Brian Mortensen's blog - featuring thoughts on multimedia journalism, PA announcing, sports, travel, cars, pizza, photography and videography, and just about anything else that pops into my head!
So I think we’ve done a tremendous job so far with komusports.blogspot.com. Will and I have done almost all the work on the site as far as content and posts. This past week, we had 2 local teams playing in Union, roughly an hour and a half drive from Columbia. Since Will was shooting the game and planning on FTPing the highlights back, I figured I’d ride along and do stuff with the blog – upload pictures to Flikr during the game, tweet score updates with the KOMUSports account on CoTweet, and basically live-blog the game. Thanks to Union HS’s speedy wireless internet, I think it was a rousing success. We beat the heck out of the competition with the amount of content we got online and on-air. I think (although I’m not certain) we plugged the blog site during the 6 and 10 sportscasts, so hopefully people went online to check it out. I have no idea how many hits we got, so I’d really like to add some sort of tracking to the blog so we can see how many people we’re getting.
Tracking my visitors is one of the more interesting things about running brianmortensen.com. I know most of the “service providers” based on who is visiting – i.e., the most visits is from “Centurytel internet holdings inc” – my apartment, so that’s me logging on there to change things, while the 3 visits from “Verizon Internet Services Inc” is most likely my family on their Verizon Fios in NJ. I’ve gotten some assorted, random visitors from people I don’t know – for instance, “Headquarters usaisc” appears to be some sort of government intelligence service who stopped by for 19 seconds, while a user named “Microsoft Corp” stopped by and briefly checked out the site . Clearly, my website has oodles of secret information on it worth monitoring…But anyway, it’s indeed fun to see who’s been on it. Even my grandparents have seen it – “Cox Communications” is their internet provider in Virginia.
Anyway…Back to the komusports.blogspot.com – I can’t wait to upgrade its appearance. It definitely looks a bit bare with too much white on it. I’d love to get some columns on the side with various info boxes, pictures, links, etc. Jen says we’ll get to work with when KOMU unveils their new website layout – so I can’t wait for that!!
With the hope of adding more content to komusports.blogspot.com and brianmortensen.com, I went down to the station on Friday to take care of a bunch of stuff. First, I wanted to get as much video as possible from my news reporting days to post over on brianmortensen.com. I looked for numerous news stories I reported on over the summer with the high-quality raw video, but unfortunately it had all been deleted except for whatever was on komu.com. Of course, I should have gotten those stories immediately after I reported on them, but oh well. The video from komu.com actually looks OK on Youtube – so thankfully I was able to save them. I was bummed I couldn’t save one of the live shots I did for the “Tiger Treasures Rummage Sale” – a total bogus story, little news value but I had some good video and it fit in with the day – simply one of those slow news days in the summer in Mid-Missouri.It was a fun live shot because I was able to show several high-quality rummage sale items, so it was a productive live shot at least.
Once I dug up all my old news video, I began uploading it to Youtube. Meanwhile, I harvested some sports video for komusports.blogspot.com and uploaded it to Vimeo. After I found all the video, I saw KOMU was covering 2 local high school games – Fulton @ Mexico, and Helias @ Rock Bridge. On a whim, I took a drive to Mexico, then back to Rock Bridge on the premise of taking some pictures and such for the blog. It was fun – I was able to get some decent pictures with my crappy little point-and-shoot camera and get them on the blog before the sportscast aired. I called the sports office and told them if they wanted, they could add a web snipe shoutout to the KOMU Sports blog at the end of the highlights to tell viewers they could check out the blog for some pictures from the games. You can check out the pictures here: the Rock Bridge game and the Mexico game
Then yesterday, I went down to the station to upload the highlights to Vimeo. I also added a short video extra from the Mexico game – the “Crowning of Mr. Bulldog” – a celebration of the school’s “best man”. One of the players on the basketball team won, so it was pretty cool.
The site is really coming along well and I’d love to see us add even more content!