My blogging skills are developing, so I’m quite comfortable adding publisher to my credentials.

It’s a bit soon to call myself a multi-media expert though, but producer is certainly on the cards.

 Yep, my latest trick includes scrambling together a video package and posting it to my blog.  But I can’t take all the credit for producing a piece this week. 

It’s a current affairs package I produced for a television unit I studied last year.  But I can get away with using it as an example, as I’m about to blog about it.

This video was produced using my digital video camera during the drought. 

It captured a farmer’s desperate plea to save his full dam being drained and knocked down. 

Unfortunately, as heart-breaking as it was, the farmer lost his case and was ordered to demolish the dam banks, watching on helplessly as the water drained away.

You’ve just seen one example of a vlog where I have included an on-line video and then blogged about it in this post.

Here’s another example of a vlog.

I produced this vlog with my webcam today, and seeing there was no option to save it to my hard drive, I downloaded it to YouTube and accessed an embedding code.

This vlog differs from the first example because the video footage includes the blog, instead of writing about the video footage separately.

So you can see vlogs are flexible in the way they are delivered.

These two vlogs are not of high quality because of time constraints, so I thought I’d include a better example that captured my attention.

Blog 5 (Week 6)

I’ve seen the universal RSS feed symbol on many website pages, but never really understood what it was about.

So, after reading helpful tips from CyberJournalist.net, I thought I better hop to it and download an RSS reader.   I chose FeedDemon.

A quick tutorial lesson brought me up to speed with how to operate the program and explained what RSS feeds were.

What I’ve come to realise is that the endless hours spent searching regular topics I’m interested in, could have been made a whole lot easier with the use of RSS feeds!

I’ve also realised, that as a print journalist, this could be one of the most important tools in my trade.

After successfully adding my first RSS feed to my reader, Yahoo7 National News,  I see that google just got a whole lot less important for me.

 Other useful tools I’ve learnt from the readings this week include:-

Technorati –  I found this quite easy to navigate around.

Moblogs – This will need to be tested in a later blog post.

Podcasts –  Here is an example of a podcast I created a moment ago using Audacity software.

Multi-media tools podcast

 Vlogs – I will post a vlog in a later post.

 del.icio.us – Another new tool for me and I’m not sure how to use the bookmarks, something I’ll investigate when I have more time.

- Out of curiosity, I re-visited my newly established RSS reader a day after setting it up.  One click of a ‘update feeds button’ and I had pages of new headlines from my Yahoo news website – that simple!