Trent Lott

Trent Lott was a US Senator from Mississippi, who resigned after making controversial racist remarks at an event.

An off-air Journalist, Ed O'keefe was in the room when he Lott makes the remarks and attempted to sell the story to national newspapers. However the nationals didn't see this as newsworthy so they ignored it. So, O'keefe and other bloggers kept the story alive, and eventually gained enough attention for the national newspapers to take notice and print articles, which ultimately led to Lott's resignation.

Google News

For the past week i've checked my page at Google news , which I customised to my liking. In theory it's a good idea. You start with eight news sections (World, Entertainment, Sports ect) and you can add your own custom section and arrange it in any order you like.

So, of course I added 24, music and television. Yay, now just sit back and wait for loads of top stories about these topics, right? No, not so much. Sit back and wait for Google to find all recent stories with the words '24, music and television' in them. As you can see, this may be a problem. Today for example, under the 24 section there are stories about '24inch Plasma screens' and some conferences that are being held on the 24th April.

Of course you can add more key works. For example 'Music+Indie' or '24+Jack Bauer+FOX'. This does filter the bulk of the articles that are found, but it's still not perfect. In fact, it's far from perfect, but it is a quick and easy way to find articles. You don't have to do anything. Just let the machine do it for you, however in this case I would say the human element would have more success, especially if you're looking for something more specific.

Links

All internet statistics from around the globe. The information on UK ages is page 13. [Worldwide Internet users]

Age.net. A age friendly site for the UK over 50's. [Age.net]

A site for people who are retired, or of the age of retiring. Gives advice for those who are retired. Where to go and what to do, ect. [Too young to retire.]

A list of websits for the elderly. [List]

BBC article about am old man married to a Chinese woman. They met on a internet dating site. [Old man. Young wife]

Artcle about 'Pensioners embracing the internet'. [Bizreport]

Affluent pensioners spending more money on the net. [BBC]

Critical evaluation

I was given the task of writing about film and TV for our ReviewTube blog, and on Monday I had the ‘Tube of the Day’. Overall I had a good experience posting on the blog, and bar one day I was successful at posting daily.

The aspect that worked well for the blog, I thought, was the layout, logo and slogan. It was simplistic yet it made it obvious what they blog was about, as well incorporating some slight humour via the pun on the name ‘YouTube’. As the target audience for our blog were students, I think we all successfully managed to attain to this level, creating a humours, colloquial style which suited our blog, and we all complimented one another with our style and posting.

The blog was very well organised beforehand, whereby we all knew what we were to post and when. Very rarely were posts made on top of one another or forgotten about.

Generally I am happy with the posts I made, especially the video choices. However, there were a couple of posts were the style wandered slightly from the norm, and became maybe too pretentious, however these only came with shows/films that I was unfamiliar with, but I did attempt to post various different videos from different genres.

My main problem was finding material to post. YouTube has over 5 million different videos and it did become laborious to search for one video that I found suitable and met the criteria that I had set. I didn’t want to just find a trailer and review it. I didn’t find any problems with posting everyday, however there was a day where I forgot. I found the more I posted the easier it became for me to review the videos, and maintain a similar style.