IYA and New Media
The International Year of Astronomy New Media Working Group (IYA NMWG) seeks to flood the Internet with ways to learn about astronomy and increase interaction among professionals, amateurs, and laypeople. Our primary audience is you! Are you an amateur astronomer, astronomy and space enthusiast, or image lover? Are you into science fiction, online gaming, and debunking psuedo science? We have content to help you learn astronomy to help you with your hobby. We aim to build lasting programs and partnerships that will continue beyond 2009.
Our weapon of choice is New Media. New Media differ from traditional media (such as television, radio, and print) in their informality. Many forms of New Media start as user-provided content (that means you and I can both bring content to IYA!). New Media content-building infrastructures answer the content provider’s creative whims (want something silly – we’ll bring you silly!), and New-Media content can be commented upon (hey! Check out the Forums!), shared, borrowed, adopted, edited, and re-posted (please link to us!) by a broad audience.
Classic examples of New Media include blogs and podcasts – and we’ll be producing both. This media is typically distributed through content-specific websites and RSS feeds, which allow individual Internet users to select preferred streams of media (including text, audio, and video) to be delivered to them automatically. If you look up in your address bar, you may see a little RSS orange symbol. If you click on this, it will take you to this pages RSS Feed, and you can subscribe to this feed in popular clients like Google Reader. This way, any changes or updates we make will be brought straight to you, where you’re reading, when you want them.
So explore this site, subscribe to RSS feeds of working groups that interest you, and help us get out the world that the International Year of Astronomy is coming to the planet nearest you in 2009.
