"Solutions" Andrew Keen

I feel that Andrew Keen's Solutions article was a bit too harsh in bashing the current web. I can understand where he is coming from in his argument that things are being posted on the internet that may have false information because they have been written by amateurs. However I feel that this concept is what shapes our online world today, the ability to speak your mind and contribute to our growing database of information available. I also think that Wikipedia is a useful tool for finding out quick information. Whenever I am unfamiliar with a subject or topic and I Google it Wikipedia is usually the very first thing that pops up. I find it convenient. For my midterm project I actually got the chance to edit Wikipedia and help to contribute information that was nonexistent.

The points Keen brings up in this reading about information being inaccurate I will always keep in the back of my mind while searching online for information to use in an important paper or project. I however do not feel that these amateur sites like Wikipedia and YouTube are taking anything away from the internet and spoiling it's authenticity. I feel that the whole article and Keen's perspective is being exaggerated in so many ways. People are already aware that the information they find posted may not be completely right. Keen does not need to blow it out of the water by bashing it so in the article. I see the arguments that he makes and may agree with them slightly but not enough to voice such a strong viewpoint that he has done.

Interesting Invention

Recently I heard about a new technology that police are using to help keep roadways safe. Many cars are stolen every year which force police to go on dangerous high speed chases to recover the stolen car, and arrest the drive. These chases put the lives of police officers and citizens in danger. Now Police are teaming up with OnStar to help cut down on this dangerous activity. Take a look at this YouTube video interview.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIIM8rw0au8

My take on Kevin Kelly's "the next 5,000 days of web"

I was very interested in these two videos. I especially liked the part where he listed the statistics like how there is two million emails per second, and fifty five trillion links. Its amazing that we have the technology to determine these statistics to begin with. Not to mention how many people are using the internet to rack up these statistics. 1829 was when the word technology was first invented by a man who was starting to teach a course. Anything that was invented after you were born, or work yet was the two descriptions Kevin gave to describe technology. He brings up a great way to look at life, what if we were to eliminate every kind of technology in our wold today, where would we be? This question scares me because we rely, well I rely so heavily on technology today I would be lost without it.

The video was informative in describing how our brain works and how fast the internet grows. Infinity processing power will be reached by 2014 was a bold statement. Infinity is a huge number and to know that we will be that far along in technology is amazing. I am excited to see if Kevin's theory on how there will be one device for everything eventually comes true. I personally am using a lot of technology like a cell phone, laptop, camera, iPod, and television. To imagine that all of these things will eventually become one is exciting. I have already seen the commercials for the portable personal television but I have not physically seen it yet.

I agree with Kelly's statement that the web is restructuring things. The different stages of link computers (the net), linking pages, and linking data. He is very comical and entertaining like when he speaks about the firs person to purchase the fax machine and telling stories about his experiences with technology. He relates his speeches to the average person and is very personable, how he was up till 4am preparing his speech, and relating technology to each of us and our different places in the world. I enjoyed watching these videos and learning about future technology.

Web 3.0

When I sat down to really think what the internet would be like 3.0 style I had trouble wrapping my head around the fact that we are already so technologically advanced on the internet already and the fact that it can grow even further, amazes me. I think that in the future concepts like facebook and YouTube will be developed further. I can see one website catering to everything. It will be your social networking site which will allow for video chat, conversations, exchange of information, a search engine, your place to do banking, send emails, interact with blogging, and even an online dating place to meet people. I couldn't imagine what else the future holds for web 3.0 because we have a lot already. The concept of Bing interests me because I feel that it may be the new Google. Bing caters to things you search for and makes it more convenient to see the websites even before you open them! Another website that fascinates me is LinkdIn. This is like a business world FaceBook where you can find, contact, and keep track of people in the business world. You can view their current and past jobs. This combined with FaceBook, blogging, and chatting will enable you to keep track of anyone, anywhere, anytime even if you have never met them before. Web 3.0 will be everywhere. It wont just be the internet through you laptops and BlackBerrys but I feel that you will be able to access Web 3.0 anywhere you will ever need to.

Illustrator Project

Edit Wikipedia follow up

To follow up with the midterm project that I completed in Wikipedia on Rate Card, Automated Measurement of Lineups, and Average Hours I posted my edits a while back and now found problems in some of the information that I added. When I placed text from other websites into Wikipedia I cited them properly in the format that was required but some of the citations did not save because there was a problem with their set up. I went back in today to try and fix my edits but some of the links Wikipedia did not approve.

The only other problem I ran into was with placing pictures into my pages. Wikipedia informed me that they use to allow users to make corrections and use pictures from other websites but now they no longer do. This made it frustrating because I could not add visuals to any of the new webpages I edited so that people would understand them better. This was a difficult assignment to do because you needed to follow Wikipedias format as well as the shortcut tools to edit in things like bold fonts, links, citations, and other things like that.

I have the before/afters of my three pages saved into a Word document but if you would like to see the finished edits you can find them here:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate_card
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Measurement_of_Lineups
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_Hours

Illustrator Proposal

1. Describe what kind of visual component you would like to create to accompany your essay

Since I choose to do my midterm project in Wikipedia I not only want to incorporate the terms I used but also the "making wikipedia better" concept. Wikipedia's logo is a basic grey color, with puzzle pieces. My goal is to give Wikipedia's logo a modern facelift. I want to give it some color and add in various images, specifically pertaining to the topics I personally edited.

2. What tools/techniques in Illustrator / Photoshop will you be using?

In Photoshop I will use tools like the feather tool to help combine various images so they fit together perfectly such as pictures which will fill in the puzzle pieces. I want to use Illustrator to add effects to the pictures and vectorize them before i place them into my new logo.

3. How to you envision your completed digital illustration?

I envision my completed digital illustration to be very colorful and vibrant because I want to present a huge contrast between the old, grey one to the new, modern, and eye catching logo. I want to find picture incorporates that modern day technology to upgrade the words that are presently in the puzzle pieces.

Making Wikipedia Better

The first article I found to be under developed was an article for the term Automated Measurement Lineups. There was a brief definition of the meaning of AML but there was no further information. I found it to be a fairly easy concept to grasp but I knew that it would be a lot easier to understand if there were more examples or even pictures so that people could have visuals of this concept. I currently have edited the article, providing more information and sources and I am just waiting to see if any part of the article I contributed to made it on.

I did the same with the following two terms:Average Hours- this was a term used to determine the "average hours" of television watched per household, per person, per week, per year. I found no articles on Wikipedia for this term so I created one and started the page by adding statistics and a brief definition. It has been left open for others to post information from what I originally started. Rate Card- This was the last term I researched. It has to do with the amount an advertiser pays for a commercial, basically a chart of how they will be charged. This was also not developed so I added some information into Wikipedia.

I saved the before articles and will keep checking Wikipedia to see if my contributions have been posted. I will keep my blog updated during the process with the results.

Midterm Project

This post never made it onto my blog for the due date because I hadn't realized that it never successfully posted. For my project I choose to do the Wikipedia project. I researched a bunch of media terms and found three that had not been developed as well as they could be.

Vector -> Bitmap

Before
(vector)

After
(bitmap)

Flip Illustrator

Web2.0 questions

1) I feel that it is not necessarily the question of if professional production values are dropping or rising its more that it is a new and interesting form of production that appeals to people. This is because the simplicity of filming something with just a web cam or amateur video camera appeals to people because its different and uncommon.

The mere fact of seeing a commercial on television such as the E-Trade baby one that is fuzzy and unclear automatically grabs the viewers attention because they are so use to seeing a commercial of high quality. I feel that it is not going to continue down this path, some movies and commercials that are intended to be seen as an amateur video will be filmed this way such as Paranormal Activity while other movies like Avatar pride themselves on the quality of the movie they are producing.


2)The article we choose was http://mashable.com/2010/02/21/deal-with-negative-feedback/ here we choose the following tags:

• Social Media
• Business
• Communication
• Feedback
• Criticism
  

The tags that were listed on this article under Delicious were: business, feedback, MARKETING, small business, and social media

The similarities in the tags included the topics that were listed in the title of the article such as feedback, and social media. Some tags like criticism and communication were not listed as similar tags. I felt that it was important to put these tags in because social media is a direct link from communication, it is a form of it.

I also felt that it was key to include the criticism tag because of the fact that this article deals with the "How To's" of it. In tagging I learned that the fewer words, the more effective. When there are less tags I feel like it gets straight to the point, to the meat of the article. It is more obvious of what the article is about if the tags are only tags that relate direct to the main point. The one tag that I would combine off of the Delicious sight would be marketing and business just because they are so similar.


3) Transparency is such an important topic in social media because the more you are transparent in the social media world the more you can communicate with other people who share similar interests. Using this allows you to find people who share the same interests that you do quicker and more effectively. This allows companies to get together and serve their consumers needs in a broader way which in the end will allow them to reach more people, gaining more business.

I feel that on one side transparency can be seen as more important to the online world through the accessibility of the internet and how many people can view it at their convince. The other side however convinces me that it is as equally important to the offline world because you have more privacy. On the internet people can be followed and it is not as private to have your information out there as it is if you were to never be online and keep personal information to yourself. For instance word of mouth through your family or group of friends would be more reliable than reading a tabloid about celebrities.

DIgital Nation Part 2

During this part of the documentary i found it very interesting that so many people played video games the way that these people did. When I saw the people meeting at the convention I was shocked to learn how much of their day they spend playing video games. Some of those people even met their future husbands/wives through the game.

The other interesting part of this video was to see the way large companies such as IBM are using virtual world to set up meetings. They are basically running their whole business though this internet program. I had briefly heard about virtual world before but had no idea it was as elaborate as it was shown here. I feel that it is not a professional way to run a business. I think that face to face meetings are still appropriate and if that can not be done than there is still video conferencing through video chats and conference lines.

Digital_Nation Video

I found it really interesting to watch this video in class. Not only does Rachel make a lot of great points but she does an excellent job of opening our eyes to the world around us. I had to stop and think how strange it was that we didn't have some of the technologies as kids growing up today do. I feel so old when I hear about eight and ten year old kids having cell phones. There really was no need to have a cell phone at that young of an age growing up and my friends and I did not get them until we were a bit older. When Rachel was speaking about her family while she was cooking dinner it reminded me of my house when I am home. When we are all in the same room we still could be in completely different places. Like my dad talking to customers and my sister to her boyfriend. I could be back at school looking through my emails and doing assignments. Even though we are all physically together we can really be in other places at the same time. The part in the video about multi tasking I found to be a bit confusing because I did not really understand the end results. I fell like the testing was a random part in this documentary. I am excited to see all of the other parts of this video.

Media Collage

The medium i choose to represent in my collage was the BlackBerry. Displayed through this image is pictures of content a BlackBerry represents such as facebook, google, internet, AIM, and other search engines. The message in my media collage is the different functions of the BlackBerry such as using this SmartPhone as not only a phone but camera and computer as well.

Web 2.0 Terms:

User-generated content-This term entered the media in 2005, it refers to a number of available media content through the creation and generation of the sites users.

Long tail- A retail strategy that describes the art of selling a large number of unique items in small quantities.

Network as platform- The focus of a network is innovation where it only exists as the infrastructure of a system. The platform is used to deliver the experience to consumers.

Folksonomy- This is also known as collaborative tagging or social tagging. This is when tags are created and managed in order to find a specific content.

Syndication- Making web feeds available from a website in order to provide people with a summary of things such as recently added content, in other words when material is made available to a number of other sites.

Mass collaboration- This phrase refers to a large number of people working independently on one single project. Projects like these take place on the internet using social software.

Computer supported collaboration- This is when groups and organizations are able to communicate, and work together through the use of technology.

Hosted services- A business that delivers a combination of key functions like security, monitoring, storage and combines its abilities.

Web applications- This is an application that can be accessed through a web browser over a network like the internet for example. These are extremely popular due to the convenience of using the browser as a client.

Social-software- This allows individuals to not only interact but share software as well through a wide variety of software systems where media and data can be easily uploaded.

Video-sharing sites- A website such as YouTube that allows the individual to upload and share their videos to the public or only a select group usually free of charge.

Wikis-A wiki is a website that allows for the easy creation and editing of a web page through the web browser.

Blogs- A specific type of journal-like website, typically intended for personal commentary, description of events, or graphics through entries.

Mashups-An application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service.

Content VS Message

BlackBerry

With this medium you can use the application BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) which allows you to communicate with other BlackBerry users. This form of new media changes the perception of society because of the competition between being an iPhone user as opposed to BlackBerry. Even though there are more benefits to this smartphone than consequences some of them include lack of social interaction because everybody is always attached to their phones as well as the annoyance of people being able to see what messages you have opened and not responded to. This brings on the issue of privacy.

On Star

On Star can be installed in many vehicles which allows you to call for help, track a stolen car, and detect when you have been in a crash so it can call for help. This special button changes the perception of society because now people will feel a bit safer when they are in their cars. A social consequence for this type of new media is that if you do not carry a cell phone and only rely on this button for help something may go wrong. Another consequence would be if you accidently pressed the button when you didn't need help, like a false alarm.

Apple iPad

This device came out today, basically a larger version of an iTouch or iPhone, like a kindle or computer. Since this technology is so new it changes the perception of society because no one has ever seen this advanced technology before. Since it is a new invention there may be social and personal consequences down the line.

Medium Examples

BlackBerry

OnStar

Apple iPad