Not just a blog post

Not Just a Number, presented by the Bay Area News Group and The Oakland Tribune, is an interesting and unique way to handle the alarming trend of murder in the Oakland, Calif. area. The interactive map, featuring 22 stories, was very well done. Each story is accompanied by a photo, and when the photo is clicked, a person tells a new story. The listen, watch and interact features give this multimedia project a feeling of freshness, as I have never seen the three classified and linked at the bottom of each scene before. By adding that last level of interactivity and showing what concerned residents can do to help curb the violence, the Bay Area News Group and The Oakland Tribune succeeded in telling the story in a much more effective way than solely print could.

Everest, Beyond The Limit is another well done Web site. The clean interface and smooth interactions are just a couple of the immediately recognizable reasons this piece won an award. Although the site itself is pretty taxing on any computer system, I believe most computers built within the last five years or so should be more than enough to run the piece efficiently. The superb use of links and video also put this Web site over the edge. The inclusion of Greg Childs' blog shows the desire to be more than just a promotional piece for a Discovery Channel TV show, but instead, a journalistic project.

Our Tahoe, one of the student winners, is pretty impressive. The simplistic and straightforward layout serves the content of the site best. I also enjoyed the nonlinear storytelling by the six subjects. The link at the lower bottom of this page gives viewers a chance to hear each subject's views on the corresponding subject. This is a very cool idea. Finally, the people, places and games sections are all implemented successfully. The people scene's two main sections are very interesting. I especially enjoyed the I Live Here piece.

It was exciting for me to see all of the award winners try out so many new and different ways to carry out multimedia projects. I feel like I am getting to the point where I could be involved in one or more of these styles of pieces.