CALIopolis

Elmer points to an article from the Wall Street Journal website with the snarky title ... "Why Getting the User To Create Web Content Isn't Always Progress".

The author, Lee Gomes, complains that user-created content on the web...

"...You can spend 10 minutes and take in all of it. Spend much more, and you start feeling guilty about the time you're wasting...."

...which is how I feel watching television all the time and about 75% of time when I am at the movies. Popular media is full of dreck.

Gomes also states...

"...It is an odd state of affairs when books or movies need defending, especially when the replacement proffered by certain Web-oriented companies and their apologists is so dismally inferior: chunks and links and other bits of evidence of epidemic ADD. ...."

You bet that books and movies need defending. What Gomes does not admit is that the vast majority of books and movies are just as bad as the "dismally inferior chunks" offered up by the pastiche of the Web.

I can't count the number of times I wish I had my money and 90 minutes back after a particularly bad movie. Even with millions of dollars and marketing focus groups out the wazoo, the popular culture industry serves up a fast-foot buffet of unmitigated crap - for the most part. I would rather surf for my own entertainment because what is slickly shoved at me in advertising-laden glitziness is so chokingly bad that I can't breath.

Our expectations are lower for Web-produced content because we know that it is amateur-produced. When we find something genuinely good - it's double-good because its genuine - produced for the love of it and not for the product placement. Perhaps I ascribe too-noble motives to UGC, but at least I didn't waste 9 bucks.

I would rather that people spend their time mashing up UGC (user-generated content) than wasting their time with most popular culture. Creation of your own content, self-expression, experimentation with ideas and presentation is infinitely better than being a couch-yam.

Rant mode off.

This is an interview with Don Zhou who is a 1L at William Mitchell College of Law and the Head of Technical Services in the Law Library. He heard about the podcasting project and approached several professors in courses that he was taking and gained their permission to post recordings of the classes on the law school's internal BlackBoard course websites.

This was an especially interesting podcast because Don provides insights from the student perspective and he repesents an interesting model for introducing podcasting into legal education that I had not considered before. Because Don did all the work of setting up the digital recorder, converting the files and uploading them to a website, he lowered the barriers to podcasting for the faculty in the courses he took. Whatever his motivations, he personally benefited and also shared that benefit with the other students in his classes.

This podcast is 20 minutes and 40 seconds long.

The link to the podcast is here - click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - DonZhou.mp3