Current TV

My brother, who teaches Media Literacy at a high school in Chicago, always has his finger on the pulse of the new media technology scene. Yesterday he showed me and my Dad Current TV, which is kind of like a TV on the internet made up of better-produced YouTube-style programs. Looking at it briefly, it looks like the future of TV news. Each story is presented on the front page and you click on it and watch a 3-18 minute video on it.

The reason Steve's interested in it is so that he can give his students the assignment to make a news story for themselves and submit it to Current. It's awesome. They post a bunch of topics that they want covered (see them here) and you can choose which one you want to shoot and submit it. They also pay you. I think this is perfect for my friend Dan, who's in film school in LA, but he always views my ideas with skepticism.

This type of news journalism is the new frontier, I think. Some Journalism Grad Students gave a presentation on this in my Social Change and Trends class. They talked about a thing Minnesota Public Radio (NPR) is doing called Public Insight Journalism. Instead of interviewing "experts in their field" for articles, Minnesota Public Radio interviews actual normal people who deal with the issues on a daily basis. It's all very postmodern.

Oh, and did I mention that Current TV is the brainchild of Al Gore and Google? Figures. Here's the wikipedia article on it.

'Learn Something New Everyday' Department

In my Social Change and Trends class yesterday a grad student gave a presentation on wind mills/turbines/huge pinwheels. It was fascinating. Overall, I found out, Missouri is not a very windy state, in fact we rank 43rd in wind production. Too bad. But we also have 2 (and a 3rd coming before 2008) wind farms that are on the electricity grid! Way to go Ameren UE for doing it too. Here's the site for the developers (Wind Capital Group) Woohoo!
I love Rural Sociology majors. They're so cool and offer such a different perspective on issues. It seems like its so uncool to worry about entrepreneurship in small towns, but they do. I think it's great. Also classes in the Rural Sociology department are always taught by people who only teach like one or two classes and have actually done what they're teaching for decades. I took an Amish class by a guy who was raised Mennonite and like 102 years old and it was terrific.
Well, anyway, back to wind turbines.


Windmills are HUGE!


This was taken at Bluegrass Ridge wind farm in northwest Missouri.

Stupid WordPerfect

No one uses WordPerfect anymore. No one. My professor of Social Change and Trends (irony? yes.) still uses it, however, and I've had the worst time ever trying to download stuff from Microsoft.com that will convert it for my Office Word XP.

But then I found Zamzar.com, which converts the file for you and emails the new version to you. Wunderbar!