Sorry for the lack of blogging the last few weeks. I jetted off to Lanzarote for a week and therefore missed two Thursday online lectures so I’m starting anew this week.
This week’s speaker in the online journalism lecture was Daniel Meadows who, in my opinion, was an absolute legend. He was a hippy and travelled around the UK between 1973 and 1974 in his Free Photographic Omnibus. This was basically a double decker bus kitted out with a dark room etc for him to take photos of people he met on his travels. As if that wasn’t interesting and unique enough in itself, Daniel went on to tell us about how years later he had attempted to find all the people he had photographed during this tour. Newspapers published his quest to find those he had photographed all those years ago while living aboard the photographic omnibus and eventually he found some. He later published a collection of them into a book called The Bus showing the characters then and now.
One woman in particular made an impact on Daniel and in fact she left a mark on me, even though I’d only heard her story through him. The story of Florence Alma Snoad, a part time cleaner when Meadows first met her in Southampton, was absolutely fascinating.
The whole idea of digital storytelling is one that I find quite scary. I’m not good with technology though I feel I’m more twentieth century now that I have an Apple Mac and a Blackberry but I still lack the confidence to tackle technology head on. When Daniel showed us the videos he made I instantly thought that it was unbelievably complicated and something that I would never grasp. Then he told us all about the project, Capture Wales. This project was set up for those who wanted to learn more about technology and digital storytelling to learn all about it. They were able to create their own videos (some of which were hilarious, such as Elvis Died in my Bedroom.
We were shown a video with people from the course talking about their experiences. The majority of people said they found it daunting at first and, like me, found it hard to believe that they were going to be able to make anything half decent. However, they had great support and help from the team at Capture Wales and the outcomes were fantastic. Some were humorous, while others were a bit more serious but all in all they were great pieces of work – especially for people who had only 5 days to learn the basics!
Anyways now onto the other section of the weekly blog. I recently got a Blackberry (in fact I’ve had it for less than 24 hours!) and one of the first things I did was install Ubertwitter. This is an application available for the Blackberry where you can update your status, location, see other peoples tweets, direct messages, trending topics etc making my Twitter life a lot easier and simple. Now I don’t even have to use the laptop to access one of my favourite sites.
This weeks trending topics have been fairly obvious. I checked them out on Thursday 5th and Friday 6th of November so as you can imagine Guy Fawkes night was right up there as number one on the trending topics due to the fact that it was Bonfire Night. I love fireworks, I usually go to the Swansea display, even before I went to university down there thats where my family and I would go, but this year because of the work load at Uni I was unable to go and had to settle for a nice Curry in Wetherspoons instead.
I am a complete Awards night geek and will stay up until ungodly hours to watch the Oscars and other such shows. MTV shows are some of my favourites because usually the celebrities are filled to the brim with alcohol and will do stupid stuff that you know they’re going to regret the next day (as evident with the Taylor Swift/ Kanye West incident – BOO YOU KANYE!). The MTV EMAs was an event that I had been looking forward to for a while, ever since one of my favourite artists, Katy Perry, was announced as the host being the only person that MTV has asked to host an EMA show for a second time. On Thursday night, the words EMAs, MTV and Katy Perry were all high up in the trending topics. Most people were commenting on the several outfits that Ms Perry had changed in to throughout the night including a West Ham United basque, especially for her footie mad boyfriend Russell Brand.
And for the third week running, Rihanna was in the trending topics yet again. It came after the revealing interview she gave detailing the night that she was attacked by her boyfriend Chris Brown. Unsurprisingly, ever the gentleman, Chris Brown released a statement saying that he was never going to speak of the incident because he believed it was something that was personal and private between the two of them. Personally I applaud Rihanna for having the courage to speak out on national TV and encouraging other women who are victims of domestic abuse to get help.
As the weeks go on I find myself being inundated with work, but in a way I’m grateful as it is making me realise how difficult deadlines can be to meet. It’ll come to a head one day when you’ll find me doing this in the office:
Until next time!
