The light dims on daytime dramas

The Death of the Soap Opera Genre

It pains me to acknowledge the deterioration of my daytime guilty pleasure. I have been an avid watcher of daytime soaps for years; labelled a soap junkie on many occasions. Rushing home to catch the last few minutes of The Young and the Restless was arguably the highlight of my day. Action packed shows filled with sex, intrigue, passion and drama galore; daytime dramas had it all. Over the last few years, soap operas have become a dying breed. Major networks are opting to replace them with cheaper to produce reality and game shows. The ratings for the six remaining soaps are lower than ever and continue to decline.


With the recent demise of Guiding Light and recent cancellation of sister soap As the World Turns; the future of daytime soaps is looking rather bleak. Daytime soap operas have been plagued with cancellation rumours for years, but there’s still hope of survival. Ten years from now, soap operas may no longer exist on regular daytime television, but may ultimately find new homes on cable television or even online. With my every day guilty pleasure on the line, one can only hope.

SocialAppReview- Grooveshark

Discover all types of music for free and receive personalized recommendations

What is it? And how did it come about?
Grooveshark is a company of about 40 young entrepreneurs. It is essentially a music service that rivals similar applications such as Last.fm and Pandora, the two major players in legal music discovery and ‘free’ music streaming. It is owned by Escape Media Group Inc. and runs out of Gainesville, Florida. It was founded in 2006 by Sam Tarantino. Began as peer to peer file sharing in 2006, and has since changed to a streaming model.

Features:
* Upload your own music collection and stream it from anywhere you go
* Search for pretty much any song or artist you can think of. Find the song and stream it instantly over the web
* This application allows you to save playlists, bookmark and “favourite” your songs.
* You can network with other users, share favourites over facebook, twitter etc.
* Grooveshark Lite: Unlike the full Grooveshark service, no application download is required to use Grooveshark Lite (Click here to view for YouTube clip)

Grooveshark Artists:
- Grooveshark Artists, offers pay-for-play audio real-estate matched to its existing track recommendations. It provides analytics tools for track placement optimization.” (Click Groovshark artists link above to discover more about this application).
- Designed to complement the streaming on demand site and give independent artists a chance to find an audience. For $500 an artist can purchase 500 song plays on Grooveshark. The songs will be played to listeners who have chosen to listen to other songs or artists similar to theirs. Listeners can rate the songs, and artists can see how the audience is responding to their music.

This tool can be useful for PR practitioners to stay on top of past, current and future trends. What is hot and what is not.

Will it survive?

Based on the unpleasant history of digital music start-ups to date, the chances of Grooveshark’s survival are very low. This does not mean it is doomed to fail; however, its staying power decreases each time they have copyright issues. They have been sued by major music labels, such as EMI and Universal Music. Whether this service is actually legal or not is still questionable. The issue with EMI has since been resolved- Click here to read Grooveshark’s statement regarding its troubles with copyright infringement or check out Danyel’s blog to read more.

On a final note, I thought this YouTube video of a teenager pitching why he loves Grooveshark, was extremely amusing. If you have time, click the YouTube link above to check it out.

How to Embed a video

Learning new computer software and techniques is never easy. To be a PR practitioner it is imperative to always be on top of your game. With social media becoming such a major trend, being computer savvy is increasingly more important.

Video Embedding is the topic of this post.

Reduces search time and makes numerous links available on one single webpage.

HOW TO EMBED A VIDEO? Most people wouldn’t know where or how to start the process.

Embedding a video was something I had heard for the first time very recently. Apparently I’m not as computer savvy as I had initially thought. I thought that learning how to embed a video was going to be a challenge that is until I came across this informative YouTube video. This video takes you through the step by step process of embedding a YouTube video into any webpage. It’s as easy as cutting and pasting. You will have no trouble learning from this video, as it incorporates both audio and visual guidance. Follow the steps carefully and you’ll be a pro in no time.

Not all sites are as advantageous to use. Some sites like Fluffbucket.com are not as helpful, without the use of visual representations.

YouTube tutorial video’s cover many elements needed to make you a computer savvy PR practitioner. It would most definitely be my first point of reference to check out any other “how to” purposes.

For further information on video embedding, please check out Shelley and Jade’s blogs.