Archives for category: Multimedia

A tricky thing about Google Drive as a Web host for Soundslides: Upload ‘folder,’ not ‘files’

March 19, 2014 //

Gosh Almighty, I hope this is the problem …

A Google Drive problem has vexed a student and me for the last 24 hours.

After preparing a really nicely done Soundslides presentation, my student emailed to say she was having trouble uploading the files to Google Drive. She followed all the steps in journotech.co.uk’s fantastic Using Google Drive as a Web Host post. Yet it would not allow her to upload folders inside the publish_to_web folder; whether with drag-and-drop or hitting the upload files button inside Drive, it just wasn’t letting it work.

She brought her laptop in and we looked at her files; they looked in order. We noticed that in Drive, the icon for her folders looked different than the one for my folders. When she clicked on the 400_300 and 600_450 files, they would not open. Mine, however, did in my Drive.

After beating our heads against the problem for about an hour (and after she showed her beautifully done audio slideshow to me on her computer), I conceded defeat with apologies for not being able to figure out the problem.

And it just kept nagging at me. I wrapped up some grading and returned to the problem, replicating the steps with a test upload on my Drive. And when I hit the upload button, the same thing happened to me: It would not let me load folders, only files.

I backed up a couple of steps. And that’s where I think I found the problem.

When you hit the little upload button, it asks if you want to upload a folder or files. I think if you click on it without noticing that option, Drive assumes you want to upload files. This time, I selected folder, then uploaded the contents of the publish_to_web folder. Then I clicked index.html, then hit preview.

The thing worked. Here it is (and it’s just a quick-and-dirty to demonstrate how to upload these things to Drive). To test whether that explains the incomplete preview of the Soundslide presentation, I tried uploading to Google Drive by just clicking the upload file indiscriminately; when I did so, Drive assumed I just wanted to upload files. Drive will upload either a folder that contains a bunch of stuff (it could have a mix of folders and files inside) if you use the “Upload>Folder” option. If you use “Upload>Files” and you point it inside a folder (like the publish_to_web folder) and try to select all the folders and files inside it, it will only upload the files. The result will be something that looks like this shell of a Soundslides project that I uploaded to test this theory.

I really hope this is the solution for my student. After this testing, I am certain it is.

Incidentally, these are the directions I gave in class before spring break for how to upload the projects:

INSTRUCTIONS FOR POSTING AUDIO SLIDESHOW TO YOUR BLOG

In Soundslides, complete your slideshow and export it by using the EXPORT button. This creates a folder called publish_to_web that contains everything necessary for an online viewer to look at/hear your audio slideshow.
Upload the contents of the entire publish_to_web to Google Drive. For directions, click through the galleries at the post “Using Google Drive as a Web Host” at this link: http://www.journotech.co.uk/using-google-drive-as-a-web-host/#more-587
Write a blog post that explains the content of your story, including the title (this is the headline you gave it in Soundslides) and link to the publish_to_web folder you uploaded in Step 2 above. The link in Step 2 will explain what that link is.
Email the link to the blog post containing the link to the audio slideshow to me at mjf0009@auburn.edu.

Tags Banging my head against the wall, persistence, troubleshooting

Categories Adapting, Journalism, Multimedia, New media, Photojournalism, Soundslides, troubleshooting, Uncategorized

My first video shooting experience

March 18, 2014 //

UNC Multimedia Bootcamp is where I got my first taste of journalistic documentary video storytelling. Not that this was my first video ever; I will confess to having made some terribly sophomoric sketch comedy using a video camera rented from the local mom-and-pop equivalent of Blockbuster Video back in the day.

While it wasn’t a boot camp in the “drop your *something* and grab your socks” kind of way, it definitely was a crash course. Remember that scene in Wayne’s World 2, where they had roadie training, and the veteran roadie who had bludgeoned a sweet shop owner to death with his own shoes to get brown M&M’s in order to get a band on stage was introducing himself? And he said, “You will hurt. You will have aches and pains. But you will get good.”

We got … well, competent enough after one week.

Afterward, I got a LOT of practice shooting a road trip to ancient Navajo and Hopi ruins in the Southwest with my father, an interview with a fascinating lady who is a muzzleloader shooting champion with a passion for creating Indian beadwork, and a piece on a mixed martial artist in Syracuse. So come to think of it, given the demands of producing research for academic presses on a regular basis, I’ve gotten more experience at this game than I thought.

UNC Multimedia Bootcamp is what got me up and running.

In just a week, we learned best practices for online video shooting and editing, basic html coding, interviewing for video and audio projects, and how all the elements of soundbites, natural sound, room tone, and voiceover-less editing combine with video footage to let the characters tell the story while the reporters stayed behind the camera or off to the side while conducting the interview.

We learned to become, as I tell my Multimedia Journalism students, Men in Black.

Our only presence is the standalone answers and reactions from interview subjects that we prompted with our carefully worded questions and by biting our tongues, smiling, nodding, and using the “dumb dog” expression while keeping our mouths shut and resisting the temptation to say, “Uh-huh … interesting … go on ….”

My assignment partner Tom Salyer, a freelance photographer from Miami, and I hit up a dozen businesses in downtown Chapel Hill and Carrboro, N.C., before we found someone willing to talk on camera and let us into their lives for a couple of hours of interviewing and B-roll filming.

This is the result.

Barry “Sid” Keith is just the best for letting us in. From one Tar Heel to another, thanks, Sid!

Barry “Sid” Keith’s secondhand shop Sid’s Surplus has been a fixture in downtown Carrboro, N.C., for decades.

Tags Barry "Sid" Keith, interviewing, Sid's Surplus, UNC Multimedia Bootcamp, video storytelling, videography, videojournalism

Categories Barry "Sid" Keith, Journalism, Multimedia, New media, Photojournalism, Sid's Surplus, Uncategorized, Videography, Videostorytelling

Posting Soundslides projects on WordPress.com blogs

March 5, 2014 //

One of the greatest things about blogging on WordPress.com is that it costs nothing unless you want to buy a preminum theme or extra storage space in the cloud. One pitfall is that its architecture is set up to really, really like using single jpegs, tiffs, docs and the like but it doesn’t work with folders full of files. That’s problematic for SoundSlides creators. Solution: Post about your SoundSlide and link to Google Drive.

A turn-of-the-century mp3 player.

Of course, if you’re a student or university employee, you have space available on your drive. But I’ve never played with that space and I’m much more of a storytelling and journalism guy than a tech guy, so even with a lot of coaching I was about to tear my hair out. But I know that the folks at Google make it ridiculously simple to do things that would have required all-nighters and copious quantities of caffeine to produce back when I was an undergrad. And as it happens, Fortunately, I ran across this great post over at the Journo Tech blog called “Using Google Drive as a Web Host.”

Really, this is a brilliant solution. It’s cheap, it’s easy, and I get to keep all my hair now. As a sample, I’ve posted a quick-and-dirty slideshow I created using SoundSlides to merge photos of magazine covers from a research project about a magazine I’ve come to think of as the antebellum South’s version of The Economist: De Bow’s Review. It’s nothing fancy: just 11 photos of covers of the magazine from just before the Civil War. I shot the photos at the Special Collections and Archives section at Ralph B. Draughon Library at Auburn University last summer for an article that’s just been published this week by American Journalism. As for the music, a scratchy turn-of-the-twentieth-century recording of the Neapolitan Trio performing Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home,” that one’s used under Creative Commons License. I obtained it at Free Music Archive, which is an outstanding resource for historical music that is so old it has passed out of copyright and into the public domain. Word to my students: You can get into big legal trouble if you violate copyright. There are so many who have pirated downloaded music that it’s hard for the recording industry to keep up with all of them, so its default position often seems to be to simply give up. But as a content creator online, you are MUCH more visible to them. As in, when you link to their stuff, it’s like Frodo putting on the One Ring and attracting the gaze of Sauron. So be careful what you use, because you might get a cease-and-desist letter (at best) or a hefty bill (at worst).

If you’re interested in Old South journalism history, you might want to give it a look here. It’s titled “Brave Old Spaniards and Indolent Mexicans: J. Ross Browne, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, and the Social Construction of Off-Whiteness in the 1860s.

Just a side note to my brothers and sisters in the world of journalism and mass communication history: Soundslides is not that complicated to master. You could easily record your own narration about your research project to accompany the slides, or you can tuck the information that would go into your narration down into the captions and let the music serve to create a feel for the time period. Yeah, I know. If you’re like me, you have a stack of papers to grade and a research agenda to pursue. But multimedia has power to make what we do accessible to people who might otherwise not pay much attention.

Tags Adapt, audio slideshows, Improvise, multimedia, narrative journalism, new media, Overcome, Soundslides

Categories Adapting, Audio slideshows, Blogging, Journalism history, Media history, Multimedia, New media, Soundslides

Big Bill Morganfield knows music marketing, including the Web and social media

March 4, 2014 //

Big Bill Morganfield listens to a student’s question March 3 at Auburn University’s Harbert College of Business, where he discussed the music business with several dozen students, professors and blues fans from the Auburn community.

Big Bill Morganfield isn’t just any bluesman. He’s the son of Muddy Waters, aka McKinley Morganfield, and an Auburn University alumnus.* And he’s well aware that as much as the blues is an art form and a yearning, it’s a business.

That business includes using the tools of the Web and Web 2.0 to reach out. I sat in on his rap session with business students, professors from a variety of disciplines, and blues lovers from the Auburn community tonight at Auburn’s Harbert College of Business. His main messages were about loving what you do, protecting your ability to continue making money off doing it, and being genuine in all phases of your work.

[View the story “Big Bill Morganfield shares lessons from his life in the music business” on Storify]

You have to have a good team to work with. That includes the sidemen he picks out, the lawyer who protects his intellectual property rights (he said he’d looked at so many Digital Millennium Copyright Act cease-and-desist forms that he couldn’t even count them anymore), and a publicist.

His communication effort includes a pretty killer website where he controls the narrative about himself, keeps people up to date on what he’s up to, and sells his own music for download or ordering for delivery via snail mail. And he told me after his speaking gig tonight, as he walked out of the building while I finished up some tweets about him, that his publicist had sold him on the power of social media.

Of course, you have to have content that’s worth promoting. Morganfield knows this.

“A lot of people make the mistake of chasing after the dollars,” he said. “When you do that, if they’re blowing away from you and you go after them, you’re only going to get a few. What you want to do is go after the dollars blowing toward you. The way to do that is to get so good, they have to pay you.”

One last note: The last time I bought a blues album was just last summer, but I must admit it could now be classified as an oldie: John Lee Hooker’s “The Healer.” The last one before that was Ali Farkha Toure and Ry Cooder’s collaboration “Talking Timbuktu.” Before that, it was probably R. L. Burnside’s “A Ass Pocket of Whiskey.” But I’m certain the next one will be by Big Bill Morganfield.

*I’m proud to say he got his bachelor’s from Auburn in communication, though I can’t claim to have played a part in that since 1) I wasn’t here then and 2) I don’t think the journalism program and the communication program had yet merged. It’s also very cool that he got a bachelor’s degree in English from the Tuskegee Institute, just down the road a good piece.

Tags badasses, Big Bill Morganfield, blues, social media, Web 2.0

Categories Multimedia, New media

A tricky thing about Google Drive as a Web host for Soundslides: Upload ‘folder,’ not ‘files’

My first video shooting experience

Posting Soundslides projects on WordPress.com blogs

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