My Crazy Idea For The Day

This is what I think would be the best solution for all involved when it comes to peer 2 peer file transfers and the Bittorent revolution. It is inevitable when people start to realise they now hold the power of distribution to use it to there own advantage.

This will work for television advertising which is where I am basing my theory. It could also work with software products by taking on sponsorship endorsments similar to how sports administration effectively creates revenue.

The players  and what they want;

• Producers- Producers want to create a product that is entertaining and fulfilling for the audience and attracts viewers to increase popularity of there work.
• Broadcasters- Broadcaster want to be popular and attract a large audience.
• Advertisers- Advertisers want exposure and awareness of there products.
• Audience- Customers want to be entertained or provided something useful at a minimal expense.

In the internet environment the broadcasters are the ISP’s, who aready get paid by charging the customer for an internet connection. So they are not really effected all that much.

Producers are missing out however as people are not paying for the priviledge of using there products. However these products do attract a wide audience, and this is where the problem can be solved with a bit of creative thinking.

Adverisers instead of using a direct marketing strategy need to start talking to producers and pay them to have there products assimilated into the productions rather than as a seperate entity to them. This would be a much better strategy that the external exposure we recieve in the current environment for a couple of reasons.

• Advertising in this manner is very subtle (or at least it should be) so does not detract from the audiences experience, or annoy them by interuption or forced unrelated exposure.
• This form of advertising would be effective as an audience seeing there favorite character using a product being exposed would effectively endorse it.
• Advertisement would be directed at the actual target audience as the common interest audience created by the producers would give the advetisers a good indication of where to advertise there product.

I know nothing about marketing and this is just my crazy though for the day.

Privacy on the Internet

I decided to do a little research on privacy to help me get a better idea about this issue with internet usage. I read and searched and found out some interesting information about the topicespecially from this website  about A Wider World facebook. Did you know that any information you place in a facebook application then becomes there property and they are free to do whatever they please with it. I did’t. And the real bonus (to facebook anyway), you are the person still accountable for defamation etc if the company is ever sued in regards to your/there content.

Have you ever read the facebook policy and terms of use.

Even if you do read the terms of use it seems that it is a standard policy to include a “we reserve the right to change these terms as we see fit” statement within them (apparently these statements are common in terms of use of internet applications) which is a bit scary really). No wonder nobody reads them, when they are not worth the electrons there created with. (I thought paper there printed on but this is an electronic world lol)

Here is an article bought to my attetion by Amy today (thanks Amy) from consumerist.com about facebook policy, which is very much along the same lines to what I discovered in my own research.

Internet Ecology

So I have finally made it to the last “write your reflections in your blog” task in this net11 course and its quite a doosey.

• how might the metaphor of an ‘ecology’ impact on the way you think about, understand or use the Internet?

Well i hadn’t really thought about it, but ecology suggests environment and behaviour within the environment. This whole course has impacted on my way of thinking, understanding and using the internet. Thats what learning is, (gaining a better understanding, impacted by a broader knowledge of a topic).

It hasn’t really influenced my beliefs in the freedom the internet provides, its given me greater awareness of the privacy issues associated with social networks, a better understanding of the invisibility of difference and the fact we use machines to talk to people, and need to treat them as people and not machines, I learned how some of the technical functioning of the internet works and thus, understand better how to use search engines, directories and databases, as well as different forms of connection, how links work to connect things and communication methods, so can better use the appropriate tools when communicating over the internet. I also learned about some newer technologies, like wikis and mash-ups, and the semantic web.

• how are the concepts ‘information’ and ‘communication’ understood within the framework of an ‘information ecology’?

I don’t really understand this much, I did try to get some answers on twitter today, but found myself confused about the whole thing. Peter suggested another metaphor “remember the map is not the territory” but Amy made it a little clearer for me (thanks again Amy) suggesting that communication was a method and that information was a resource.  I am still a bit confused by it all though as ecology needs behaviour as well as an environment by definition. and I see the information and the infastructure as the environment and the communication as the behaviour (yep totally lost).

• why don’t we talk of a ‘communication ecology’?

As mentioned above I have no idea with this question, to me it would make more sence just to call it an “internet ecology” and desrcibe it as i have in answering the previous question where the ecology is dependant on both aspects of communication and information (as well as infastructure as Peter pointed out in the Tweets discussion).

Its Been A Crazy Week

Ok lets see, last week was the due date for the concepts assignments, my inadequecies in such areas as writing essays lead to a feeling of dissapointment which is one emotion I don’t handle well at all. I did however attempt the assignment and submitted it on time as well, and its hidden away somewhere for the teacher to read and assess. I also wrote a “pretty cool poem” according some of my peers who read it which helped me to feel a bit better about myself.

Back to dissapointment, so from doing  a bit of self analysis in the past, I discovered that dissapointment sending me into a spiral of self-destruction and depression. To combat this I decided if I needed to punish myself I would give up smoking cigarettes, in essence creating a positive negative.

So all week I have been on Twitter distracting myself from the cravings of nicotine withdrawal, combating the lonliness of depression and generally using it as a release mechanism for all the frustrations I have been feeling this week.

I have finally overcome this temporary insanity, and am ready to start doing some meaningful work with my study again.  I have avoided writing on the discussion board this week also, though I have been reading it and am only 200 posts behind the 8 ball, though some of them would be quite outdated by now so would have no context and others would be irrrelevent to my learning, like the (Mac users United) thread for instance, seeing as I don’t have a Mac.

I have written my participation assessment, though have not submitted it yet. The essay assignment is done and submitted (so too late to change that now) so I suppose I should be doing some revision of my blog, and tidying up any loose ends or crazy misperceptions I have had throughout this blog writing experience.  Its been quite a journey.

Is The Internet A Living Thing?

I was at my sisters who is a research scientist and came across an article in NewScientist journal. The article was about religeon but it made a point about the cognitive thinking patterns of the human brain, which stated,

“One of the key factors, says Bloom, is the fact that our brains have seperate cognitive systems for dealing with living things- things with minds, or at least volition – and inanimate objects” (Micheal Brooks 4th  February 2009).

It goes on to say how even babies as young as 5 months old make this distinction, and react differently accordingly. This got me thinking about how people use the internet to communicate. The invisibility of difference may very well be more about making the distinction that we are communicating with people and not machines over the internet, than anything to do with the difference in culture, hardware or any other unseen limitations.

So this poses the question is the internet a living thing?  Should we be treating it as such in order to effectively communicate to the people who use it, and make the clear distinction between how we respond to living things and the way we percieve inaminate objects differently.

It would be interesting to hear what others thoughts are about this concept.

Evaluating The Web

Darn it, I thought i was doing so well with my last post too, but as usual I stuffed it up, putting the first site in which is a comercial site (or is it an advocacy site hmmm still not really sure), got the second one right though as an academic resource, and the third was an advocacy or personal opinion, as indicated by the ~ in the URL , which used a university domain name.(a little confusing really).

At least I’m learning things I guess, and did fairly well in the tests from the tutorial scoring 70%. The hardest part was distinguishing between a reference site and an advocacy site,  but I guess the best way to approach it would be to ask the question,”does this site promote its own ideas or is it objective about all ideas regarding the topic?”.

Other useful tips were referencing the source to other links by using the link:url syntax in a search engine to see where the site links to, and comparing it to other similar webpages for verification of the messages being displayed.

Organising Search Information

For this task we had to find 3 resources from our prevoius search results and provide some information about them, namely, the Author, URL, Institution and  screenshot.

The first site I chose was the java.sun.com which is the official site of the developers of the java programming language. I was unable to find the author and when I searched by typing “author” into the search tool I came up with thousands of references. The URL is above the author is varied the institution would be Sun Microsystems, and the screenshot is;

The next site was the first hit when I typed “java programming” into a google search, and provided an academic resource, perfect, no hasles here The Author is David J Eck, the URL math.hws.edu, the institution is “Hobart And William Smith College” and the screenshot is;

The third website I chose was www.apl.jhu.edu , another academic resource. The Author is Marty Hall with help from Shlomo Krasner, the URL is above, the institution is the John Hopskins University, and the screenshot is;

Disturbed- Group Chat

Ok so its 4am and after a few hours dosing I realised how disturbing the events of yesterday really were for me.

Firstly I gave up smoking 2 days ago, so am feeling the effects of that,  secondly the bushfires have stirred up the emotions related to grief within me, and thirdly I feel lost as to what course of action to take to help myself.

Quiting Smoking- well it makes you very stort tempered and easily irritated. Craving seem stronger whenever I feel nervous or anxious (which is quite often). I have also been a bit irrational at times, as people who read my tweets yesterday may have noticed, so my appologies. All that is a bit annoying.

Grief- this is a bit more of an issue as I felt I had dealt with my grief but according to my therapist after I told him that the emotions of the bushfires had stirred up previous thoughts and emotions related to my past, I still have some work to do in this area. It may have been empathy for the victims, and knowing the pain of losing loved ones will remain long after the amazing and fantastic support the community is showing has stopped if it ever ceases at all.

I have had 5 years to get used to this new world and it hurts no less, all I can do is try to cope with it better.

This lead me to look for support groups in relation to grief and loss. I must say I didn’t find anything that was very helpful which was a bit dissapointing. Maybe its the nature of grief that makes it hard to provide a decent facility for it online, there is a bit of information about community groups and mental health proffesionals to seek out which is all well and good, but not really what I was looking for. All I was looking for was somebody to talk to who could understand my need to talk about it.

Ok so gave up on that and decided to try a general group chatting facility. I downloaded meebo a couple of weeks ago and noticed they have group chatting there so off I went. Seeing as I was feeling isolated and alone I decided to join a room called “seek companion” which seemed to make sense at the time.

Now this is where it gets really disturbing, after joining the chat session, I said “hi” and that I was new to this group chatting thing and was just seeing how it worked to which somebody replied “if you can handle and ignore the freaks, perves and bullies you will be doing well” or something to that effect. Ok then, next thing I know I am getting a private message in a seperate window “hi”. Followed by “ASL”. hmmm what does that mean, aha now I remember, Age, sex, location. Well these people don’t waste any time do they. My name is Jamie which is both a boys and girls name, after asking in the general chat area I soon found out that these people just sit there lurking, waiting to see if they can pick up women, after finding out I was a male they had no interest in talking to me. This to me has a lot of parallels to stalking and I found it to be a bit creepy. Anybody who is impressed by this behaviour, sorry i don’t understand.

The really disturbing thing though was when a girl in the general chat area told a story of how after telling somebody she was only 13 was still being hit on, I told her she should be reporting such people, but she said she only blocked the person. This doesn’t really help the next victim though. Others just lie or make a joke about the ASL to throw the perpetrators off. Anyway I felt a bit uncomfortable even just being in the general area with a girl that age who was a stranger,  so I left. (there was an 18+ warning before I entered the chat room, nice to see its being policed properly)

Its a strange world, its ok to break conventional rules of society, like talking to stranger, but it still is not alright to be a dobber. Internet users really need to think harder about this, its ok to block somebody from effecting you personally but wouldn’t it be better to be protecting everybody and not just yourself.

My Internet Concepts Poem

It all started with Tim Berners-Lee

Who gave away his ideas for free,

Open source and freedom is the way to go

But with closed source we’ll make money you know,

So now we need rules about copyright and such

To stop the freedom fighters from enhancing too much,

Businesses and marketers seen potential as well

Though pop-ups and spam created a living hell,

Social networks will be this markets next target

But with fancier  ads they will be smarter about it,

The internets an envirnment we all share and create

Is it public or private is the big debate?

Permenant or ephemeral, well its really both now

They keep a record of everything somewhere, somehow,

Java and ajax created web 2.0 for me

Bridging the invisiblity of difference we do not see,

Going from static to interactive, as it may be

Breaking the barriers of asynchonosity,

A new language created in the form of text

With symbols to indicate the emotions expressed,

We have too much information with robots to sort it

Before it happened, who’d have thought it,

So now we need the semantic web

So the robots understand what we have said.

Group Chat and IRC

Well I finally did the group chat thing. The way the group connected was by starting an instant messaging session and adding other people to form the group. I’m not sure if this is how it is meant to be done or whether we were meant to start a forum and allow anybody to join the conversation for this task, but anyhow it was quite a lot of fun chatting with some of the other students.

IRC seemed to be a group forum that has assigned regulators, so if a participant was becoming offensive or out of line a warning was issued to that person. Seemed that way to me anyway though I don’t really know for sure but that is what I would say is different about IRC messaging from some of the other forms of communication over the internet.