Head Tale

Just what the world needs (and what I need too) – another blog!

I've set up a blog called The Universal, mainly as a place to link-dump stories and web sites related to the topic of online broadcasting which is a personal interest of mine (remind me to do a post about my summers selling door to door cable television subscriptions throughout rural Saskatchewan during my undergrad years!) 

Unlike Librarian Activist
which I encourage you to bookmark/add to your RSS feed reader if you
like what I write on Head Tale, you probably don't need to follow this
new blog too closely as I doubt I'll post to it too often (especially
between my one or two posts I do per week on LA and my daily posts to
this blog.)  Plus with a baby and hopefully a new job on the way sooner
rather than later, I'm guessing that time might just be at a premium
very soon.


Anyhow, I was able to do a
presentation on the topic of online broadcasting for a joint
Journalism/Library Science course (earning one of my highest marks in
FIMS – yay me!) and I decided to create this blog for a number of reasons:

1. a cursory search showed only professional and
industry sites on the topic
2. when I was working on the presentation, every day would bring a new development –
Google's purchase of YouTube, the Michael Richards incident and so on –
and the pace of developments in terms of both form and content regarding online broadcasting,
continues at a steady pace
3. as an excuse to try both the new Blogger software and also
Slideshare.net which allows you to upload Powerpoint presentations (aka
“the fuel that makes FIMS go”.) 

Slideshare is pretty slick but lacks a few notable features – I tend to do fairly minimalist presentations in terms of on-screen text so this presentation might not make as much sense without the notes showing up below the display.  It also doesn't include sound clips, transitions or animation which aren't as important but I do use a brief clip of Blur's “The Universal” to set the mood during the first slide of this presentation. (I also did a presentation for Advocacy which required an audio narration since it was for a distance course and students at both U of T and UWO had to be able to watch it.  So something like that would be ideal for SlideShare – if it allowed audio (all 62MB of it!))  On the other hand, pretty much every image in this presentation stayed as a hot link so you can explore the (mostly) YouTube clips I used to illustrate my points. 

Here's the presentation (how the hell did I get 129 views already?  I'm the 20th most viewed presentation of the week right now and I only uploaded it a couple days ago.  Sometimes I forget that there are millions of people online all the time looking at each and every thing that's available out there.  Heck, I'm ahead of Erotic Photos from Dror Davidman by four votes! Oh, he only posted four photos in his presentation – maybe that's why.  Uhm, not that I looked. )

[Edit: I uploaded a PDF of the same presentation that shows my speaking notes if you're curious.  You'll probably have to view it fullscreen to be able to read them.]