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| It has begun - Friday, January 21, 2005 at 10:26 p.m. |
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After reading one of Amanda neechan's many posts, I thought that I might as well give my brief social software biography.
At first there was nothing, and then there was light. That light came from within a pokeball...
Well, I first joined chat rooms when I was around 9 years old. However, there came a 2-4 years hiatus on that and I did not return until I was 12/13. When I did return, my former chat room of choice (freezone.com) didn't exist anymore. It didn't slow me down much as I went on to explore other sites and, powered by my undying love for pocket monsters, I stumbled upon a basic java chat room off the pokemasters.com site. I made lots of friends and eventually helped out with site, both in the chat rooms and the message forums.
This was my first time using message forums and I loved it. It was like a slow motion chat, no longer did I have to stay up late if I wanted to talk to my friends in Europe. I would simply chat with them on the forum and others may comment as well and I could ignore them if I liked. It was ideal. Even though pokemasters eventually shut down, my love for forums continued...I joined those for gamewinners.com, megatokyo.com, etc. No matter what the main focus of the site is, the discussions in the forums are always widespread. There are talks about philosophy, interests in anime, even complete chess games are played on forums.
Recently however, with the development of blogs, activities on forums have slowed. Even I have abandoned the forums and left to pursue other interests. Currently I am co-heading a spoof ring on xanga where all members have the passwords to all the other spoofs blogs and can spoof anyone's real blog or even themselves. For example Moses of Hanes is a spoof of Rose of Pain.
From one kind of online community I have moved to join another. I have decided to follow the social software of online communities. However, because many things fall under this category, I have decided to limit myself to communities that utilize the karma system. To me, this feels like the next logical step up. It integrates the concepts of both forums and blogging. There is the sense of wholeness that forums give, you do not have to hunt around for various blogs that might interest you. The system is basically like a blog where anyone can post and anyone can comment. In order to keep chaos in control, commentors can grant positive or negative karma points that would affect the poster's status within the community. This has a few effects:
1. It encourages quality posting
2. Most people post links to interesting finds and this allows other quality sites to get exposure
3. Need to know news and other current events are posted quickly since posters would be fighting for karma points.
4. Allows good "citizens" to have more power in the community (such as having more influencing in granting karma or even mod powers)
A quick example of a simple karma system site would be Slashdot however an even better site to see karma in action is SE A word of warning, however, the contents of SE is considered to be quite dodgey. However, I've been following the site for the past week or so now and the porn to interesting stuff ratio seems to be at about 1:5...so there are lots of interesting things to be seen there.
Next post: I'll do some research and see how the karma system evolved. Hopefully my findings will support my hypothesis that this is the next logical step from blogs and forums.
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Cheers,
MrScaryMuffin |
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| Blogs=New Media? - Thursday, January 13, 2005 at 9:24 p.m. |
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Just a quick thought that I wanted to get down before I lose it in my sleep time.
Richard discussed in class on how new media is the media that allows two way communication. As the more astute viewer may have noticed, I've changed my template into one that resembles the infamous Yahoo! index page. There are a few tweaks, such as the "Murray is the Board Game God" comment above, my picture on the sidebar and my complimentary dancing bear to drive our professor crazy. The big problem that I'm having with this template, one that is proving difficult to remedy, is that the ability for you guys to comment is gone! I'm still messing around with the original source code (which can be found here btw...) and hopefully I can get it up and running soon.
Without the comments however, this blog quickly loses its claim as two way communication medium. However, continuing on with this logic will bring us to the hypothetical situation of an anti-social blogger who chooses to prevent all his viewers from commenting. Can, then, blogs truly be new media?
While you're thinking about that, realize that I'm treating blogs as a medium that hovers in the unknown region between one and two way communication media. However, if we were to look at a social software, such as MSN Messenger, we can see that it is definitely a two way communication medium. By using the fun fun gadgets available on various websites (such as Mess.be) a situation may arise where User A can block User B on his list and effectively prevent User B from talking to User A while still talking to User B by unblocking User B long enough to send a message and then immidiately reblocking him (or her). While a normal human may not be fast enough to do all the blocking and unblocking required before User B talks back, a program would easily stop User B from talking and another one-way conversation appears.
I'm not sure how all this is relevant, nor am I certain that I have the correct grasp of what is "new media." I shall pore over our text and return to this topic again in the future when I am a bit more knowledgable.
EDIT: It took me a few hours and a lot of guessing and checking, but comments are now working ^_^ *Phew* this template needed to be tweeked a lot! Hopefully that's the end all...
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Cheers,
MrScaryMuffin |
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| A Journey of a Thousand Miles... - Tuesday, January 11, 2005 at 5:17 p.m. |
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A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. This saying actually refers to the old Silk Road back in the day when Chinese traders would travel to Europe to sell silk, something that the pale faces had never seen before. It makes me wonder...how would (or how has) new media affect this saying? No longer will we have to embark on ridiculously long quests just to make our daily living. Instead, we'll be able to conduct our businesses and trades online...
A Blog of a thousand words begins with one click (the click on "create post" I suppose).
And here I am. Lovely dovely, all shampoozey.
Just to get this off my chest, here is my first email to our Prof. Richard Smith. It's assignment zero! (Which I had fondly saved under the title of "asszero")
Hi Richard, My name is Murray, I'm in second year and aiming to get a double major in cmns and business. Besides the fact that this course is required for my major, I've heard nothing but good things about you and your course and I am really looking forward to attending it this semester. I am an avid web user, having my own blog (www.xanga.com/mrscarymuffin), a few sites and even a webcomic that flopped miserably (doesn't everyone have one of those?). I am not afraid to say "LOL" in real life, except more often than not I say it with sarcasm with intent to hurt the feelings of a bigger computer geek than myself (avoiding the urge to put a smiley face here). My answers to the scavenger hunt questions: 1. You have two dogs, though what breed and gender alludes me at the moment. My psychic abilities are seriously lacking. Myself, I have no pets. Instead, I am the pet of a wonderful girl whom I adore. 2. elive works great for me. This system looks awesome, I am already accustomed to online chat programs such as ventrilo (used mostly for gamers). I might be tempted to go home early and just listen onto the class from home, but I have classes after this. However, i will definitely be using this to help me study. 3. I use MSN daily and AIM occasionally to talk to my american acquaintances. I usually socialize but occasionally I have net meetings with friends to study or do projects. I have an awesome gmail account that I used frequently last semester when my girlfriend was in Soctland. I'm part of several message forums that talk about various subjects. I do not, however, like meeting random people online (and thus I do not use friendster nor its ilk) and I only share pictures with my friends. It kind of makes me edgy if I know that strangers can see what I look like. 4. My parents force me to carry a cell phone around though I prefer not to. I much rather be disconnected from the world sometimes and it is hard to do so when one is obligated to have a cellphone on 24/7. I use the fido to fido plan and I only text to my friends that also has a fido plan (so not too frequently). I never really got into the photophone craze and I use an older phone because it is lighter than camera phones. 5. I am such a geek, I scored all 3s on the test (joy). It is interesting as my greatest fear about IT is hardware...I have no idea how fast my computer is nor what cards are installed in it. My uses for the internet are merely for purposes of pleasure. I know that there are bigger geeks than I, but I suppose that I'm still quite the geek (t3h g33| Thanks for taking the time to read this, I tend to rant now and then and I hope that I have managed to stay mainly focused. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not too cheesy I pray. Anyways, I'm spent. First blog done, over and out.
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Cheers,
MrScaryMuffin |
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