The Internet is an eclectic medium. Inputs can be drawn from far and wide to form something new. For instance you can gather free sound recordings from around the world. Why? That’s for our creative selves to explore, but Create Digital Music, which assembled these sound bytes, says they could be used being “to help find musical collaborators.”
Of course we can get more than sounds online …
Online photo galleries are another manifestation of this assembly process. For instance, Webshots has created a photo gallery pegged to the DaVinci Code. Not my interest, perhaps, but Steve Outing says that example:
” … should give you some ideas for similarly sifting and compiling the submissions of “citizen photographers” on your news site. Obviously, many news sites do this sort of thing when disaster strikes, taking the best citizen submissions and putting them in a gallery. This Webshots.com feature reminds us that there are events and stories of less gravitas that could benefit from this treatment.”
Awards for new media pioneers: Apply for the honor and cash prizes that come with The Batten Awards for “pioneering approaches to journalism that spur non-traditional interactions and that have an impact on a community.” Check out the 2005 winners to see what won last time.
Big ideas: BBC director Mark Thompson recently offered his staff a vision for how they should retool their large media organization — to make content more portable, accessible, personalized, and manipulable by an audience not always content to be passive. His speech is chock full of ideas and worth reading even if you don’t have a major media organization to test them on.