The Society of Professional Journalists have started up a blog about the “technical side” of journalism, Technolo-J–clever. I look forward to seeing some quality posts about multimedia journalism and the future impact of multimedia journalism techniques.
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With all this Halo 3 action, I have neglected my favorite Nintendo obsession from the Gamecube days…Super Smash Bros.
The latest updates that you may or may not have heard….
A new video highlighted the awesome new singleplayer story line that will be part of this new title. The plot of previous Smash Bros. games has not been too thick–mostly just a series of missions where you must kill 1 to 600 opponents before time runs out or your lives run out. That’s good news.
New characters have also been announced. Ike from Fire Emblem, Pokemon Trainer (who fights with Pokemon and Diddy Kong have all emerged onto the new battlefield.
You can read the postings about their announcements, but I can’t say that any of these characters really excite me that much. Where’s the meat, Nintendo? It’s what’s for dinner!
Profiles of the newbies:
Ike
Pokemon Trainer
Diddy Kong
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The game industry has numerous podcasts that you can follow to get your gaming information. I know because I follow about 25 right now.
My favorites tend to be video podcasts because they are 1) short and 2) more visually engaging/interesting and also easy to follow in the corner of the screen while I do work. Favorites of the moment are G4TV’s X-Play Gaming Updates and The Daily Feed (I don’t have a DVR to catch the TV versions of these broadcasts) bringing the news in a quick format. TeXtra is also a good one to pick up on if you are interested in all things gadget-y and technical rather than just videogames.
What is strange about my following is that I don’t even have a video iPod. I just watch them on my desktop either while working or doing other things around the apartment.
A recent posting on The Guardian’s Gamesblog pointed out one of the complaints I have about some of the more long-winded podcasts out there.
Most podcasts try to be like blogs. People want to read short, sweet postings with pretty images and links to more information on the whole. Long postings have to be very in depth and intriguing in order to gain a following. TeXtra is one of the longer ones but cuts off usually around 5-6 minutes.
The videogame podcasts coming from sources like 1up (at least it is video), Gamespot (just audio) and GameSpy (just audio) are not published as frequently as these smaller podcasts and choose a 1-hour, weekly format. Most of them are massively long. Not only does it require you to spend an entire hour listening to catch all of their discussions, but when one of the segments covers games you aren’t particularly interested in or topics that are old news (like something that happened a week ago), it makes it almost painful to sit through a podcast that long. You can’t even skip to a more relevant part because there are no labels or visual cues as to where you can find the next “chapter” or discussion in the audio file.
When I am particularly busy, I often find myself skipping through in 5-minute jumps and hitting the end unless I catch something of interest.
I would think with these pubs being generally speaking more tech savvy that they would get their act together a stop torturing us with these long podcasts. I wouldn’t mind not having flashing intro and end graphics or theme music if you just cut up your hour long show into five 20 minute shows or–better yet–5-10 minute segments.
This format would follow the norm for podcasting in today’s world and make it easier for someone obsessing over all things videogames all the time every waking moment of my life following many blogs to handle.
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In my travels around my RSS feeds in Google Reader, I stumbled upon a link to WebbAlert.
Apparently, outside of her usual gig on X-Play, Ms. Morgan Webb is also producing her own daily podcast of the latest in tech news. [Sneakily enough, her Wikipedia entry has already been updated to reflect her new podcast, which apparently began on August 2, 2007.] You can view the latest videos right on the WebbAlert site or subscribe to the podcast through email, iTunes or other readers.
Her coverage seems a little less consumer focussed than the already prevalent TeXtra Podshow hosted by Natali Del Conte. Natali tends to focus in on news pertaining to consumer projects and consumer tools online like Google’s online offerings, laptops and media players. Morgan seems to have more links from Red Herring and business-to-business news.
The video blog runs Monday through Thursday, and as the first episode explains, she wants this video podcast to catch people up who may have missed their daily dose of the blogosphere. The business focus probably will work for this topic because it will be the busier entrepreneur types that won’t be able to catch their daily dose of blogs and podcasts.
It sounds like a good idea. I am not hating on her for finding a new hobby outside of X-Play, but I was amazed to see her branching out. I hadn’t even heard about it until I suddenly just saw her online.
Catch the initial episode–dated August 2.
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I am not sure how many people know about methods of tracking traffic and demographics for your site audience. I know that I just discovered a few recently within the last year that have proven invaluable for seeing your results each day and making that information comprehensible. If you are ever interested in adding marketing value to your site.
Two services that I use that have a very easy interface:
Quantcast.com. A free service that gives you demographic information as well as making available to potential advertisers and your audience. Using this service, you can also compare your own traffic to another rival site or larger popular blogs–although it might just depress you to see your traffic reduced to a tiny squiggle at the bottom of a line graph.
Google Analytics. Another useful tool from a site you may have heard of previously. Google Analytics gives you a lot of hard data on your site as well as giving you easy access to AdWords and AdSense tools to marketing your site or add marketing to your site. Check it out if you want more data than you could ever need. Analytics is pictured above with a screenshot.
Both services just require you to a drop a small amount of script code into your site and then wait for the results to pour into their analytics engine.
Try them out.
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A story over at Slashdot pointed out that tech blogs are eating up all the ad revenue of larger tech print publications. Even worse, in most cases, popular blogs are beating print media on scoops about the latest and greatest in tech.
I won’t sit around and preach about the death of print media because too many people have done that and looked foolish. I think print media will always be around, but you had to know the techies and first adopters would be the first to migrate straight to all digital content all the time. I didn’t tell you so, but someone probably should have.
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So you may have noticed…unless you are reading an RSS feed…that my site doesn’t look the same. Hey, it’s not even located in the same place. Well, that was my bad.
Playing around with the blog installer built in to the Globat.com console which hosts my site, I actually clicked to install this blog…right over my existing blog and site.
I spent all of yesterday configuring the settings on this new blog to work properly for my site and importing all of my content because LUCKILY I had just moved my blog temporarily over to ugachaka.wordpress.com (saved me terrible woes for all the lost content). I also backup the rest of my site on my desktop. Whew 
The WordPress blog platform is absolutely amazing. I may have abandoned Movable Type before they caught up with their latest offering, MT4, but the interface and speed of this new WordPress setup gives me the instant gratification that I desire. As you can see from the latest several posts, ugachaka.net is going multimedia and all fancy-like. Yes, you like it. I’ll try to do more of that as we move forward. The content here is going to a great improvement from the former ugachaka.net blog, and despite not having the customization of the layout and blogging option that I did with Movable Type, I have decided that content is king.
So, for now, enjoy. Update your bookmarks and re-subscribe to the feeds. We’ll talk soon…very soon…with pictures…and videos….and maybe even sock puppets.
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