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For the second time this year, The Knoxville News Sentinel has been named a finalist in three categories in a national online awards competition. We won three Digital Edge Awards earlier this year, and now have been named finalists for three 2008 EPpy™ Awards for the Best Media-Affiliated Internet Services.

knoxnews/GoVolsXtra are finalists in best site design, best overall news site and best sports site in our circulation category. Jack Lail has more details on who contributed to this awesome announcement here.

Find a full list of 2008 EPpy™ finalists.

I just got in an invite to tagged.com.

It was from a friend I don’t hear from often, so I figured I check it out. I’m always down for more time-wasting, social networking sites after all.

I would have clicked “sign me up” until I read the “About Us” section:

Tagged provides a fun, safe, and exciting environment for people to showcase their personalities and talents, and to connect with friends and meet new ones.

Fair enough, but then the kicker:

Tagged is experiencing dramatic growth Advertisers love Tagged because they get clear, uncomplicated access to our audience. Our team is dedicated to making every advertiser successful and can develop and support any type of ad campaign.

I don’t know about you, but I hate giving advertisers “clear, uncomplicated access” to me. I get enough SPAM and junk mail as it is.

And here’s the Wikipedia criticism:

There have been several critical articles[3][4][5][6] written about tagged.com’s policy toward their users’ email address books. These policies have been described at best as spamming, and at worst as phishing attacks.

Eeek!

I’ve been on knoxnews.com everyday for three years and have never had this kind of luck.

A co-worker passed along a blog link revealing that two of our online commenters found each other - and love - through the comment area on knoxnews.com!

I wasn’t looking.
Neither was she.
And it started happening.
I still can’t believe it.

Read more about the chance meeting.

This week in my online journalism class, students were asked to shoot and edit their first man-on-the-street video in groups of two or three.

They chose a question and had to get at least four responses. Students were asked to keep lighting, framing, background noises and a few other shooting tips in mind. They had one class to shoot and one to edit, using either iMovie or FinalCutPro.

As I should have expected, two groups had video files that could only be processed on a PC, not on the Macs in our lab. When we got to the PC lab, codec issues continued to prevent us from accessing one group’s files. The other group used Windows Moviemaker to edit for the first time.

It was frustrating for the group who had to sit through class, watching everyone else edit. But I let them know it’s very reflective of life in multimedia journalism. You never know if something screwy will happen to your tape, or if you’ll be asked to process a foreign file for the first time. The only thing I can guarantee students of multimedia is that you can never anticipate what you’ll be asked to do or what will happen.

My co-workers and I have a saying for the unexpected situations: Yay for freeware, shortcuts and not having a clue what we’re doing!

It sounds scary, but I’ve actually learned to enjoy it. I took the video files we could not access back to the office and wound up converting them using Ultra Video Splitter, one of the first video programs I ever used for RandomThis at it’s inception. I don’t even remember the last time I opened up the program either.

The group wound up getting a crash course in FinalCutPro and produced this video about the UT men’s basketball team in 20 minutes. Another group used FinalCut for their video on the election. They chose this program so they could fix sync issues with their audio and video. One group worked completely independently of any help and used iMovie to make this video on Candace Parker’s decision to leave UT early. Here is the second video produced in Moviemaker, also about UT sports. And lastly, check out this one on UT dining and health, also produced in Moviemaker. It has a nice surprise twist ending.

Breaking, exciting news for knoxnews.com: We won three Digital Edge awards this weekend for Best News Site, Most Innovative User Participation (School Matters, managed by Web goddess Jigsha Desai) and Best Site Design this weekend at the NAA conference in Orlando.

Last year, knoxnews.com won for RandomThis video blog.

See a full list of winners here.