Practice 6 :Analysis of multimedia specials

For this practice I choose a multimedia special that appears on the New York Times webpage about the legendary music festival Woodstock. Considering that Acrosstheunivers-ity explores the past, the present and the future sounds, I thought it would be interesting to go back to the latest 60´s and take the opportunity of learning more about what has become a myth.

-Structure: This multimedia special is not a typical one, it´s structure it´s quite different. First we´ve got a big photograph that introduces us on the context and the title: "Woodstock: A moment of muddy grace", and below it there´s an article explaning how the festival went on and it´s influence over the following years. These article occupies two pages.On the left side of the article we may find diferent options. There are a bunch of links headed by the title "Multimedia". To begin, there´s a link that takes us to another page, where we can choose our favorite Woodstock song, and a list of tracks with a player underneath them so we can listen before voting. Next, there´s a link toa slide show of Reader´s photos of Woodstock, to continue there is another link to a slide show of photos in this case titled "Woodstock: A look back". If we continue going down, now we can see a podcast with a twenty-four minute mp3 of the festival, below it, another link to videos uploaded by reader´s,the webpage of Woodstock´s film. Nearly at the end of the left list there´s a column of related articles, another photograph and a link to a larger photograph gallery, a video and the option to watch more videos and at the end a link to the comments of the reader´s. The same column appears at the second page although the article continues.

-Formats: These special includes most of the formats, maybe we could say all of them. There are several images and videos, as well as audio and hypertext. So we could say it´s really exhaustive because there´s a lot of audiovisual content.

-Features: There are no timelines, infographics or maps at this multimedia special

-User oriented: There´s a big interactivity on this special. The user has a list at the top right of the article with several options, he can sign in to recommend, link it to Twitter, comment and read the comments, sign in to e-mail, print, read it on a single page, print it several times and share it to several webpages : Linkedin,Mixx, Digg, Facebook, Yahoo!Buzz and Myspace. He can also make this same actions on the slide shows mentioned before.

-Updating of contents: On the link "Related" contents upload as new articles or news come and are related to this special. Contents as comments also update the special as they can give new information that has not been included on the article.

-Web 2.0 : The social media is included at the Woodstock special as the user has the possibility of sharing it in several communities such as Facebook or Myspace.

-Comparative: On the New York Times webpage we can find another multimedia special in this case about a review of the movies of the seventies, called "A 70´s Flashback complete with flaws". It´s got a similar structure but this one is more simple. There´s also a use of the Web 2.0 and a big interactivity of the user, but not as many slide shows, although it´s got more hypertext links.