Krista Roberts

Great shift today. I felt for the first time like it was a fluid process. From getting the information from the reporters to repurposing (which I had some fun with) to getting it onto the site-- everything worked out great. I'm glad that I'm getting to the spot where I don't need to rely as much on my notes about how to do things like prepare pictures in photoshop, add a link or post a story. Doing this shift once a week has made it a bit of a challenge to retain the information from week to week (especially since we had a Monday off for Labor Day), but now I'm hoping that I'm on the backside of the learning curve. I look forward to my Monday shift a lot more when I feel like I've got a handle on what I'm doing :)

I know that Wichita bears a striking resemblance to the generic girl-next-door avitar. Someday maybe I'll master changing her appearance.
Courtesy: Second Life

I created Wichita as part of a class assignment in one of the more frustrating hours of my life. Just like when I tried to embrace playing space invaders in junior high (to impress a boy), I wanted to embrace the Second Life metaverse before me (to impress my professors), but once again, I spent most of my time fighting technology.

Wichita is my proxy in this virtual world, but I have very little control over her. I can't get from one place to another without running into something. Driving a car was an exercise in futility. I did find notecards to help with life in Second Life, but when I went to capture them, I was told that I didn't have the right permissions.

Now this isn’t to say that I can’t master Second Life. The obvious solution is to spend a substantial amount of time digging into this virtual world. If I really apply myself, I'm sure that I could master walking, chatting - even flying.

The trouble is that I have a first life. It requires things like mowing, cleaning and doing homework. If there's free time left, there's choir, being a youth sponsor, choreographing, and volunteering.

So which of these do I give up to gain a second life? None. I'm perfectly happy living my first life. While I'm glad I had an opportunity to explore this virtual world, I don't see myself taking up residence any time soon.

And I'm not alone. Apparently most people who create avitars don't stick around too long. According to Second Life's statistics page, while the number of total residents (anyone who's ever created an avitar) is nearing a billion, the number of residents who've come back in the last 30 days doesn't top a million. Others have questioned the need for a second life. In fact, someone's even created a parody site.

But just letting Wichita disappear into the Second Life mist doesn't seem right either. Perhaps I should write a virtual obit for her. Unfortunately, it would read something like: "She had a brief and uneventful life where she spent most of her time running into inanimate objects."

Brad and I got right to work today and managed to get everything written and posted before Gretchen came in for her shift.

Having my shift overlap Brad's and Gretchen's shifts is really working out well. Brad can pick up early stories, Beyond Lawrence and the 3pm update. I can pick up the later stories and I'm still able to get out on time at 5 p.m. Gretchen can focus on editing the pieces out of the newscast and linking them to the stories we've written.

This was probably the smoothest that the Monday afternoon shift has gone this semester. Hopefully, it is the sign of things to come.

This week I switched to the noon-4pm shift because Brad had a morning flight into KC and didn't know if he'd make it back to Lawrence by noon. Getting in early gave me some time to play with. I found three new stories to post to "Beyond Lawrence." I enjoy hunting out those interesting tech stories from around the world. Today, two of them had video components, so I linked the image to the video and the text to the original article. Pretty neat.

We had a lot of items to post today and everything went very smoothly. I got a package and VO repurposed along with the text for the 3pm news update. Brad added the news update video and did a couple of stories too.

My big breakthrough of the day was that I was able to write out basic links without having to go back to my cheat sheet. Hopefully that knowledge will stick with me through the midterm on Thursday :) and beyond.

We appear to have this shift down. Brad was already nearly finished with re-purposing a package when I got in at 1 p.m.

We had 2 VSOTs and 1 VO ready to go not too long after that. Each of us took a VSOT and I did the VO plus the script for the 3pm update. We had all of it done by 4pm. That meant that Gretchen only had one VSOT and the video to put in for her shift.

I was also able to do the coding for the links without having to refer to my notebook. Repetition is a great thing! And I've gotten pretty good at manipulating/sizing images in Photoshop. Both of these are skills that I was hoping to obtain by taking this class-- so as far as those are concerned-- mission accomplished.

Put some creative minds to work and you could be looking at YouTube's next "Must See TV."
Courtesy: KUJH-TV

Right now, we're putting up stories that aired on KUJH-TV and we’ve seen a handful of views (especially the flu shot story), but are we making the most of our opportunity?

Here are some of my favorite ideas from marketers on how to use YouTube to your advantage.

Keep it short: Gareth Davies wrote that people who surf the net have "lightning-quick attention spans.” For a clip to make it in the YouTube universe, he wrote that it must be both quick and catchy.
**Good news for us since stories for KUJH are usually short.

Choose your tags carefully: Jonathan Mendez wrote that the tags you attach to your clip can affect your number of hits. He suggests using adjectives because people often search for videos based on moods. Also, he said not to waste valuable tag space with words like "and" or "to."

Use your URL: Michelle MacPhearson pointed to a goofy video that did it right (and got 1.4 million hits). The short video started and ended with the URL and it was also burned into the video. She wrote that way if people clip it or make mashups, your information is still getting out.

Make it fun, but keep it real: Stephan Spencer likes Blendtec's "Will it Blend?" videos. In these short pieces, the president of the Blendtec blender company puts something unexpected into one of the company's blenders. The results are fascinating, but more importantly, real. Spencer wrote that one of the keys to these videos' popularity is that it's not smoke and mirrors. The president of the company likes to see what his blenders will do to stuff and the videos simply share that with the world.

Have something worth watching: Blendtec's George Wright said to make it on YouTube, you really have to have something worth watching.
**Again, we're in luck here. KU students and alum are all over, so there's a built-in worldwide audience for what's going on at KU.

Each semester, we get lots of talented, creative people who are ready to stretch the limits of what we've done before. Maybe putting KUJH onto YouTube is the first step in a bigger process where future KUJH'ers take these suggestions and turn the KUJH channel on YouTube into "must see TV."