyone in the world can be a part of.
Monday, February 6
Weblog Post #4 - Ship Needs Better Paper Management
As a lab attendant in three computer labs on campus, I have noticed something rather uncomforting about Shippensburg students: They waste paper and they don't think twice about it.
At least once (usually more) times a day someone feels the need to print out their own copy of the bible, phonebook and dictionary all at once. They ruthlessly print out their professors' PowerPoint slides, each slide on a page...even the ones that just have "Federalism Part 1" centered in the middle of the slide.
Students have no qualms in standing by the printer as it spits out lyrics to their favorite song in five different fonts. They print their 12-page term papers, print backups and backups for the backups. Other students waiting to print their dictionaries? They don't care. They watch as page after page is fed to them and they grin inside...they know that they are wasting huge amounts of paper for no reason. They know they probably won't read past the first slide in their PowerPoint. If they forget their papers in the lab, no worry...they can just print it out again.
Students drool at the sight of stacks of unused printing paper lining the walls in the Grove lab. So little time, so much to print!
I have no numbers on how much the University spends on printing paper. I have no numbers on how much paper SU goes through every semester. But I do not want to just help the university save money, I want it to conserve paper and help students learn how to do so.
At Penn State University there is a semester limit of 110 pages per student. Sure the school has 32,000 more students but in reality 110 is more than enough. Every page after that is a 10-cent charge. Not a bad deal.
Also, most of the PSU printers are preset to print double-sided. This alone, I safely assume, cuts down the number of pages used by around half.
Why doesn't Shippensburg do this?
Instead SU pays for the huge amount of wasted pages. If a student knows that they only have 110 pages to use, he/she might be inclined to go look for their class syllabus before printing out another copy, they might read PowerPoint slides on the computer screen before printing them out or they will be sure to print six slides on a page double-sided.
Think about this. A professor drones on and on for two hours. He/she used 100 slides in that one class alone. Joey ShipStudent dozes off in class and misses the last hour and 45 minutes of the lecture. What will Joey do? He will probably venture over to the lab and print out all 100 pages of the presentation and if the school would only change a few settings on their computers and impose a few rules about printing, they could cut down those 100 sheets of paper to only nine sheets.
100 slides / 6 (slides a page) / 2 (double sided (or “Duplex-Printing”)) = 9 sheets of paper.
It’s that easy. So instead of wasting a few sheets of paper that say “No Excessive Printing” and “Only One Copy,” they can make a few rule changes and help save money and better its students.
At least once (usually more) times a day someone feels the need to print out their own copy of the bible, phonebook and dictionary all at once. They ruthlessly print out their professors' PowerPoint slides, each slide on a page...even the ones that just have "Federalism Part 1" centered in the middle of the slide.
Students have no qualms in standing by the printer as it spits out lyrics to their favorite song in five different fonts. They print their 12-page term papers, print backups and backups for the backups. Other students waiting to print their dictionaries? They don't care. They watch as page after page is fed to them and they grin inside...they know that they are wasting huge amounts of paper for no reason. They know they probably won't read past the first slide in their PowerPoint. If they forget their papers in the lab, no worry...they can just print it out again.
Students drool at the sight of stacks of unused printing paper lining the walls in the Grove lab. So little time, so much to print!
I have no numbers on how much the University spends on printing paper. I have no numbers on how much paper SU goes through every semester. But I do not want to just help the university save money, I want it to conserve paper and help students learn how to do so.
At Penn State University there is a semester limit of 110 pages per student. Sure the school has 32,000 more students but in reality 110 is more than enough. Every page after that is a 10-cent charge. Not a bad deal.
Also, most of the PSU printers are preset to print double-sided. This alone, I safely assume, cuts down the number of pages used by around half.
Why doesn't Shippensburg do this?
Instead SU pays for the huge amount of wasted pages. If a student knows that they only have 110 pages to use, he/she might be inclined to go look for their class syllabus before printing out another copy, they might read PowerPoint slides on the computer screen before printing them out or they will be sure to print six slides on a page double-sided.
Think about this. A professor drones on and on for two hours. He/she used 100 slides in that one class alone. Joey ShipStudent dozes off in class and misses the last hour and 45 minutes of the lecture. What will Joey do? He will probably venture over to the lab and print out all 100 pages of the presentation and if the school would only change a few settings on their computers and impose a few rules about printing, they could cut down those 100 sheets of paper to only nine sheets. 100 slides / 6 (slides a page) / 2 (double sided (or “Duplex-Printing”)) = 9 sheets of paper.
It’s that easy. So instead of wasting a few sheets of paper that say “No Excessive Printing” and “Only One Copy,” they can make a few rule changes and help save money and better its students.
Weblog Post #3 - Halftime Shows - The Op-Ed
So what do you do when your favorite team doesn't make the championship game?
Some may root against their least favorite team in the match-up while others may watch for the pure enjoyment of sports. However, when it comes to the Super Bowl, unless your team has a chance of hoisting up the Lombardi Trophy that night, it comes down to two things: commercials and the halftime show.
This year the only play a Patriot made in the Super Bowl was flipping the coin so you can guess what was on mind? Pepsi, Budweiser and the Rolling Stones.
I do not plan on talking too much about the ads but needless to say Pepsi’s “brilliant” marketing plan flopped. To quote Adam Sandler in a Saturday Night Live skit “Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?”
“Brown and bubbly” was all the Pepsi PR guys could come up with this year. They need to stop asking their children for help when they run out of ideas. I need a young Shaquille O’Neal warning me not to “fake the funk on a nasty dunk.” I certainly do not need Puff Daddy and his crew giving props to a Diet Pepsi can in a recording studio. Again...“Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?”
Anyway…enough talk about the ads.
It seemed that after Aretha Franklin, & Aaron Neville hacked their way through the Star Spangled Banner, we would have to rely on our friends from across the pond to bail us out: The Rolling Stones.
So after a lackluster first half of football, the huge mouth and tongue symbol of the stones appeared on the field (how do they do that so quickly? It’s amazing). It was not too hard to predict “Start me up” as the opening song. It brought me back 11 Super Bowls ago when that song was overplayed during Microsoft Windows 95 commercials
(Did you know Microsoft gave the Stones $13 million for that song after R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe turned down the offer to use “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)?” I think everyone should know that.)
The Stones may be before my time but for the first time ever (and I mean ever) I was excited about the halftime show. After Ciara (whoever she is) and Ashley Simpson (I really shouldn't know who she is) manhandled the past two Orange Bowls, I have been weary of halftime entertainment. Paul McCartney was great last year at the Super Bowl but I was not excited.
The Stones are a different story.
My memories of the Stones stretch all the way back to 1999 when “Hot Rocks, 1964-1971” was the only tape I listened to all summer. I am not sure where the tape is today and I have not listened to the Stones all that much since, but I felt it was worth waiting through two boring quarters of football to see them perform.
So the band, well into their 60s, roared through three songs. Singer Mick Jagger pranced around the big mouth, shaking his hips in his mini cut-off shirt and bouncing around like he has for 40 years.
After “Start Me Up,” some unintelligible talking from Jagger and a song that is not on “Hot Rocks, 1964-1971,” they catapulted into their predictable closer, “Satisfaction.”
At that moment, millions of viewers under the age of 22 sat back down on the couch after a bathroom break and a refill and said: “Do these old farts think they are cool covering Britney Spears?” that may not have been the whole case, but it's close.
Anyway, so far I may have bad mouthed the Stones a little bit, but here is why we need artists like them and McCartney doing halftime shows:
The Rolling Stones are easily the greatest rock band ever. If those endless lists of the all-time greatest albums and songs get anything right…it’s that the Stones usually make the cut multiple times.
For the most part these days, all the respect they deserve ends there. (See an article from Penn State's Daily Collegian.Click here.)
These days we do not remember who wrote great songs last year, not to mention the last 40. You could say it is sad that greats like McCartney and the Stones are only here because Janet Jackson put them there, but maybe that weirdly shaped spiked thing was a blessing. These are the greats and we are lucky to have their performances televised into our homes.
Was the Stones’ performance amazingly memorable? No, but knowing that the bricklayers of rock can still rock and are still represented should be a relief to all of us.
I don’t assume the Stones walked away last night empty handed, but the Stones are a part of our culture. Ciara and Ashley Simpson are not and they will never be. We need more artists like the Stones today, innovators with longevity that are professional artists and true representatives of who we are, were and going to be.
So I guess the saying is true when it comes to football halftime shows, “you can’t always get what you want…but you get what you need.”
Some may root against their least favorite team in the match-up while others may watch for the pure enjoyment of sports. However, when it comes to the Super Bowl, unless your team has a chance of hoisting up the Lombardi Trophy that night, it comes down to two things: commercials and the halftime show.
This year the only play a Patriot made in the Super Bowl was flipping the coin so you can guess what was on mind? Pepsi, Budweiser and the Rolling Stones.
I do not plan on talking too much about the ads but needless to say Pepsi’s “brilliant” marketing plan flopped. To quote Adam Sandler in a Saturday Night Live skit “Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?”
“Brown and bubbly” was all the Pepsi PR guys could come up with this year. They need to stop asking their children for help when they run out of ideas. I need a young Shaquille O’Neal warning me not to “fake the funk on a nasty dunk.” I certainly do not need Puff Daddy and his crew giving props to a Diet Pepsi can in a recording studio. Again...“Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?”
Anyway…enough talk about the ads.
It seemed that after Aretha Franklin, & Aaron Neville hacked their way through the Star Spangled Banner, we would have to rely on our friends from across the pond to bail us out: The Rolling Stones.
So after a lackluster first half of football, the huge mouth and tongue symbol of the stones appeared on the field (how do they do that so quickly? It’s amazing). It was not too hard to predict “Start me up” as the opening song. It brought me back 11 Super Bowls ago when that song was overplayed during Microsoft Windows 95 commercials
(Did you know Microsoft gave the Stones $13 million for that song after R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe turned down the offer to use “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)?” I think everyone should know that.)
The Stones may be before my time but for the first time ever (and I mean ever) I was excited about the halftime show. After Ciara (whoever she is) and Ashley Simpson (I really shouldn't know who she is) manhandled the past two Orange Bowls, I have been weary of halftime entertainment. Paul McCartney was great last year at the Super Bowl but I was not excited.
The Stones are a different story.
My memories of the Stones stretch all the way back to 1999 when “Hot Rocks, 1964-1971” was the only tape I listened to all summer. I am not sure where the tape is today and I have not listened to the Stones all that much since, but I felt it was worth waiting through two boring quarters of football to see them perform.
So the band, well into their 60s, roared through three songs. Singer Mick Jagger pranced around the big mouth, shaking his hips in his mini cut-off shirt and bouncing around like he has for 40 years.
After “Start Me Up,” some unintelligible talking from Jagger and a song that is not on “Hot Rocks, 1964-1971,” they catapulted into their predictable closer, “Satisfaction.”
At that moment, millions of viewers under the age of 22 sat back down on the couch after a bathroom break and a refill and said: “Do these old farts think they are cool covering Britney Spears?” that may not have been the whole case, but it's close.
Anyway, so far I may have bad mouthed the Stones a little bit, but here is why we need artists like them and McCartney doing halftime shows:
The Rolling Stones are easily the greatest rock band ever. If those endless lists of the all-time greatest albums and songs get anything right…it’s that the Stones usually make the cut multiple times.
For the most part these days, all the respect they deserve ends there. (See an article from Penn State's Daily Collegian.Click here.)
These days we do not remember who wrote great songs last year, not to mention the last 40. You could say it is sad that greats like McCartney and the Stones are only here because Janet Jackson put them there, but maybe that weirdly shaped spiked thing was a blessing. These are the greats and we are lucky to have their performances televised into our homes.
Was the Stones’ performance amazingly memorable? No, but knowing that the bricklayers of rock can still rock and are still represented should be a relief to all of us.
I don’t assume the Stones walked away last night empty handed, but the Stones are a part of our culture. Ciara and Ashley Simpson are not and they will never be. We need more artists like the Stones today, innovators with longevity that are professional artists and true representatives of who we are, were and going to be.
So I guess the saying is true when it comes to football halftime shows, “you can’t always get what you want…but you get what you need.”
Thursday, February 2
Weblog Post #2 - Reactions to Rosen
My first memory of the Internet was when I was in second grade and my father signed up for America Online. Our computer was a Macintosh Classic and it had a black-and-white screen. The modem was 2400 bps and we were amazed.
Since then the World Wide Web has grown by leaps and bounds. The screens are colorful, the speeds are faster and the information is infinite.
When Internet journals first came onto the scene, I did not think there was much to them. It was just everyday people droning on about their lives and opinions. I had no idea that the now termed “blogs” would become the ground-shaking newsmakers they are today.
Media critic and faculty member at New York University Jay Rosen came up with “10 things radical about the weblog form in journalism.”
He claims that weblogs are a very democratic way for people to get their news and daily information compared to the radio, television and newspaper which seem to be inching in the direction of obsolete systems like the newswire and the record player.
Rosen says blogs are radical because today’s journalism comes out of a market economy where blogs are free.
This is true. You are reading this blog free of charge thanks to the advertising revenues of blogger.com. And it's not like the traditional media world is “pop-up” free.
Advertisements take up full pages in newspapers and magazines, commercials squeeze their way into news programs every seven minutes on television and the radio. Not only that but you are sending in your cable bill and sticking your 50 cents into the newspaper machine to get your news.
Blogging is free. It is free for the reader; it can be free for the writer and without serious money at stake the floodgates open for anything at all to be available for millions of people.
Rosen’s second radical blog truth is the fact that in everyday journalism, professionals run the show and amateurs are asked to call or write in. In the “blogosphere,” it is the amateurs who are running the show and it is the professionals who are welcomed into their worlds.
This is where blogging becomes problematic. Do we want everyone and their uncle twice-removed to be stuffing the Internet with opinions and stories? Do we want amateur news to be feeding professional news?
A lot of these people are blogging news and information for the fun of it. Don’t we need that market, objectivity and professionalism that we expect from our news-gatherers? There needs to be a line.
I do not want to read about a congressional hearing or election coverage from a writer who just happened to be bored that day.
Rosen says that when it comes to blogs, everyone is a reader and everyone is a writer. Blogs give the ability for readers to post comments to individual posts on any blog and since there are no time or space constraints, these readers/writers can go all out. (If you visit Ascent of Humanity, a blog by a professor at Penn State University, you can see how
readers chime in with comments for each post.)
This feature of blogs has its ups and downs. Along with the blogger, this allows the reader to add anything. Whether it is bias, false or unfair it can be instantly posted on a site for millions to see.
Imagine if newspapers printed every letter to the editor they received or if news stations played every call they got on the air. I would hope that most people do not want to hear or read those things. They trust their professional news-handlers to sort out the newsworthy opinions.
Rosen's sixth observation says that weblogs can work journalistically and they do not need a huge amount of readers to be successful, like a newspaper does.
It is not a good thing to think that blogs can be the answer to real news or can be. We as the public should be able to rely on the news professionals to collect and distribute our news.
It is good that big names in journalism have a medium like a weblog to let people know a little more information. In certain cases the blog may uncover their bias and once a journalist loses his/her objective credibility, it can be hard for the public as a whole to trust everything he/she say. Journalists need to stay objective on all subjects that they cover.
Some may say that they do not trust the media, and blogs are the only way to go. If that is the case then our media needs some serious help. The day the weblog becomes the primary news medium for people is the day Media Ethics classes in colleges become optional one credit courses.
There are many radical differences and benefits of the blog. However, the more people rely on amateur news gathering, the less people will care and be fully informed about everything around them, whether it is politics, science or education. Blogs are a nice addition to traditional media, but they are not radical enough to replace any of it.
Since then the World Wide Web has grown by leaps and bounds. The screens are colorful, the speeds are faster and the information is infinite.
When Internet journals first came onto the scene, I did not think there was much to them. It was just everyday people droning on about their lives and opinions. I had no idea that the now termed “blogs” would become the ground-shaking newsmakers they are today.
Media critic and faculty member at New York University Jay Rosen came up with “10 things radical about the weblog form in journalism.”
He claims that weblogs are a very democratic way for people to get their news and daily information compared to the radio, television and newspaper which seem to be inching in the direction of obsolete systems like the newswire and the record player.
Rosen says blogs are radical because today’s journalism comes out of a market economy where blogs are free.
This is true. You are reading this blog free of charge thanks to the advertising revenues of blogger.com. And it's not like the traditional media world is “pop-up” free.
Advertisements take up full pages in newspapers and magazines, commercials squeeze their way into news programs every seven minutes on television and the radio. Not only that but you are sending in your cable bill and sticking your 50 cents into the newspaper machine to get your news.
Blogging is free. It is free for the reader; it can be free for the writer and without serious money at stake the floodgates open for anything at all to be available for millions of people.
Rosen’s second radical blog truth is the fact that in everyday journalism, professionals run the show and amateurs are asked to call or write in. In the “blogosphere,” it is the amateurs who are running the show and it is the professionals who are welcomed into their worlds.
This is where blogging becomes problematic. Do we want everyone and their uncle twice-removed to be stuffing the Internet with opinions and stories? Do we want amateur news to be feeding professional news?
A lot of these people are blogging news and information for the fun of it. Don’t we need that market, objectivity and professionalism that we expect from our news-gatherers? There needs to be a line.
I do not want to read about a congressional hearing or election coverage from a writer who just happened to be bored that day.
Rosen says that when it comes to blogs, everyone is a reader and everyone is a writer. Blogs give the ability for readers to post comments to individual posts on any blog and since there are no time or space constraints, these readers/writers can go all out. (If you visit Ascent of Humanity, a blog by a professor at Penn State University, you can see how
readers chime in with comments for each post.)
This feature of blogs has its ups and downs. Along with the blogger, this allows the reader to add anything. Whether it is bias, false or unfair it can be instantly posted on a site for millions to see.
Imagine if newspapers printed every letter to the editor they received or if news stations played every call they got on the air. I would hope that most people do not want to hear or read those things. They trust their professional news-handlers to sort out the newsworthy opinions.
Rosen's sixth observation says that weblogs can work journalistically and they do not need a huge amount of readers to be successful, like a newspaper does.
It is not a good thing to think that blogs can be the answer to real news or can be. We as the public should be able to rely on the news professionals to collect and distribute our news.
It is good that big names in journalism have a medium like a weblog to let people know a little more information. In certain cases the blog may uncover their bias and once a journalist loses his/her objective credibility, it can be hard for the public as a whole to trust everything he/she say. Journalists need to stay objective on all subjects that they cover.
Some may say that they do not trust the media, and blogs are the only way to go. If that is the case then our media needs some serious help. The day the weblog becomes the primary news medium for people is the day Media Ethics classes in colleges become optional one credit courses.
There are many radical differences and benefits of the blog. However, the more people rely on amateur news gathering, the less people will care and be fully informed about everything around them, whether it is politics, science or education. Blogs are a nice addition to traditional media, but they are not radical enough to replace any of it.
