The Rhodes University New Media Lab`s 'State of the Arts` Web site will provide users with interactive coverage of the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, which runs until 9 July.
Vincent Maher, head of the New Media Lab, spearheads the project, backed by a 21-strong team of students and lecturers.
With the introduction of 'moblogging` the Web site, which went live on Wednesday, can be updated in real-time with images sent from the journalism students from the events via mobile phones, while the Web site can also be accessed by mobile phones on the simpler http://fest.ru.ac.za/mobile version.
The Web site will represent the festival for those who are not here, and for those people who made it to the festival, it allows them to reframe their experience after the actual event, says Maher.
The festival coverage, which includes text, audio, multimedia and images, are made available to media organisations under a creative commons licence, he adds.
The Web site also offers interactive features such as 'Find-a-Festino` and 'GeoGraffiti`.
'Find-a-Festino` lets people who have been photographed access the site and add captions to the uploaded photos. The results can then be sent as postcards via e-mail.
The 'GeoGraffiti` facility combines cartography and blogging, allowing users to add their own experiences on a scalable map of Grahamstown for others to see what they have to say.
An underlying project being run in collaboration with the centre for advanced media from Prague, the Czech Republic, is the implementation of a single interface in the digital newsroom.
"We are piloting a new content management system which tightly integrates print and photography on a common database," says Maher.
"And if successful we may look to distribute it to other small newsrooms on an open source platform."
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