In a week or two, you’ll see a new look to InsideTheCBC.com. With any luck, the new design will make it easier for you to find things, subscribe to email alerts or RSS feeds.

As always, your thoughts and suggestions are more than welcome!

– Tod

Coverage of former cabinet minister Ernie Fage’s fender-bender and the drug crime scene in Cape Breton have netted CBC Nova Scotia journalists three Atlantic Journalism Awards. [details]

Web videos have tons of potential practical applications. Video blogs are becoming increasingly popular due to the ease of shooting and production. This recent video blog by Al Thompkins, as reposted by Dan Misener on his blog, shows how to make short videos on the cheap using a “Flip” camera, some simple editing software, and your own ingenuity. It isn’t as hard as you would think.

The Flip camera is a video camera with a “flip-out” USB port that allows you to plug it directly into your computer without a cable. It is available inexpensively, at a price point of around $200 as opposed to the expected $1200 for a digital video camera in the past.

This brings the realm of the video blog into everyone’s reach. Mr. Thompkins runs through the technology and software needed to work with a Mac; it is easily adaptable to a PC simply by just changing the software package to something like Podesk which is tailor-made to produce video blogs and video podcasts.

CBC shows have been taking advantage of this video format and have been posting their own short web videos; check out the following links to get the feel.

Spark - How To Make A Radio Show
The host of “Spark” and co-staff produced this how-to video.
http://www.danmisener.com/archives/334

R3TV (Radio 3 TV)
http://blip.tv/file/258335/
This contains some fun stuff, a music video, and interesting commentary in the manner of an internet video rather than a sleekly produced TV Show.

ZeD:
http://zed.cbc.ca/go?c=ZedCandidHomepage
While cancelled, the videos on this page try to keep the feel of an amateur internet video and give you the general idea of what is possible.

UPDATE: Temporarily disabled until a software conflict with comments is sorted out. As one of the commenters noted, this site and every other web site still works on iPhones and iPod Touches… this enhancement simply makes it much more readable.

With the iPhone coming to Canada later this year, I’ve started a bit early and launched a special iPhone version of InsideTheCBC.com. Just visit the site with any iPhone or iPod Touch to get this special version.

(Programmed by Canadian firm BraveNewCode which is giving the theme away for free.)

This is the final week of voting for the Webbys People’s Choice and CBC Radio 3 needs your help.

For public broadcasters like CBC Radio 3, we are not judged by how much revenue we take in (which is none), but by how relevant we are to our community of listeners. And an award like the Webbys People’s Voice is a great way to document community support.

If you like what Radio 3 is doing, and you want to help us champion independent Canadian musicians in this country and on the international stage, than please take the time to vote. (Once you’ve confirmed your registration, you’ll find R3 under Website / Media / Radio.)

CBCNews.ca is a finalist in three categories for the EPpy [sic] Awards, one of the biggest international digital journalism awards. Most impressively, it’s a finalist for the big award, the Best Overall News Site category — along with The New York Times, MSNBC.com, Slate.com, and BBC News (last year’s winner). That means the judges consider CBCNews.ca one of the top five news sites in the world. CBC is also in the running for Best Overall Radio-Affiliated Web Site, and Best Use of Video in a Web Site for the Archives site. The awards are run by Editor & Publisher and Mediaweek, who will announce the winners next month.

CBC Radio 3 has been nominated for a prestigious Webby Award, in the radio category.  The nomination, which was unveiled earlier today by The Webby Film & Video Awards, puts CBC Radio 3 in the company of BBC Radio 1, iCat fm, NPR and Virgin Radio.

As one of five nominees from around the world in this category, Radio 3 and the team behind it are eligible for the Internet industry’s two most sought-after awards: The Webby Award and The Webby People’s Voice Award. This is the second year in a row that Radio 3 has been nominated.

CBC overall was also named an “official honoree” for CBC Podcasts—an honour granted to fewer than 15% of entrants and one that signifies an outstanding caliber of work.

Unlike other awards shows, where only judges choose the winners, The Webby Awards also give the global Web community an opportunity to decide who will take home a Webby. Starting today, and running through to May 1, the public can cast their votes in The Webby’s People Voice Awards.  Award winners will be announced May 6, and honoured at a star-studded ceremony ceremony for the 12th Annual Webby Awards in New York City on June 9.

Hailed as the “Oscars of the Internet,” The Webby Film and Video Awards are the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. Established in 1996, the Webbys are presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. This year, the Awards received a record 9,500 entries from across the U.S. and over 60 countries worldwide.

At the Junos this weekend, CBC Records celebrated another win for its acclaimed album featuring Canadian violinist James Ehnes, bringing to three the awards for this album.

James Ehnes’ recording, Barber, Korngold, Walton: Violin Concertos, with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra yesterday won the Juno Award for Classical Album of the Year – Soloist with Large Ensemble. In his acceptance speech, Ehnes singled out CBC producer Denise Ball and Recording Engineer Don Harder.

Two other nominations for CBC Records this year included Live! Jazz Legends / Légendes du jazz nominated for Traditional Jazz Album of the Year and Celso Machado’s Jogo da Vida for best World Music Abum

It has been a banner year for CBC Records given the international recognition it received with a Grammy award, and through the national profile achieved with Juno and Western Canadian Music Awards wins. CBC Records has won a total of 29 Junos. – Text condensed from a CBC news release

About a dozen of you emailed to say you were having problems posting comments to the site. It must have been one of the, er, “enhancements” I made on the weekend. ;-)  Should be fixed now. Sorry about the inconvenience.

Over the weekend, I upgraded the blog software and added a few more features to make this site a bit easier to peruse:

• Commenter pictures: You can now have your photo (or almost any image representing yourself) beside any comments you make. Want to get started? Get your own “gravatar” here.
• Integrated Digg.com: Now, if you “digg” one of the stories here on the popular social news site, the famous little Digg button will automatically appear on the story. Here’s an example.
• Wider page: Now, there’s more width to the pages, so that should make reading a bit easier.
• Easier to use categories: Instead of one long list of categories to select from, the list (at the top of the grey sidebar on the right) only displays top-level categories at first. When you click one, it expands.
• More comments shown: Comment summaries shown in the sidebar now have more text to them and there are many more comments displayed.
• Tag cloud: It’s just getting started, but a “tag cloud” exists in the sidebar in case you prefer to do your browsing that way. (The bigger the word, the more posts are about that topic.)

As always, please keep the suggestions coming!

Nora Young and the over-caffeinated crew at Spark have put out a quirky little video about how to make a radio show.

If you’re looking for Radio 101, look elsewhere. This tongue-in-cheek production is Radio 001. (For instance, one line from the piece: “When you’re in the studio, say the words and phrases that you wrote down earlier into the microphone.”)

Be sure to watch for how they get the audio tape into the recorder. I’d been trying to figure that out for years now!

Here’s the embed code if you want to share it on your blog:

<object width=”425″ height=”355″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/WsFbcKlc26c&hl=en”></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/WsFbcKlc26c&hl=en” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”355″></embed></object>