The Independent Media Center's self-publishing system is the lifeblood of the website. The system encourages direct and democractic media participation by letting activists, writers, photographers, artist, audio reporters, and videographers "publish" their work on the site and have it instantly accessible for people to see. We at the site use the material published to highlight and inform other IMC sites and people around the world about our global struggles and local issues.
The media we publish include:
• Text (reports, articles, essays, action anouncements)
• Photos (in JPEG format)
• Art (in GIF format)
• Audio (in real or MP3 format)
• Video (in real format)

The following are technical specification guidelines for publishing material to this site. If the specs are unclear, please go to the online help section for definition of terms and measurements.

TEXT
• Please focus on activism issues and events. We (the people organizing this site) may rearrange the display of submitted stories. We have a lot of respect for people publishing on our site, so we generally only use these features to fix obvious mistakes, such as typos in a web address or a duplicate copy of a story.
• Try to make sure the text you are submitting are free of ">" and other artifacts from email formatting. A freeware called Smartwrap (mac+win) can help you format your stories so they are free of strange paragraph breaks one can get from email texts.

PHOTOS
• We accept JPG (.jpg) compressed images in both color and black/white.
• Please name your images in DOS convention (lowercase 8 letters max and then a 3 letter extension, like "protest.jpg") No grammatical marks in names please.
• Maximum size for upload pics are 600 pixels wide by 600 pixels height. Make sure all photos are 72 dpi.
• We accept real (.ram), mp3s (mp3), and quicktime (.mov) formats for audio clips.
• Please name your audio in DOS convention (lowercase 8 letters max and then a 3 letter extension, like "protest.jpg") No grammatical marks in names please.
• Generally the smaller the file the better, so keep clips below 4 minutes in length. If your clip is longer, cut it up and publish them in two or more parts.
• We accept real (.ram) and quicktime (.mov) formats for video clips.
• Please name your video clips in DOS convention (lowercase 8 letters max and then a 3 letter extension, like "protest.jpg") No grammatical marks in names please.
• Keep clips short, below 2 minutes in length if possible. If your clip is longer, cut it up and publish them in two or more parts.
• Video size should be 160 pixels wide by 120 pixels height or smaller.
• Frame rate for video clips should be 15 FPS or lower.
• Audio for video should be 22khz at 8 bits and mono.

Online Help
These are links to website with information and resources on the technologies we use to produce and publish material on this site.

Print/online resources for journalist
http://www.cio.com/central/journalism.html
http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/journalism/journalists.html

Optimizing images
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/99/15/index0a.html?tw=design

Image formats explained
http://acomp.stanford.edu/acpubs/Docs/graphic_file_formats/

Editing and optimizing sound
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/geektalk/96/42/index3a.html?tw=multimedia
http://school.syntrillium.com/tutor/shortcourse.htm

Digital video primer
http://www.adobe.com/support/salesdocs/8e96.htm

Capturing and editing video on macs
http://acomp.stanford.edu/acpubs/Docs/digital_video/

Web video compression explained and compared
http://www.dvlive.com/webvideo/2000/0900/waggoner0900.html

Freeware
Freeware is software that is offered at no cost. Shareware is software that is distributed free on a trial basis with the understanding that the user may need or want to pay for it later. Here are a list of both types of software that can help you produce media for our site or your own.

TEXT
Smartwrap (shareware/win + mac) is a utility to format email and web text so there aren't funny line breaks in sentences. Very helpful for people uploading stories.
http://www.selznick.com/products/smartwrap/index.htm

IMAGE
JPEG cleaner (shareware/win) reduces your JPEG images' file size without a loss in image quality.
http://www.pppr.sk/rainbow/

Graphics converter (shareware/mac) converts any image format to any other.
http://www.lemkesoft.de/us_gcdownload.html

Ultimate FX (freeware/win) is a free version of photoshop!
http://www.ultimatepaint.com/index.html
(then go to download and select Download Ultimate Paint v1.91f FREEWARE)

GIMP (freeware/unix) is a free version of photoshop! In UNIX!
http://www.gimp.org/download.html

SOUND
MP3 2000 (freeware/win) is an MP3 editor and encoder.
http://www.worldusa.com/mp3/mp2000/index.shtml

cooledit 2000 (shareware/win) is an audio editing suite for web audio.
http://www.syntrillium.com/products.htm

Sound Studio 1.4 (shareware/mac) is an audio editing app for the mac.
http://www.felttip.com/products/

VIDEO
HackTv (freeware/mac+win) is a free utility for capturing audio and video (for the capture of video you need a video capture card installed in your computer).
http://developer.apple.com/quicktime/quicktimeintro/tools/