A Class in the School of Journalism and Mass Communicaiton at Texas State University

Jill and I plan to capture the moments you don’t see in a dancer’s life. We want to see it from several different angles: from beginning dancers to those that have danced for decades. We think know there’s a story here. A dancer’s life is a struggle for beauty and perfection–we aim to show that.

Pages will either be categorized by the dance group, by the genre or by the parts of a dancer: Personal Life, Practice Life, Stage Life. The story will dictate the separation.

We are using lots of video mos def. Photos will be there too, probably in Flash. Also, I’m sure a map will appear somewhere. Suggestions?

Kenny Farah & Valerie Soja

We will be doing our project about the history and significance of the quad here at Texas State. Our site will include a home page, a video page with interviews, a history page with pictures and information, a contact page, a page about upcoming activities, a quiz or game made with flash.

Ramsay Knox and Anne Marie Herring

We plan on doing an informational site on marijuana and the laws associated with it. Our index page will have 4 links: a marijuana laws page, history of usage page, health and statistics page, and an interviews page.

On the index page, four images will serve as links for the different pages of the site. Beneath the images will be a twitter widget that will show tweets regarding marijuana laws along with some information on our site.

The laws page will provide the different marijuana laws for different areas of the country as well as recent changes in laws. We will try to incorporate charts in some way.

The history of usage page will go over the history of marijuana on a global scale and increase in laws over the years.

The health and statistics page will have facts about marijuana’s effect on the human body as well as statistics regarding its usage.

The interview page will have text and video of interviews with people associated with the marijuana laws in some way. (police, offenders, etc.)

Fred and I are going to do our final project on the unusual and infamous characters of San Marcos.

Our index page will consist of a picture of some sort and brief introduction to our Web site.

The next page will consist of the biographies of the different people we plan on interviewing. So far, we have decided on 5 or 6 different people to interview. We really like the interviews that were done on the Being Web site and plan on modeling ours after theirs.We will also include a short bio on each.

Our third page will be all about catching our unusual characters in action – in their most true and natural form. We will include all applicable pictures and videos.

The fourth page will consist of a map of San Marcos with way points locating where you are most likely to find our unusual friends.  We are thinking about making this part interactive and allowing people to add their own way points whenever they see an unusual sighting in San Marcos.

The contact page will be our fifth and last page. We will include our contact info as well as the Facebook and Twitter links to anyone featured (with permission, of course).

The main thing that I learned from Download: The True Story of the Internet is that the most successful companies on the web are the ones that understand the importance of focusing on the people who visit the site as opposed to the actual products being sold. This business model creates more traffic, and it is the reason why social networking, blogging, auction sites, and Youtube are so successful. These sites will continue to thrive simply because people want to be heard, or because they want to represent themselves directly to buyers and sellers.

Chris Anderson’s articles The Long Tail and Free both support the idea that the future of the internet will be based on ease of use, user-friendliness, accessibility, and low cost. The Long Tail explains the relationship of broadcasters and the taste of internet users. Free is about the revolution occurring in online business by companies offering things for free, not increasing their traffic and the users’ happiness, but getting customers to return to their site and purchase items in the future.