Mediactive

Last week I attended the Game Developers Conference and kept my eyes open for topics related to media literacy. Thoughts on media consumption and creation show up in the multitude of lectures, panels, bootcamps and roundtables dedicated to the study and creation of games. Here are some things I gleaned:

Serious Games Summit
Several interesting things came up at the Serious Games Summit, which is the session track for examining games used for purposes other than entertainment (not that entertainment isn’t a worthy goal itself). Here are the highlights:

• Soren Johnson contrasted game theme with mechanic in a talk titled “Theme is not meaning.” This is an important breakdown when it comes to games literacy as game mechanics tend to deliver the real meaning in a game. Johnson’s thesis was that a game’s window dressing was just that unless the mechanic matched. The Redistricting Game was offered of a solid example of matching theme with mechanic as the player is tasked with literally drawing new voting district lines to win needed votes. The discussion goes much deeper and Chris Dahlen writes more about the talk here.
• Borut Pfeifer has been working on a game about crowds in the Iranian Election. Named The Unconcerned, the game pulls the player through the streets of the Iranian election by putting her in the shoes of parents looking for their daughter. Pfeifer’s talk covered prototyping and the many iterations along the way to figuring out what played well. The biggest takeaway here concerns creation. Traditionally, creating media involved getting one’s ducks in a neat row before creation began. However, games and other digital media find success in testing and getting feedback on many rough drafts along the way. I’m going to hunt down some links for the best practices for iterative design for the Mediactive Tools section.
• While the talk strayed more into digital entrepreneurship, Jelena Godjevac presented a case study of Blossom, a game that places the player in the role of a small business owner. Blossom came out of Micro Enterprise Acceleration Institute (MEA-I) as a game-based way of furthering local micro-business. They’re looking for new ideas for games that teach entrepreneurship and are teaming up with HP in a design contest. I’d love to see submissions related to digital media entrepreneurs, like starting a local news site or training citizen journalists.

Game Writers’ Roundtable
Several worthwhile tips came out of a roundtable of both professional and amateur game writers. Here are the ones that apply well to digital media creation.

• Show don’t tell – In an interactive environment, show a story before using words. Figure out what you can say with other forms of media. This applies to even something like blogs. Can you set your stage with a good photo or video? Does a link or a podcast say it better than you can?
• If you can’t tweet it, you shouldn’t write it – This came up in the context of dialogue and text in midst of play. The same could be applied to captions, explanations of mashups and even one’s YouTube video descriptions. There are excellent uses for long form, but if your creation is multimedia, don’t burden it with text. Err on the side of brevity.

Farmville
Social games were a hot topic at the GDC this year, both for the massive jump in people playing these games and for their lucrative nature. I sat in on a session with Mark Skaggs of Farmville where he explained the game’s development process. Farmville itself has been a bit of a phenomenon and a rather controversial one.

Most interesting for Mediactive’s purposes are the rapid creation and development of Farmville. According to Skaggs, the initial team was composed of less than ten people and was developed in five weeks. From the point of release, the game acquired about 1,000,000 new users per week, an above-expectations rate. This critical mass gave the team lots of data, which informed the design going forward. Skaggs explained “fun” as something hard to measure, while behavior could be tracked by clicks. When strawberries received a large number of clicks, the team created “Super Berries” and the resulting popularity nearly crashed the server. This is just one example, but every game action and click was evaluated for new direction in content.

I see a couple lessons here that apply to digital media:

1. Release quickly and design based on data and user feedback.
2. Data-driven design requires greater discussion when it comes to news. Lots of clicks can tell you if a story is popular, but a click can’t tell you if the reader was informed. As well, a click may tell a creator if people enjoy content, but not the impact of that content. For example, a reader may spend more clicks in a day on what celebrities are wearing, but one click given to a long form political story may have the greatest impact on a future vote.

Beyond what I’ve covered here. I ran into some interesting tools for media creation, which I’ll be testing and posting to the Tools page. Games and interactive environments are ripe for experimentation when it comes to new media and I’m excited to see what emerges over time.

I’ll be at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this week and I’d like your suggestions on what to cover. Games and interactivity are a large part of contemporary media and the ability to both engage with and create within this rapidly-evolving medium become more important.

You can see the conference’s schedule here. Hot topics this year are social games, geolocation, smartphone applications and augmented reality. As well, something like the Serious Games summit examines the use of games for not purely entertainment reasons. So, if the GDC interests you, add suggestions for sessions or topics you’d like me to cover to the comments section.

After the Deadline is a WordPress plugin that adds proofreading functionality to the WordPress dashboard. Once added, the plugin will highlight grammar, style and spelling errors while you write posts. Similar to Word, errors are color coded by type and right-clicking will bring up suggestions for correction. It’s not 100% (it didn’t catch a there/their misuse I tested), but like any proofreading support, it should be a safeguard instead of a brain replacement. The plugin is only available for self-hosted WordPress blogs. The following video shows After the Deadline in action:

Note: After the Deadline is also available as a FireFox add-on.

NewsTrust gives its community tools to evaluate news stories. Users can add news articles they find, rating them by journalistic standards such as fairness, sourcing and depth. This format readily lends itself to teaching news literacy and evaluation. Recognizing this, NewsTrust offers a nice set of teacher guides.

The guides, aimed at high school and college-level students, are broken down between news and opinion. The teacher guide is broken down into a 45-minute lesson plan, while the student guide offers an example story and questions that zero in on qualities like facts and fairness. Additional activities are offered as well.

If you like the guides and want to go more in depth, NewsTrust offers an additional page of external educational resources geared toward news literacy.

You never know when you’ll need to chop audio or upload it on the fly. For example, a laptop theft last month had me jumping from loaner machines to public PCs until I secured a suitable replacement. Web-based and low-profile apps prove their worth in such situations and I want to list a few of my favorite finds here.

Audacity is the old steady when you don’t have GarageBand and you need a free audio editor. It has the backing of an enthusiastic open-source community, which keeps it regularly updated. It’s also popular with the public radio crowd as its simplicity is great for editing interviews (as opposed to remixing music). However, you must download and install it as well as download the LAME codec for the ability to export to mp3 format. This is a simple process, but a significant barrier if your current machine doesn’t offer you install privileges.

That’s where Myna comes in. Part of the Aviary suite, Myna is a fully web-based audio editing tool. The features are robust and include nice editing touches like fades, control points and effects. Aviary as whole offers a community for sharing creations publicly and connecting with friends on the site. This video gives an excellent overview:

Indaba Music also offers an online audio editor, but the site’s strength is its fixation on community. The vision is to enable musicians to collaborate on music from afar. In this Colbert interview, Indaba’s co-founder shares an example of producing music with a friend and then bringing in vocals from a singer in Nigeria. The same scenario could easily be applied to journalism.

Indaba allows the user to create a Session and invite other users. Session members can then upload audio tracks to that session (adding audio via phone call is another interesting feature). When the user opens the web-based audio editor, all the tracks from that session are automatically added to the track list. Session members then see file and editing updates on their dashboard or they can subscribe to session updates via RSS. This has a lot of potential for journalists working remotely on a radio or podcasting project. Of note, is the 100mb limit for free accounts. This may not go far when dealing with long interviews. An upgrade to a 500mb account is $50/year, while unlimited storage is $250/year. Another note, the editor is java-based and in Chrome and on Mac, one must open the session file manually in Java.

Finally, I want to offer mp3cut as the ultra-simple tool for crude audio chopping in a hurry. It’s advertised as a platform for cutting clips from songs for ringtones, but could easily be used to reduce the file size of large interview when one only has one clip to worry about and only wants a small part of that clip.

If you have other free and easily-accessed audio tools, please share them in the comments.

UPDATE: The embedded VidMap was showing an error when trying to display the video. I’m looking into it, but I’ve given a link to the page where you can see the example.

Many sites now allow for quickly building your own maps and their feature sets are fairly predictable. With that in mind, I want showcase several unique features I’ve run across in mapping tools.

VidMap has journalistic potential. The site lets you sync video with a map, showing the aerial course of the video’s content. For example, I added this video of a trip along the Phoenix light rail and then clicked its course out on the map. When finished the video plays while a marker moves along the train’s route. This example is a bit mundane, but this would be excellent for displaying the movement of a roaming protest or showing the blocks of a neighborhood in a related story.

UMapper offers several distinctive features and one of them lets you make games out of your maps. It’s similar in style to the classic Geosense and its derivatives like Globetrotter XL. This would be useful for either helping the user master locations or saying something about the relationship distance plays in a story (as distance is part of scoring). This video gives an overview:

As well, UMapper recently made it possible to create maps with Twitter results. This adds thumbnails of tweeters to a map which show the corresponding tweet if clicked. Tweet results are drawn from Twitter automatically, so the map builder doensn’t have any input in filtering results. It’s also worth noting that tweeter location can be an inexact science as only a small selection of users enable GeoTagging and results from the Location field can be all over the place. However, there may still be potential uses for building a map where tweets alongside annotated map notes creates something interesting.

Micello is an application that shows maps of indoor environments. It’s relegated to just the iPhone for the moment, but this an extremely useful and untapped mapping realm. While the Micello feature set doesn’t mention shared maps at the moment, many stories happen within buildings and the potential to easily annotate floor plans with story details is an interesting one. For now, the content is primarily retail, but I’m enthusiastic about the potential.

What other interesting mapping tool features have you run across?

Before terms like podcasting and citizen media were common, several sites and public radio storytellers were already on top of helping non-professionals tell their stories. The sites I want to list here offer great examples of what amateurs can do with a recording device and a bit of encouragement.

Transom.org is produced by Atlantic Public Media and is a site for welcoming newbs into the world of public radio. In 2003, it was the first website to win a Peabody award and did so by offering great examples of audio storytelling and solid instruction on how to produce such stories.

HearingVoices.com is a series featuring the best of public radio. It hosts its own “Learn Radio” list with great links related to both storytelling and production.

SoundPortraits.org hosts a great Interview Checklist by David Isay. Its beauty is in its brevity and would make a great pre-game rundown before interviews until you get the hang of it.

The Teen Reporter’s Handbook at RadioDiaries.org is another great reference for getting started in audio. As well, Radio Diaries itself is a commendable project replete with good examples of citizen storytelling. The goal of the project is to find folks whose voices are rarely heard and get a recording device in their hands to begin a personal diary. Hosted documentaries include the voices of prisoners, unique teens and carnival retirees.

If you’re still hungry for digital storytelling links, McLellan Wyatt’s list will keep you busy for weeks.

Finally, check out Ira Glass on Storytelling. He gives an excellent breakdown between merely reporting and telling a story people want to hear:

YouTube Project: Report is holding its second contest for aspiring journalists, offering $10,000 grants to five winners. Partnered with the Pulitzer Center, the contest asks journalism newcomers to film a day in the life of a compelling person. Because of this newbie focus, the YouTube page offers several videos with basic, but solid production advice for amateurs. You’ll find videos on camera basics and lighting tips, but this one on reporting composition gives an idea of what they offer:

Keeping in spirit, I’m producing this post on my G1, using the app described.

The new WordPress app for Android has been released and it’s quite nice. While blogging from a phone still feels a bit limited, this app is a good option for blogging away from a machine.

The application integrates with self-hosted blogs and features tabs for managing comments, posts and pages. The screen for writing posts integrates with Android’s image gallery. (Here, it becomes an even greater travesty that Android doesn’t provide an easy way to take screenshots.) Once written, posts can be published or uploaded as drafts.

Also nice is the comment alert feature, allowing the user to get updates when new comments show up. If you require comment approval for new posters, this can free you from your machine and frequent dashboard refreshes.

In all, it’s nice to see this app taken seriously with bases well-covered in its initial version.

With the discussion over the New York Times’ paywall plans this week, I thought it would be interesting to explore how an individual could set up her own paywall. This isn’t to make a call either way on whether a paywall is good or bad business, but individual experiments in this area could yield interesting results.

While there are multiple ways to host and charge for content online, drop.io offers a fairly simple option. Drop.io is a collaborative, file-sharing service that becomes interesting when you add its privacy options and real-time nature. In addition to file-sharing, drop.io offers the user a feature (appropriately named Paywall) to charge for uploaded content.

Many kinds of media creators can find benefit in a streamlined system for charging for files. Drop.io offers several use cases, which include the independent journalist who wants to charge for monthly access to an insider news service and the photographer who wants to sell high-resolution versions of his images. To this, I also see usefulness to the data journalist who wants to fund her document digging and visualization time by charging for curated data sets. As well, this could be an option for quickly selling that newsworthy photo you caught at the right place at the right time.

Drop.io has a thorough and well-done how-to on their site, but I’ll give the steps in broad strokes here:

1. Create a new drop on drop.io’s homepage. You have the option to add a file in this step and you’ll have to create an admin password.
   
2. Access Paywall and follow the setup instructions. This is done by appending your drop’s URL with “/admin/paywall/”.
   
3. Setup your Amazon Payments Business Account. Drop.io will take you to Amazon to set up a new account or you can use an existing one. One thing to note is that your Amazon Payments name will be visible to buyers. So, keep this in mind if there is a desire for anonymity/pseudonymity.
   
4. Finish by entering your Amazon Payments info and agreeing to terms.

It’s important to note that each site will take a cut from transactions. Drop.io takes 1% and Amazon takes 1-3% and some change based on payment method. As well, free accounts on drop.io go up to 100mb, but it’s $20/month to upgrade to 10gb.

All in all, I believe the simplicity of this approach allows for fast experimentation in terms of the kind of content an individual can sell.  For example, PaidContent.org began as a one-man trade newsletter by Rafat Ali. As well, the system could fit into the 1000 True Fans model being adopted by entrepreneurial media creators. This is ripe for creativity.