TechMedia

Tanya Croft, Eli Purchase, Jean Escalante, Kyle Thomas and Megan Holsapple watch Taylor Moore's presentation on online interactive games at North of 60 Blog Camp, April 2, 2011.

Had a great time at my first North of 60 Blog Camp over the weekend. Thanks to Nancy Zimmerman for organizing the event, and to the other participants who shared their geek-knowledge. Here’s what Tweeters had to say about the event:

I just completed my first test of Storify, which is a fun and easy way to tell stories from social media:

Collect the best photos, video, tweets and more to publish them
as simple, beautiful stories that can be embedded anywhere.

The resulting story, shown below, can then be easily placed into a webpage, or linked to from Storify. Here’s what the one below looks like on its page.

The service is in Beta testing for the time being, and you must request an invite to use. Storify is being used by some large media companies to cover events such as the uprising in Egypt – both CBC and The Globe and Mail created Storify pages. And with the recent announcement that Storify raised $2 million in its first round of funding, it looks like we’ll be seeing even more Storify embeds on the pages of news sites.

It’s a great tool for breaking news, but could also be used “to remember an event through what people share, whether it’s a conference, wedding, election or natural disaster,” says its profile on Crunchbase.

How would you use Storify?

(Mac users only) This great tip is courtesy of Magbook’s Independent Guide to the Mac.

Firstly, if you haven’t already, set up a Facebook username under Account>Account Settings. The obvious choice would be your full name – or the nearest equivalent if that’s been scooped.

Then, add an account to iChat. If you haven’t used it before, it will open to this window, otherwise open Preferences and add account.

Change your server settings in Preferences

Set new account type to Jabber. Enter username@chat.facebook.com as the account name, substituting the username you chose. Enter the same password you use for Facebook.

Expand server options and enter chat.facebook.com as the server and 5222 as the port. Leave SSL and Kerberos unchecked and press Done. It’s that easy – and iChat is a much nicer interface than Facebook!

The main reasons to transcode are to convert to a codec for editing purposes, and if you need to deliver in a specific codec iPhone, WMV, etc).

For editing, capture from tape creates few problems. But the rise of video-to-disc systems means most camera manufacturers record in codecs that that are highly compressed and not designed for editing.

Which means that a lot of times you could end up with video that doesn’t play so well in your Final Cut Pro and Avid editing systems.

So after coming across the article To Transcode and Not to Transcode? I started thinking that using Premier sounds pretty sweet.

For those of us not using Premier I recommend using Streamclip, which has a feature I find very handy – File>Show Stream Info (cmd, i) will give you all kinds of useful information for import, such as frame size, and kbps.

What is your workflow, do you transcode before editing? Will Premier capture a bigger market share because it’s so handy to edit using native file formats?

With so much upheaval in the news industry, it can be tough staying on top of new technologies. One of the biggest incentives for me to be on Twitter is to follow people and businesses that provide useful links for e-learning, and I have discovered many useful resources through Twitter.

So without further ado, here are a few of my favourite journalism sites on the web today.

Journalism coders

Hacks and Hackers is a digital community of people who seek to inspire each other, share information (and code) and collaborate to invent the future of media and journalism.

Sadly the meetups for this group are far away from where I live, but I follow its founders Burt Herman, Rich Gordon, and Aron Pilhofer on Twitter and find its Q&A site helpful. Have a question about media and technology, post it here and knowledgeable journalist/coders will jump in to help you out.

News University

Poynter’s newsu.org is a wonderful interactive journalism training site, and many of its courses are either free or cheap. (And we all know how much journalists love free stuff.)

I have taken some fantastic free courses such as Multimedia Reporting: Covering Breaking News, Video Storytelling for the Web and Online Project Development. I advise you to go and create an account, and to follow newsuniversity on Twitter.

The Nieman Journalism Lab

The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.

The J-lab’s Twitter stream is a great source of news about, well, news.

Recent stories include How The Guardian is pioneering data journalism with free tools, Calmness, curation, cat porn, and The NYT’s depressing list of most looked-up words

Lastly, a not-totally-journalistic site

I am going to throw in Read Write Web. I didn’t include it in the top 3 as it as more a general technology blog, but it has plenty of stories of interest to journalists and is well worth a follow on Twitter.

That’s my very unscientific list – what are your favourite journalism sites?

Zoomify lets you post high resolution photos to your website and creates panning style navigation.

Most times when you post photos online you try to make the files fairly small to ensure that viewers won’t wait too long to load the images.

But Photoshop’s Zoomify command lets you create pages with high resolution and panaromic images that are composites of smaller, faster loading jpegs, which greatly improves load time.

And it’s so simple to use.

Simply go to File>Export>Zoomify. The template field allows you to pick a colour for your interface.

The Base Name will be the name of the html file Photoshop creates for you.

Make a folder and select it to save your zoomified files in. Set jpeg quality – keep this high, you want your image to look good.

Set what size you want your browser interface to be (maximum width is 1000 pixels).

Make sure the Open in Web Browser box is checked to see your new creation immediately.

That’s all there is to it, just hit OK and your files will be created ready for upload – a zoomify viewer swf file, the tile group of small jpegs, an image properties xml file and the html file.

The interface will look something like this shot of a spring commute on Great Slave Lake. (You can zoom in and see a guy on the houseboat – is that Adrian?)

And lastly – don’t forget to add a target=”_blank” attribute unless you plan to add navigation to the page!

I just watched a wonderful 2 minute video on pocket-size video journalism in which BBC multimedia trainer Ramaa Sharma provides tips on how best to use a small camera (such as a Flip, Kodak or iPhone).

A few of her key points are:

• Keep the camera still. Try to use a tripod – or natural support – whenever possible
• Hold each shot for at least 10 seconds
• Shoot from different distances – wide to establish, medium gives more detail, and a close up
• Avoid zooms and pans
• Try to get in close and find quiet spot for best sound
• Avoid backlighting where possible

And special for those headed to music festivals this summer (Folk on the Rocks and Vancouver Folk Fest are next weekend!), check out the embed below to see how to shoot a video of a live music performance.

Colour is an important part of any design, it immediately sets the tone and helps to communicate the mood of your message.

Tones of a colour can be easily matched, but just because a website has the colour red doesn’t mean you add any old red and expect design harmony.

So when a friend, who is creating a slideshow for a class reunioun, asked, “how do I match my school colours?,” I thought that would be a great topic for a post.

There are two easy ways to get the numbers you will need to match your colour to an existing colour. If the colour is online, I would highly recommend using Firefox’s ColorZilla extension.

With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program.

I use this handy extension frequently, it’s so easy to grab the RGB or hex colour values from a design element for use in Photoshop, or to use in your CSS.

Speaking of, there is an easy way to grab any colour anywhere on your screen using Photoshop.

Simply select the Eye Dropper tool and take a sample from an area by clicking and dragging from your Photosop document to where the colour is. This will load colour into the foreground colour box of the colour picker, for use in your design.

Once you have your colour, time to create a great palette using Adobe Kuler (as outlined in a previous post).

Free online screencasting tool

Note: this demo should really use a low constrast photo for dramatic effect, but I had trouble finding one because the north’s low-angled sun makes for a lot of great lighting!

You can’t always take photos during the magic hours of sunrise and sunset, and sometimes bad lighting makes colours washed out even monochrome.

For these photos, there is an easy fix: Lab colour. The method involves few steps:

• Go to drop down menu: Image>Mode>Lab Color
• Go to drop down menu: Image>Adjustments>Curves (Cmd M on Mac)
• Click Curve Display Options and make sure the grid of 10% increments is selected
• Find a and b channels (along with Brightness) under the Channels drop down – this is where the magic happens
• Adjust the Input levels along the bottom and top, either 10 or 20 per cent depending on how much colour boost needed
• Change your image back to RGB or CMYK once you are happy with the contrast. Lab colour files save as PSD, so’ll you’ll know if you forget this step.

This method can work wonders on washed out scenes for times when you can’t get reshoot and it takes 2 minutes.

I am a big fan of the font Georgia, but sometimes have wistful memories of designing for print, those heady days when life was pretty much a what-you-see-is-what-you-get experience. There are many image replacement techniques, but these can suck up bandwidth and require hacks for viewers with text-only access.

So I was greatly interested to hear about Typekit, a subscription-based service for linking to Open Type fonts. This sounds like an excellent solution to accessing a broad selection of fonts on the web. While @font-face has enabled designers to use style sheets point to web font files, there is a major problem with this technique.

Almost all fonts are protected by copyright — even those available for free — and very few of them allow for linking via CSS or redistribution on the web. – Typekit

Font squirrel is another interesting (free) resource that offers downloads of hundreds of prepackaged @font-face kits. But this method offers no guarantees that the licence is valid for @font-face usage.

For more info on online typography, speckyboy.com has a wonderful collection of links: 50 Essential Web Typography Tutorials, Tips, Guides and Best Practices.