Assignment: The We Media Podcast

Over the course of the class, each student will write, record and podcast an audio essay or documentary on the the topic of the Personal Media Revolution. Essentially. we'll track the critical categories or issues found in our We Media Notebook, and we'll combine each of these essays to produce a serial podcast. So how to proceed?

1. Choose or be assigned a topic. Approval of the instructor required here.

2. Starting with links in our We Media Notebook, the dig into the deb and/or appropriate print resources. Based on your research, write an essay of roughly 1200 words, or 5 to 6 minutes of spoken narration.

3. Following our in-class tech tutorials, record your piece as a spoken word audio essay using the audio booth and equipment in the CAMS lab. Edit your piece using software of your choice, but Apple's Soundtrack Pro, ProTools or GarageBand are recommended. If you choose to make a documentary with interviews, etc., you may wish to record interviews—"phoners"—with national authorities using our telephone recording interface. Output your final essay or documentary as an MP3.

4. Upload your piece to the project blog, and to your own blog. Each project should have an associated RSS feed.

Proposed topics:

P2P video: 2006 the year p2p video explored on the web. Where, why and how.
Citizen Journalism [Sam Lowry]
Camphone citizen journalists
Lifecaching: the new impulse to digitize and share our lives [Karina Hill]
Economics of web 2.0 beyond the Long Tail [Dan Selz]
The Long Tail [Daniel Matanovic]
Social music
BitTorrent Nation: sharing, darkents & implications [Sarah Jones]
Web 2.0: is it, and what is it?
Copyright and We Media [Leah Sipher-Mann]
Open Source software and We Media
Remix [August Brown]
Tagging and Folksonomies
RSS and how it's changing info foraging
Videoblogs: what are they, and why?
Photoblogs: genre[s] and prospects
Video Blogging [Greg Marliav]
We Media
Flickr
What is AJAX [and/or Grease Monkey] and why is it important?
The New News Portals
Newsreaders, and how they changed my life
Water Like Music [The Future of Music]
Blogging as personal expression [Khanh]