Robinson Crusoe Island is a small, isolated island four hundred miles off the coast of Chile. The island is rich with history – including pirates, buried treasure and the real-life inspiration for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – but unfortunately lacking in resources. In 2006, I was part of a team of Chilean and American journalism students who went to the island and built a documentary website.
Minutes after last week’s earthquake struck Chile’s mainland, Robinson Crusoe Island was pummeled by a tsunami that, according to AP reports, covered nearly two miles of the island. When the wave retreated, it took with it nearly all of the island’s small fishing settlement. Just about everything is wiped out – their school, community center, fishing boats, supply stores, homes.
Some of us who created the site back in 2006 have put together a new video showing photos from before and after, and we have links to where visitors can find out more and donate directly to the island’s people. Check out (and share!) the video below, and go to Chasing Crusoe to learn how you can help the island survive.
(and a special thanks to Andrew Sullivan for posting our message on his blog!)
The February episode of KQED’s Health Dialogues is called Teen Health: Coming Of Age. The show addresses teen health from a number of angles, from pediatricians’ perspectives, to the stress of applying to college, to school bullying.
In the opening segment (embedded below), I spoke with a group of high school students from San Francisco about how they think about health: what are they concerned about? Who do they trust for info? How would they raise a healthy teen?
With the help of partner stations and freelance reporters, I also collected answers to the same questions from teens across California, and built an embeddable Flash interactive to showcase their responses. I think the content turned out well. Hopefully, we can use the module as a template for further projects.
It’s about time I mentioned that we’ve launched the latest iteration of KQED’s You Decide. Part of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s collaboration on economic coverage, You Decide is a website and series of activities designed to challenge your assumptions on economic issues – on both personal and policy levels.
Widgets for each activity are available for you to embed on your site. You can also embed the entire activity, like below.
Check out the You Decide website for all our activities. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to get an email notification every time a new activity is published.
As of November first, I am officially in the running to become the Man of Movember, a worldwide annual event to raise money for and awareness of prostate and testicular cancer. If you visit my Mo Space page – where you can leave comments and donate to the cause – you’ll see that I’ve decided to compete because not only do I have a strong distaste for cancer, I also think it’s time someone held a mirror up to Adam Morrison.
I’ve heard the call to post photos. I’ve been keeping a daily photojournal, but I’m going to wait until the end of the month before putting a time-collapse video up. My ’stache may be unique, but I don’t think it commands daily attention. (Aside, of course, from the grooming.)
We finished moving Health Dialogues from the KQED website into the California Report website. The redesign gives the show a major facelift, with each segment clearly delineated while remaining part of the thematic whole.
The redesign gives us some added features, as well. Most notable to the user, you can now click through to the segment level, meaning that you can bookmark or otherwise share links to a specific segment of a show. You can also leave comments and embed segment audio on your own website. The program archive is also much more functional, with episode listings and descriptions.
Along with the relaunch of NPR’s website comes a newly improved media player. Now running off the NPR API, the player was built using ActionScript 3 and an object-oriented programming model, and written using open source Flash Develop software.
What all this means for the user is that you can now download an mp3 of any NPR media clip, or embed it on your website with the provided embed code. And because it’s running off NPR’s API, we can expect some further additions and customizations from the development community.
It’s great to see NPR making some solid strides in digital media, per CEO Vivian Schiller’s stated goal of making NPR a major player in that realm. While radio remains NPR’s trump card over other media outlets, it has to focus on digital presence and distribution to remain relevant. You can have the greatest and most in-depth news coverage of anyone around, but if you’re not where the consumer is, then who cares?
Here’ s an example of the newly embeddable NPR media player:
Special Olympics Live, a project for which I served as coach and daily video producer, just won two golds in the 2009 Horizon Interactive Awards, in the categories of “public service/non-profit” and “College & University.”
In its 8th year, the Horizon Interactive Awards was created to recognize excellence in interactive media production worldwide. Since 2001, the competition has received many thousands of entries from countries around the world and nearly all 50 US States. Each year, those entries are narrowed down to the best of the best to be recognized and promoted on and international stage for their excellence. The judging process involves a Horizon Interactive Awards advisory panel, end user panel and a worldwide panel of judges consisting of industry professionals. Winning entries are dubbed the “best of the best” in the interactive media industry.
Today was the first day of David Lynch’s Interview Project. Every three days over the next year, the site will feature a new interview with someone found by Lynch’s production team as it drives across the country.
The site has this to say about the project’s first entry:
Jess was our first interview. We found him sitting on the side of the road during the middle of the day. He told us he was waiting for his trailer to be repaired so that he could go live alone in the desert. Although hesitant at first, Jess agreed to spare a bit of his time and talk to us. His rugged delivery and appearance soon gave way to a gentle man who was just looking for some peace in his life.
I had the chance to meet NPR’s new CEO Vivian Schiller a couple weeks ago, when she visited our studios at KQED. In our casual, round table discussion, she touched on the same topic that she discusses in the video below (via Huffington Post). As the former senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com explains, there are few working pay models on the web – all of them serving niche markets. For journalism to survive, she argues, it must remain freely accessible and, by extension, searchable.
I am the guitar player, my name is Olle Hemmingson and i live in Sweden. There has been some asking about my guitar, it is a Gibson Les Paul Signature, i bought it used around 1975 and it’s the best guitar I ever had. The bridge is for adjusting the strings in all ways and the strings are locked in the top. There is a movie with “Sweet Georgia Brown” and a one with “Lover come back to me” to[o]. I did not send the movies to YouTube, but it’s fun that people seems to like it.
