Dinero y Más Dinero

Three great multimedia packages

sofiamaciasliceaga — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 02:07:33 +0000

To say the truth, this assignment has been hard because even US media uses much lees than I thought multimedia packages to tell stories (I also looked for some examples in Mexico and Spain, and there were very few), but this made me think there is a lot of material wasted in the newspaper I work for that could be in our web site to giver more elements to users.

But going straight to the point, I liked very much the way the Baghdad Bureau in the New Yok Times covered the story of the guy who threw a shoe to George W. Bush because they talked about it in a blog, included picture and also a video I could not find anywhere else (they had a reporter in the conference when all happened).

I think a blog is an accurate vehicle to tell this kind of story because its not as solemn as a regular story in a printed edition and the journalist can leave a space for people to give opinions it would be political incorrect to give himself.

Here are some comments that express the act was fair, for example, or some that make fun of his skills to cope with flying shoes.

Other example I saw was the MSNBC story on Adam Walsh Murder.

They used a gallery and also videos from the mother and father, but it was not only the resources they chose but the exact images they got: 6 year-old Adam holding a bat makes you feel connected to the story, even if like me you have never heard about it before.

This is a photo gallery where you can see the kid and also the murderer.

A resource I noticed is not commonly exploited in news web sites are maps, and I think those give you a good approach to the story. I thought of that only when I saw a story from The Sayer fire where they used it to show which places were devastated by fire.

That one was probably the best but was like a microwebsite. The photos, testimonies, maps, everything was great, the only problem is that it takes a bit downloading it, but it is worth waiting for such quality.

I think the main difference with Mexico or in Spain is that we use probably one or maybe two resources the most, and most of times charts and profiles (In every story in elpais.com where there is a relevant public figure they include “A Fondo” that is a sort of profile), but we most think of elements that give different keys with different means to the audience.

Award winning and lousy headlines

sofiamaciasliceaga — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 02:06:05 +0000

I guess it takes a lot of blog-reading to find which are good or bad headlines, but here are the ones I liked and those I hated:

Good ones:

-Obama outlines plan to create 2.5M U.S. jobs, all the information in one sentence.

- Maybe It´s Time to Buy That First House, it´s a personal finance story that makes you click to know why are they suggesting such a thing.

-Price of gas hits lowest point on nearly 5 years, straight to the point, now I can go and read why.

- Finding good trash, What is that guy talking about? I want to read it!!! (extra point because it turned out to be a wiki covering)

- More on Caroline Kennedy Senate chances, Oh now I now she wants to be there.

Most of those also have words that I would use in a google search about the topics they talk about.

Now the lousy ones:

- Typing without a clue, if he has no clue why should I read him?????

-Remembering Pearl Harbor 2008, booooooooooooooring. If you will talk about a date you should have a different angle.

- Lessons from Pearl Harbor, same problem as the one on top

-Situation in Somalia is about to get worst, The situation there is dreadful any way, to read it I should have a clue of why or what is new about it.

- Simon vs. Trevor, mmm? who are they

Best blogs ever!!!

sofiamaciasliceaga — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:42:29 +0000

There are a lot of blogs I could name as my favorites, but there are a few that I really take some time every couple of days to read. The first would be Iwillteachyoutoberich, this is a blog written by a 25-year-old Stanford Graduate on Computer sCience and Psychology that lost his first scholarship investing it fully in the stockmarket. Due to this bad experience he started learning about personal finance and he writes about it. He has great ideas like a section called “the money diaries” where a person writes what he does about his money for a week and can get advice from the readers to reach his financial goals.

Other I like to visit is Alt1040 by Eduardo Arcos. He is a guy from Ecuador that quit his job to start his own blog company. He was earning as much as his salary with Google ads that he thought on doing it with more blogs of different topics. This blog is about technology but he has some about TV or Entretainment, cars… you name it, he has it.

A guilty-pleasure blog I read is- Plaqueta´s. This is a silly blog of a girl that writes about her personal life but she is quite funny and has been writting since 2004. Sometimes she talks about anecdotes from her lousy teenage stage (she says she used to look like a “heavy metal tamal” ), but she is a great example of the 2.0 generation, she started using computers even before ICQ existed and has gotten all her jobs due to her blog.

Other nice blog:

A Nobel Prize blogger (Krugman in the NYT)

A 2.0 Guru (Chris Anderson´s blog)

Gossips straight from Silicon Valley

Hope you enjoy my selection.

My second assignment

sofiamaciasliceaga — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 19:40:22 +0000

Hi Mark, Vanessa, Paul and all the guys from my Knight´s Center Course.

I had a blog in blogger, but as I have heard so much about WordPressI decided to give it a try.

Ok, so now I´ll answer this assignment:

1.- The reader I´ve been using for about 8 months is Google reader. The feeds I was subscribed to were Google news alerts on “afores” and ”pensiones” (retirement news), last minute news on ElPais.com and Yahoo!Mexico Business news.

2.- I have set up the RSS reader

3.- I just subscribed to:

- A blog named iwillteachyoutoberich

- To the Americas- Economy news alert from the Financial Times

- Business and Financial news form Cnn Money

- A blog from Spain named El Blog Salmón

- The Inflation section of Banco de México (Mexico´s central bank)

- A google news alert on “Banamex” (an important bank in Mexico)

- A Yahoo! search on “Plataforma México” that is an advanced security system for my country I plan to write about soon .

Just a quick comment: I just discovered that in wordpress you can choose to open the links in a separate window from the post, and I think that is a great option. I´m starting to like this system.

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