Freelance Unbound

Just got my first sessional lecturing gig at Southampton Solent – teaching first-year journalism students about web audio and video. I’m pretty pleased about this, as it was the result of a spec email I sent to the course leader. Which goes to show it’s always worth punting for work – you never know who’ll take you up on it.
It’s also interesting because, of all the many, many things they could have asked me to teach – writing, subbing, layout, software etc etc – they went straight for Web 2.0 skills. Luckily I know Final Cut and Audacity through making animated films. Audacity – the standard low-end podcasting program – is free. But you don’t need to invest in high-end software when Macs come with iMovie as standard. Any journalist with their own machine can learn the basics of sound and movie editing easily. And given what appears to be a lack of suitable web A/V tutors at Southampton at least, it looks like it’s a worthwhile investment of time.
The moral? Get up to speed with everything interactive. It means learning a whole lot of new software tricks, made trickier by the fact that whether something works on the web or not can be affected by your browser, your software, the site you are dealing with and what the weather’s like.
Already I’ve learned that embedding video into a blog is really easy if it’s hosted on YouTube, and really tricky if it’s hosted somewhere else – such as Vimeo, when you have to work around using a site called VodPod. Why? I have no idea. All I know is I’ve been registering to join a hell of a lot of social networking/social media-type sites recently…