CNN Critique

CNN.com is definitely a "professional" website. It is very organized starting with the numerous news categories you can choose from at the top of the site. This makes it really easy to navigate right to what you're looking for. They have a video section so you can be sure you're getting a video newsclip if that's what you're looking for. Near the top is also a list of headlines (about half of which I could understand) You can pick a story based on the quick headline although you don't know if it will be text or video until you have clicked on it. There's a section on the main page to find what's on CNN's television station, and a section called "Quick Vote" which is interactive and allows you to vote on a question, then see what others have voted. It also brings you to an editorial about the question throughout which there are links to a number of related stories. Another section of the main page allows you to get your local weather and news headlines which I thought was really great because it means you can access this one site for all your news instead of having to find a local site also. In addition to the interactive feature of the vote they have a section called ireport which is a site where anyone can send in news stories, CNN has specific stories that they use and you can look at them based on the people reporting them or the topics that are being covered.
There are also a number of blogs and podcasts that you can get to from the main page. There is a lot of information on the opening page, and it's really easy to get lost in the site because there are so many options but for CNN this is probably a good thing. I thought that there was pretty minimal advertising on any given page which is nice because with so much information in front of you a lot of advertising would be really distracting.

Family Slideshow

fish show

Slideshow Critique

It wasn't hard finding slide shows on the Internet, they seem to be a pretty predominant form of presenting information. However, I did have a little trouble finding a slide show that wasn't accompanied by audio. This in itself is a pretty good indicator as to which way is more effective in communicating a story to an audience.
The first slide show I looked at was from the New York Times website. It told about right whales and used both pictures, slides of writing, and audio to tell its story. This was a really effective story-telling technique. It is really easy to take in both audio and visual simultaneously and you are able to really focus on the pictures because you aren't distracted by trying to read at the same time. The story about the whales was able to contain a lot of information delivered in a relatively short time, covering everything from why the whales are endangered to numerous solutions and current statistics.
The second slide show I looked at without audio was on the White House website. Not only did it not have audio it also didn't have captions under its pictures so while I saw pictures, I had no idea what was actually going on in them. Definitely not a good storytelling tool.

Podcast Critique

For anyone with average technological skills finding and choosing podcasts seems like a pretty easy endeavor. Unfortunately, I don't have anywhere near average skills, so it took me a little more work than I would generally care to admit. However, once I had someone show me how to do it, it was quite easy and straight forward. I downloaded three different podcasts and put them onto an ipod so that I could listen to them anywhere. Since I don't have a computer at home this was a particularly useful feature for me. I choose two podcasts from NPR, "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" and "Car Talk". I love listening to these but rarely get the chance because of the time they come on the radio and the fact that having two children leaves little time for leisurely listening. This was my favorite thing about the podcasts, that you can listen to them anytime at your own convenience. The automatic download of each installment means that you also don't have to remember to do it each week, it's automatically done for you. The other podcast I choose was from the New York Times, a weekly news update, this one was about women's shelters in Afghanistan. I thought this was a useful podcast because again, it's hard to catch news at home, and I definitely don't have time to read a newspaper very often. I thought this, or a daily news podcast would be particularly useful if you had a commute from work and could download to an ipod and have something to listen to each day for the ride home. I found it somewhat hard to tell at a glance how often anygiven podcast was published, but I'm sure it wouldn't really be hard to figure out. Overall I was thoroughly intrigued by podcasts and intend to try to keep enjoying them.