What’s new

Video broadcast booth available for the home

San Francisco Attention, would-be news anchors: it’s time to go on the air.

Visual Communicator Plus, a nifty application that lets you build a broadcast studio at a desktop computer, brings much of the power of broadcast video production to the small office or home.

You supply the PC and a video camera (or webcam) and the $149 program provides the software muscle to add title bars for text, fancy graphic scene transitions and superimposed background images of your choice.

Makeup artists and hairstylists are not included.

Visual Communicator Plus, from Sacramento-based Serious Magic, would be great creating training videos or distance-learning footage for Internet publication.

The software also could be useful for teaching students video production, although the truly career-minded will want more powerful and complicated software packages such as Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro.

‘Blog’ goes mainstream

A form of Web publishing called the “blog” slang for Web log took another step toward acceptance by mainstream journalism last week when Salon.com, the Web magazine, opened its site to amateur authors who want to publish a “Salon Blog” for $40 a year.

Blogs are hyperlink-rich online diaries, with short entries displayed in reverse chronological order. Salon cleverly designed its blogging section to rank the authors by how many people read them. As of last Friday, managing editor Scott Rosenberg’s blog was ranked No. 1.

Professional writers at several major-media sites, including MSNBC.com, Fox News, the Financial Times and Microsoft’s Slate, have started blogs this year. But Salon.com is the first to host amateur bloggers on its www.salon.com/blogs/.

Yahoo revises free e-mail

Yahoo is letting users try out a revised version of its free e-mail service, which features a snappier, more colorful design and more tools for organizing messages. The redesign, rolling out soon for all Yahoo users, integrates e-mail with other tools, such as an address book, calendar and notepad. Yahoo said the idea was to make e-mail easier to use.
http://mail.yahoo.com