Multimedia Maniac

Purchasing on the Internet is a great way to buy at amazing savings. How many times have you gone to the screen where you checkout and see a box asking if you have a coupon code? Most people will see the box and wish they had one, but keep on and go through with their purchase. But that is a tremendous misstep for anyone who needs to save some money.

One effective way to cling on to your bucks is to stop, search, and return with the code.

Taking the extra 1 minutes to search can save you anywhere from 20 to 54 percent on your purchase. For example, let’s say you are buying a lawnmower on Sears website. Once you get to the checkout stage, here are Sears coupons you can use. Enter that code and save green, it’s simple.

So many e-shoppers overlook this money saving detail and overspend for no reason at all. Online coupon codes can be found for just about any big or small shop. Coupon codes are no longer simply for the enormous stores even small stores offer discount coupon codes.

No matter what your buying opinions are, do yourself a solid and shop keenly.

Having a custom web site should not be put off and thought of as a frill for shop owners, they are a downright essential part of any business. Every person you see and meet will at sometime in their life search on Google or Yahoo or some other search engine for businesses online for anything you can conclude from plumbers to celebrity Jennifer Garner to information on amazing schools like Gillette College.

Every small business could use a web site to advertise products and inform people.

Having a web site will give possible customers the information that they need to buy a product from your establishment. Your boutique web site will tell future clients about your business, services you offer, how to contact you, and can give your establishment a more exclusive face which is always nice for customers. When you make the verdict to compose your own website, there are a couple of things you need to ponder.

You need to consider who is going to dream up your website, an apprentice, an outside company, your friend? Of course you require to pick someone who knows what they are doing and will be able to support you and update your web site weeks from now with new information. Private contractors and companies will do a basic web site pretty cheap if you don’t require any of the bells and whistles. The other giant question you need to ask yourself is, where am I going to backlog my web site. Most people don’t think about the fact that they need to bank their web site but you do. Your web site has to be reserved on a secure server somewhere that is accessible from the Internet and has all of the necessary functions features installed.

There are tons of diverse web site hosting businesses out there that will form you a domain name (www.YourWebSite.com) and bank your website for a very minuscule fee. If by chance you out grow your web hosting company it can be a giant pain to move your web site to another hosting company so do your homework early to avoid unnecessary costs. There are a few things you really want to look for when making a decision on your web hosting company.

Data Storage is the first thing you want to look at when you’re selecting a web hosting company. Storage space is the amount of room that the company allocates you to store your web site. When looking at storage space you want to have at least 10 Gigs or ten thousand Mbs (these are the same thing). By having this much storage space you can cause to be a general web site and have loads of room to expand with your web site.

This Samsung smartphone does it all, and people who love multimedia will undoubtedly be very impressed by that. The camera and network capabilities are impressive, and the phone can store a lot of information.

It even has a built-in mouse, so it’s more like a tiny computer than a phone. After you use it to get all of that great information and take all those pictures, what are you going to do with them? One enjoyable thing would be to get yourself a Cricut and get into scrapbooking.

There is so much that you can do with this hobby, and the pictures you will take are probably great. There’s no point in letting them languish on your phone or your computer when you could be printing them out and putting them in a great scrapbook with decorative shapes and borders for your friends and family to see and enjoy.

No, I can’t listen to the American correspondents. Even Reuters reporting is all about the bankers stealing everything they touch. You can’t turn on anything without becoming horribly depressed.
It’s on my television, my laptop, and all over the radio.

I am constantly left with an ominous all over feeling …

It’s official. I have a new job: Deputy Editor in Chief of NOS News. An amazing challenge, a great honour and it’s gonna be a lot of fun.

I will start June 2nd. Which means I will return to my native Holland after having been away for over thirteen years. But hey, New York City, Washington DC, London and now Hilversum seems like a logical move.

The boss blogged about it: Read it here. Apparently he wants me to keep blogging. So don’t go away. Neither do I.

We’ve been doing it for ten years now. We blog at NOS Dutch public broadcasting. But next month it’ll be bl**ging serious. No sh*t.

Blogged about it on (Dutch) new media blog De Nieuwe Reporter.

Signing off for now, packing up, and heading for the U.S. Will be sitting on the couch for most of the time, watching football and plotting a silent revolution.

Stay tuned for what a co-conspirator calls ’a quick fix’.

Twenty students from my alma mater, the very superior Tilburg School of Journalism, sent me some feedback on a recent multimedia production in Wales.

They were very polite.

Very honest, that too. Ouch.

(Check for yourself, albeit in Dutch, in the comments below the entry on multimedia math.)

I find it vitally important nowadays to hear from journalism students. We teach them how to become responsible journalists (values when telling the story), they teach us how to become responsive journalists (valuable ways of telling the story).

On that front, check out what Mindy McAdams is doing at the University of Florida. (Click on the pic.)

Mindy McAdams (photo Diversity Institute at Vanderbilt University)

On her college website she shares her syllabus on multimedia journalism for students. We also see some material from students, taking their first steps as multimedia story tellers. Exciting stuff, that proves one thing: Students and teachers learn from each other more than ever before.

A while ago, I queried my fellow members of the Online News Association. Simple question:

What non-American sites do you regularly visit?

Within hours my mail box was bulking with responses. At least, that’s what I hoped. But alas, in vain. After some subtle prodding I did get some better idea what (mostly American) online-colleagues consider international inspiration.

Let me list them all:

- BBC Daily

- Reuters Alert Net

- Canadian Broadcasting Company

- El Periodico

And that was about it, although some funny guy mentioned that we shouldn’t forget the international flavor of Alaska and New Mexico.

Damn colleagues, we just can’t be bothered, can we?

As I was about to give up, someone alerted me to the following site:

Global Voices Online, managed by Curt Poff, who plugged his site as follows: “It’s not hard news. But still, you get a good idea about what folks are blogging about in far-flung locations around the world.”

And so I find myself for some time already, mostly after midnight, surfing the world wide web of blogging. Little pearl in that international ocean of opinions is by far the bloggers from Burma. It is a beautiful world.

You may call me ‘weirdo’, I don’t care. I still love paper, as professed in an earlier entry. So here the love story continues.

6. I love all those people who actually read the paper on the bus, whether it’s Metro, London Lite or some other daily rag.

7. But I also love to smile politely and say ‘no thanks’ to the insisting paper boys handing out those freebies.

8. I therefore love handing over 50 pence for The Evening Standard to the old lady at Marylebone Station.

9. I love doing recycling, and more often than not I end up reading another page before it’s all tossed in that huge, green container.

10. I love Letters to the Editor, especially those in The Daily Telegraph. These folks must still use an old fashioned type writer. Love it!

So this is what tomorrow’s BBC website will look like. The online colleagues who we love to hate. Despise to be more exact, because they’re so bloody brilliant. A sneak preview. You didn’t hear it from me.

Click on the picture (of granny’s BBC era) to go straight to the new website

And to explain the face-lift, Richard Titus (Acting Head of User Experience) writes about drawing inspiration from sources as Facebook, iGoogle and NetVibes in his entry on, where else, the BBC Internet Blog.

Acting Head