Creativity and New Media

 

Picture word a thousand word so twitting picture should take over all of those little twits. 

This is a picture of a sleepy dog

Creativity

As new media took over the old media, new ideas are also generated along with the shifting from the old media. Twitter is one example, where it was created for posting short message into a message distribution tool. An article from NYT titled "Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers" also wrote about how twitter has evolved. The idea of changing and adding functions to twitter was mostly generated from its users. The engineer of Twitter outsourced the design to the users rather having all the ideas generated internally. This is important because if something is not able to follow changes or cannot catch up then it will be hard for them to catch up. This is probably one reason why there are many outage around the webs because many new things are being implemented.

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual world is a online virtual community. The largest one i have heard about is Second Life. Second Life's community is so large that it seems like you can find whatever you want there and if there are something you cannot find then you can create it yourself. . This is also one pro about virtual world that we can create something easily and could model anything on there. Users can also use it to do what they wished and fulfill their wishes that cannot done in the real world. But there is also cons about virtual world, there are people that is so addicted to virtual world because of the ideal life it provides. The addiction could cause people to give up the real world and put so much into the virtual world.

Virtual world can also serve different purpose. In the article "Avatar II: The Hospital " from New York Times, universities uses Second Life as a virtual training tools for medical training and education. Instructor can throw in different situation and control virtual patients when teaching students. Another use of virtual world is also exposed in the article where the users can rent what they created in Second Life in exchange of real money. Ramesh Ramloll who is a computer scientist rent out space in Second and also work for client if they wanted to create a virtual environment accordingly. 
Another article from New York Times named "I've Been in That Club, Just Not in Real Life" a virtual Lower East Side where people can live and experience LES without going outside of their house.


Lots of creative idea can be created from virtual since any imagination can be created. I have seen virtual life photography where an artist explore around virtual world and take screenshot.
There isn't a point where I think virtual world is heading to. There is no clear direction of it and there could be many possibilities.  But something I believed is virtual is still virtual and people may have to spent money to use the virtual world service so people may have to come back to real life.

Blog about Twitter

Using Twitter for class discussion is a good idea than using Blackboard's discussion. First I spend some time to get from Baruch College's site to CUNY portal then getting into Blackboard. So doing this will take time and if we are doing discussion we want updates instantly and it is what Twitter can do. Another benefit for Twitter is we can also easily access it on our smartphones which is something causing us willing to check it more. But one thing that is not that great is the limit on Twitter because discussion could required lots of wording.

Social Networking Sites

There are many social networking sites out there and they are all different.

Facebook is probably the most popular one right now among all the sites but some of them may serves different purpose. Facebook actually have great appearance, easy to use, and advertisements that are small. Updates seems to be very often with Facebook, but things are still easy to look around. Facebook changes a lot and keeps on added new stuff like the timeline and developers with Facebook apps.
Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn which deals mostly with businesses professional and jobs seeking. Unlikely to find any social photos like the one in Facebook, people only show bio picture and information about their career. It is easy to browse around too but more ads so a little bit annoying.
Twitter is somewhat different than the others, Twitter users use Twitter to share short messages called tweet and is limited to 140 characters. I think Twitter is annoying if you have lots of tweets or following lots of users because the tweets jam up and it feels like too many to read. One more bad thing about Twitter is many businesses use it to advertise their business and updates so most the tweets is not personally related.
The fourth social networking site is Myspace. I think this one was the worst one out of the four because first it has large and something like a movie clip ads, then there is no uniqueness to the site. Myspace was so popular before but gone down hill after Facebook. I saw how Myspace was before in the old time, but now it is totally different and looks like they copied Facebook's format.

Social Networking

Social networking is most popular online due to the easy access and social demand on networking. One reason of the high popularity is no cost networking.People uses the technology to meet and share with each other, and because of the popularity of these available technology, businesses uses them as a marketing tools.  Except from marketing AT&T uses twitter as a tool to communicate with its customers instantly "and it appears that large companies, such as AT&T, are using the service to keep their customers and anyone interested in the company, informed in real time about a crisis." (AT&T uses Twitter during service outage, by Marguerite Reardon) Another way corporates make use of it is recruiting over the web, which is very popular compared to the old way. "Social networking technology is absolutely the best thing to happen to recruiting — ever." (Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting by Frank Langfitt) The technology had probably killed the job market on newspaper. Now most jobs are posted online and usually the first place individual is screened.

There is also a dark side of these technologies such as online crimes increases and loss of privacy. Online crimes can be cyber bulling, cyber harassing and cyber stalking. The numbers of these cyber crimes increase as more and more users use social networking technology. Loss of privacy is another problem caused by the widely used technology. Many information of individuals can be found online and is open to the public.

These or similar technology would further evolve and take over the society. Sooner or later I think people will start different businesses using the tech for something like instant concierge service.

Blog vs Wikis

Blogs and wikis are two different technologies and tools. In some way they are the same such as sharing information on the web that are published by any individuals. The main purpose of wikis is to have people share information about one topic and every one can be a contributor. Blogs are a tool that the creators share or post what they wished and have the option for visitors to publish comments. 

They are different in how information is contributed, wikis by everyone sharing something and blogs by the creators publishing materials. Both tools are free of charge and the attraction of them are attracted many users around the world. And both of they doesn’t require high level of technology knowledge which were also stated at article from CIO “More on How to build your own Wikipedia.”

 

The way of user collaboration for both wiki and blogs differs. Users can easily edit any information on Wikipedia but that’s not the case for blogs. So wiki is a way easier for user to user’s collaboration. Blogs can too but in a different way, by having user sharing in the comment section.  Wiki also become a tool for collaboration due to its simple system. “How to use Wikis for business” an article from Information Week states “collaboration software that solves all these problems yet,” the problems is addressing the difficulties of information collaboration.