Final Exam

Top ten songs from 2009 according to the AOL Radio Blog:

1. "You Belong with Me" Taylor Swift


2. "Down" Jay Sean


3. "Replay" Iyaz


4. "Poker Face" Lady GaGa


5. "I Gotta Feeling" Black Eyed Peas


6. "Use Somebody" Kings of Leon


7. "My Life Would Suck Without You" Kelly Clarkson


8. "Right Round" Flo Rida


9. "Fireflies" Owl City


10. "Watcha Say" Jason Derulo

My favorite songs at the moment:

• "Haven't Met You Yet" Michael Buble


• "Ridin' Solo" Jason Derulo


• "Monster" Lady GaGa


• "Sexy Bitch" David Guetta


• "Real World" Rob Thomas


• "It's Only Life" Kate Voegele

An embedded picture:



Here is a map of some of the universities in Washington, DC. A movement began on the American University campus to "annex" Catholic University.


View Universities in Washington, DC in a larger map


A chart, courtesy of Google!

Last Post...

Spring 2010 is over!...almost. Only finals to go, so I guess I'll be seeing you all one more time at 8:30 in the morning on May 4th. Until then, good luck to everyone on the final!

This last week of class definitely beautified my blog....as you can see below, I have added a map and a chart to my blog :)
Thanks to Google, embedding the map and chart is super easy, just playing around on Google Maps and Google Chart Tool let me find all kind of nifty tools that can help online journalists to add interesting information in posts or articles. For example, maps can provide information about where events occurred and the chart tools allow journalists to easily display information and statistic. This last week really tied together a lot of loose ends in online journalism, from the technical aspects of html and how to embed items, to applying the information to a site in a meaningful way.

today's lesson: charts

Just playing around with maps...and craving caffeine

View Find a coffee. in a larger map

Laura Olson's Multimedia Production Skills blog #4

As you may have noticed, the title of my blog today has been designed to make it more "searchable." After our discussion in class today about SEO (search engine optimization) I realized the importance of titles and keywords on the internet. I want the internet spiders to be able to find me when someone looks for "Multimedia Production Skills" or simply my name -- and the best way to do so is by writing clear and direct titles. No walls or speed bumps between the Google search engine and my site! In class we played around with the Google AdWords, a tool that give you keyword suggestions for a specific site. For example, when I put the AU SOC homepage into this engine, it suggested "film school" as the best keyword.

Here are things that makes my site special. As we discussed in class as a blog, this site has three defining characteristics:
1)frequency of updates -- as you can see, I update my blog weekly!
2)comments -- I welcome comments on my blog, and I comment on other blogs.
3)hyperlinks -- I have included a hyperlink in this post to the Google keyword application

Well, I am off to enjoy the weekend now but I will be sure to update you on class next Friday!

April 9, 2010

As you can see, my page has changed thanks to our lesson in CSS (cascading style sheet) in class today. I was able to edit the embedded CSS in blogspot to change the background color, type size and type color on my own page. I am still playing around with different styles...

Earlier this week we learned some more about HTML earlier this week, this time about the difference between relative and absolute links. An absolute link includes the entire URL and will always connect you to the page no matter where you are. A relative link, however, will link you to different levels within a specific website. It assumes that the beginning address remains the same, and just directs you to a different file within the site for example, http://american.edu/soc places you in the SOC homepage. in your HTML, you can simply put "/journalism" to direct you to the journalism link! This gets a little more complicated, as we figured out in class today but I think I finally understand the basics! Luckily we will never have to write our own CSS or complete HTML in class :)

April 2, 2010

Well, my brain is somewhat crammed with information from this week. I've learned the basics of online journalism to the definitions of the "internet" and "world wide web" and can now even create my own html script. To apply some of what we discussed in class this week --

This site itself lives in the world wide web, which is a component of the overall Internet. Journalists today must be able to understand how the Internet works and be able use blog sites, such as this one. Blogs can be credible, although they often present a clear opinion, or bias.

This page is composed using hypertext markup language--html.

html is composed of the and the. Within html, there are codes for color, inserting images, lists, bold or italics, and on. This text allows us to create any kind of web page. Cascading style sheet makes this process much easier.

This is the basics of what we learned this week, but the general knowledge will be useful in my own blog, and in the future when (as a journalist) I will have to publish the news --in multiple forms-- on the internet!