The Next New Thing

It's really hard trying to come up with a new media that does not exist yet. But if I can create anything without thinking about the reality constraints, I would definitely create something that automatically searches the internet for new articles, websites, updates and many more related to your personal likes. It could be called GoLink (a product of Google). It would searches the internet using Google's search engine for new concepts, updates and many more related to your personal likes. For example, you add an music artist like Usher to your personal likes. Google would inform you of any new songs, websites or updates that have the tag Usher in it and send you a email with a link to the website. So you can be informed of any new updates without having to check consistently.

Our Class Wiki - So Far

I'm planning to update and improve the New Media & MMORPG section of our class's wiki. I haven't been able to add anything but I'll should be able to update it somewhat this weekend. I'm planning to update the current sections: History, MMORPGs Vs. Reality, Addiction, Business Opportunities, Gold Farming, and many more with new contents and my own perspective of the topic. I'm also going to add in a new section with information regarding Second Life since that's becoming a major hit in our society.

P2P File Sharing

File Sharing is when you distributes or allow access to electronic information such as software, music, multimedia documents and more. File sharing consists of many methods but P2P File sharing is one of the more common used method to file sharing. P2P File sharing is called Peer to Peer file sharing. P2P File sharing is where a user (peer) make a file available for download for other people. Some examples of P2P File sharing are BitTorrent, Limewire and more. While P2P File sharing is often used to distribute copyrighted materials, many creators and producers are dis-motivated to release their products since they know it will be hosted for download on P2P websites. According to this article "Content producers should take advantage of P2P, not fear it" by Jamie King, director, Steal This Film;s stealthisfilm.com, it motivate creators and producers to not fear P2P but take advantage of it to distributes their ideas and creations. They relate P2P file sharing to how producers and creators distributes their works on a p2p site The Pirate Bay.

Work used:
http://www.nma.co.uk/opinion/content-producers-should-take-advantage-of-p2p-not-fear-it/35925.article

Privacy & Confidentiality

As new media grow, the risk and dangers of privacy loss and confidentiality grow as well. In this case, I will use Facebook as a example of new media which involves the risk and dangers of privacy loss and confidentiality since there are a lot of information users have disclosed on this profile pages. This also linked to my term paper since there's a section of my paper that deal with Facebook and privacy which I will directly copy and paste from my paper.

Facebook indicated in their privacy policy that “Facebook can indeed share your information with other companies for advertising or other purposes.” (Jones 21). However Facebook only have access to information that Facebook’s users have disclosed. According to Information Revelation and Privacy in Online Social Network by Ralph Gross and Alessandro Acquisti:

In general, CMU users of Facebook provide an astonishing amount of information: 90.8% of profiles contain an image, 87.8% of users reveal their birth date, 39.9% list a phone number (including 28.8% of profiles that contain a cellphone number), and 50.8% list their current residence. The majority of users also disclose their dating preferences (male or female), current relationship status (single, married, or in a relationships), political views (from “very liberal” to “very conservative”), and various interests (including music, books, and movies). A large percentage of users (62.9%) that list a relationship status other than single even identify their partner by name and/or link to their Facebook profile. (Gross 75)

Facebook’s users have disclosed an shocking amount of personal information that are at risk from a security breach, hacker break-in and/or even daily Facebook’s users who have stumbled onto your Facebook profile page. At that instance, that individual who have stumbled onto your Facebook profile page would have all the basic information he/she need to build up their background database on you. The individual would know who you are, where you live, when you’re born, how to contact you, who you’re in a relationship in, what are your interests and more. The information Facebook’s users disclosed on their profile page can be at risk for potential stalkers in determining and locating where their victims are located.

Even strangers that you never met before can access your profile page and know where you're located, born, etc. according to the information you disclosed. So in my opinion, as new media grow, so does the lack of privacy and confidentiality. 

Advice to Baruch College

There are several ways to improve Baruch by using new media. One of these ways that I thought would be pretty cool to have is to implement something like Wikipedia/Facebook social network site which can be called BaruchBook where you can add yourself to class network with people who are taking the same class with you. The professors can post up class notes, assignment (something that Blackboard is currently used for), tests dates, and etc. Students can post up study group dates so they can get together and help each other pass the class. BaruchBook can be something like a mix of Wikipedia, Facebook, and BlackBoard.

About My Term Research Paper

My topic is Impact of Facebook from an Educational, Economic and Sociological Perspective. I changed my topic since I sorta went over the boundaries of my old topic regarding privacy. I basically did my research using Google Scholar and Google to search for scholarly and non-scholarly news articles such as new york times. I found several things that are interesting like how Facebook expose you to identity theft. You can easily find out a person first 5 digits of their ssn by knowing where they're born and when they are born. The first 3 digits can be identified by knowing your hometown since each location have their own specific set of ssn (First 3 digits.). The next 2 digits can be known when you give out your birthdate and the last 4 digits are usually used in people's id or passwords.

Creat ivity and New Media

I could say this is the hardest assignment in the whole class! Apparently I just found out trying to be creative is really hard when you don't know what to do. So I decided to go with the easy task and create an avatar on Second Life since I have been itching to do so ever since I heard about it.

To start this off, here's my avatar:

I noticed there really isn't a lot of customize options for you to pick such as changing your hairstyle, facial details, color, and etc. Since I used to play this rpg game called "PerfectWorld" where I can customize every feature of the avatar from the face to the body. PerfectWorld is a massive online role playing game where it is similar to WoW (World of Warcraft) but it's free to play.

My avatar in "WOLF MOUNTAIN SKI RESORT":

Another thing about the graphic that seemed so familiar to me is the fact that there's another RPG called "Runescape" which have similar graphic design to SecondLife.

So far from how I tried SecondLife, I couldn't see what's so popular with this game since visiting places you have never been is great. But I would rather go there in reality and experiences it for myself instead of looking at it through a computer screen.

Creativity

Like what I mentioned in my previous post regarding "Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds", Second life foster creativity since you can create your own second life on their server and you can do whatever you want with your avatar on it. This will lead to people trying out things that they never had a chance to in their real life. Another new media that we used in class is twitter. You may ask how twitter foster creativity? According to "Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers" Twitter are outsourcing the design of the website to its users. So this gives everyone a chance to change Twitter into something they like or prefer. It would lead to new ideas that would satisfy a lot of people since they're the one using it so they know what they want and how they want it.


Work Cited:
 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/technology/internet/26twitter.html

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

          The topic of today's blog is "Virtual Worlds." But before we start talking about virtual worlds, we have to ask ourselves the question "What are Virtual Worlds?" Virtual Worlds are online communities that exist only on the internet. Users can interact with each other on these virtual worlds. These worlds can have a genre of being a game or even to the point of being business related. When I saw this topic of virtual world, I immediately knew what I'm going to write about. I'm going to write about "Second Life" which I have just recently heard of in my cis2200 class. It's amazing on how I only just found out about "Second Life" since it have been out for around 5-6 years and it is popular among everyone. Second Life is a online 3D virtual world where users can interact and socialize with each other. Now it have been developed to the point where businesses are going virtual.
           There are many pros and cons of virtual worlds. Virtual worlds can also foster creativity which I will get to in the next sentence. According to the article, "Toys with a Second Life" by Brian Hindo, companies are making little plush animals that come with codes that activate an online version of the toy in a virtual world. This is an example of how virtual world foster creativity. You would think to yourself, who would spent money on virtual things? Apparently in this case, people do spent money on things that they can't physically touch. This lead to the article, "Going to the virtual office in Second Life" by Mark Tutton, where businesses can have virtual offices. Parmar recently held a meeting with 12 technical leaders from across Europe and Asia by using the new Sametime 3D instead of flying everyone to a central location. This will show the pros of virtual worlds since it allow businesses to save money, time and energy to have international meetings in virtual worlds. However, there are also the negative effect of virtual worlds, since from time to time, we would have these "addicts" that neglect their real life and focus entirely on their virtual life. My friend told me that he read an article that an Asian couple neglected their nine months baby just to be in a cybercafe on Second Life taking care of their virtual baby. Of course, the real nine months baby died due to neglects. It's amazing to see how people can just throw away their real life for a virtual life.


Sources cited:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_53/b4065091329372.htm
http://www.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/11/05/second.life.virtual.collaboration/index.html

Blog about Twitter

In my opinion, I still like posting on BlackBoard discussion board rather than having a Twitter's discussion. Having a discussion on Twitter confuses me, since I can't really directly view the conservation between classmates and join in with my own opinion since I would have no ways to search up what they have been talking about without missing any relevant things. While comparing Twitter to an in-class discussions, I would have to say Twitter is more of one to one while an in-class discussions is one to many.

Social Networking Sites

          The following social networking sites that I will be talking about in this post are Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and Xanga. All of these are social networking sites that were once or still popular among us. In my opinion, Xanga is one of those social networking sites that died. Xanga is a blogging site like bloggers.com. Facebook, Myspace and Twitter on the other hand, are still relatively popular among us. But it seem like Myspace is dying out as well.
          I'll start off with Twitter, Twitter's interface and usability is simple and you can get the up-to-date twitters the moment you log in. I don't particularly like Myspace due to their interface since it's messy and unorganized to Facebook. I guess that's one of the reason why I moved on from Myspace to Facebook. In my opinion, Facebook is so far, the best social networking site out there due to it's simplicity and usability.

Social Networking

          Social Networking is one of the new items that we considers to be a new media. Blogging is not social networking so www.blogger.com is not a social networking site. Social Networking sites are Facebook, Myspace, Twitters, and etc. According to "Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting"

by Frank Langfit, Professional recruiters recruits/scout people using Social Networking.

Maureen Crawford-Hentz is one of those recruiters that scouts recruits for Osram Sylvania. She stated that
"Social networking technology is absolutely the best thing to happen to recruiting — ever." It changed how recruiters scout people in today's era. It improved it to be more efficient and effective than before.
          However one of the benefits to society is that Social networking technologies improved and changed the way recruiters scout people in today's era. It also came with a price. There is a dark side of everything. The dark side of Social networking technologies is privacy loss. According to the article "Who Cares About Facebook Privacy? Students Do" by Marc Perry, students do care about their privacy. According to the researchers, students and other Facebook users manages their privacy setting to an extents. I can imagine that as time passes on, I can see Social networking technologies as a threat to our privacy since pretty soon, we will have sites that can look up all our information with just a click.

Sources used:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6522523&sc=emaf
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/who-cares-about-facebook-privacy-students-do/25877

Blogs vs. Wikis

      Blogs and wikis both play an important role in today's society. They have a part in how people socialize to researching for information. But in order to see the similarities and differences between blogs and wikis, we need to ask ourselves the questions "What is a blog?" and "What is a wiki?" A blog is a type of website where it is run/managed by an individual who can share almost anything on it ranging from their daily activities to informed product reviews. A wiki, according to one of our assigned reading, is a "website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor.^[1][2][3] Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used to create collaborative works."(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki)
     One aspect that blogs and wikis are similar in many ways yet different in many ways is the aspect that they both provides a source of information. However the source of information they both provides are different since a blog which is usually managed by a individual could provide bias or one sided information (i.e. information about politics) while a wiki is managed by a group of individuals so the information provided would be less biased. This lead to the first difference between blogs and wikis, a blog is managed by one person while a wiki is managed by several. Wikis involve a sense of teamwork and collaboration efforts while blogs involve a sense of  forum where other "bloggers" can comment freely on a post and give their true options which can often lead to collaboration. According to a New York Times article "Brooklyn Blog Leads to Drug Raid” by Michael Wilson, "peering turned to blogging, and blogging turned to action, as neighbors started filing complaints with the 68th Precinct station house and attending Community Board 10 meetings and generally making noise until a narcotics investigation began, leading to the arrests." This show an interesting case where blogging can make changes and this case is also the case where blogs can be used as collaboration to voice out and make changes. This lead to our next discussion about the importance of convergence of blogging and wikis in today's networked world.
     Wal-Mart is a fine example of how important blogging is in today's networked world. According to Michael Barbard, author of "Wal-Mart Tastemakers Write Unfiltered Blog", "Their decisions about what makes it onto Wal-Mart’s shelves have enormous impact, earning (or costing) vendors millions of dollars." People's opinion on Wal-Mart's blog can influences which products get placed on the shelves and which don't. It can even change a company's reputation if enough people blog about it. For example, if a group of people start blogging about how bad a company is, then it will eventually affect everyone and the company will lose customers.
     As for wikis, there's a new use that I thought it would be cool if they can create it is a feature that allows users to give out awards to certain wiki members that have achieved a certain task such as posting a important relevant piece of work on wiki. This would certainly increase the amount of editing/contributing on wiki.


Sources used:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/nyregion/26bayridge.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/business/03walmart.html?_r=1

Social Networking: A purposeful loss of privacy.

There's a lot of social networks out there on the internet but in order to narrow down the range of social networks and get a more prescribed view of how social networking can lead to a loss of privacy. I decide to based my research focus on Facebook. Since many of us have a Facebook account or used Facebook at one point of our lives, we noticed groups that people joined that are something similar to "Protect your privacy on Facebook" or "FaceHooked will make you lose your privacy." So there are a loss of privacy regarding Facebook but I will research what kind of privacy that you lose when you're on Facebook and does those privacy affect you deeply.