Social Media/ Web 2.0 Response

1). The Amateurish or "homegrown" style that advertisements are trying to emulate today is a prime example of a media "fad". I believe that the drop is professional production levels is a response to the population's realization that technology has developed "user-generated" content. People have become fascinated with the ability to publish and not be professional. The media's job is to appeal to society, and right now, nothing appeals more to the American public than this "homegrown" fad. I believe that professional production levels aren't dropping and won't begin to, but rather, professionals are experimenting with this different approach. Just as the media focused on appealing to user generated sites like Myspace, this new amateurish approach will pass with time. I also believe that user-generated content won't get better necessarily, but perhaps will explore the "homegrown" sytle more deeply.

2). The article I used for the tag comparison was an article about how the use of marijuana by senior citizens goes up as the baby boomer generation continues to age. I felt that some tags that would help define what the article is about include marijuana, baby boomers, retirement, drug laws/politics. However, to my surprise, only one of the tags that i suggested were posted on an online site. Delicious.com used tags like boomers, marijuana, seniors, and USA (in that order) to describe what the article was about. This exercise helped me to realize how the web helps bring peoples different perspectives together. Only one of my suggestions was listed online and i though each of my tags sufficiently described the article. I also learned that if you search for broad tags and then narrow down your search, you are more likely to find the article you are searching for.

Article Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100222/ap_on_re_us/us_seniors_marijuana

3). Transparency is more important to today's culture than it has ever been in our society. In our ever technologically-advancing world, social networking is continuing to become more and more prominent in everyday life. The social-media world was constructed based on people's need to communicate and share ideas through an easy to use and efficient medium. For example, we saw business people using "Real World" avatars in order to conduct business meetings in the Digital Nation video. Without transparency, social networking sites like facebook, myspace, twitter, and youtube would not exist. I feel that transparency is more important online than it is in the offline world TODAY, because our generation grew up with the web and the web will be a prominent component in everyones life in the near future. If transparency didn't exist on the web, it would be much harder for humans to communicate, network, and advance.

Digital Nation Response

The Digital Nation video helps us to realize how advanced our society has become. This new generation of technology has blinded us from seeing how influential it is in every aspect of our culture today. Technology is going on undetected because of the impressive ability it has to converge with simple, everyday tasks. For example, cell phones, cars, GPS, iPhones, and other hand held devices are designed so that its user doesn't have to adapt to the appliance's format. Rather, technology is learning based on us therefor making use feel more natural. I was shocked to see how many businesses use online networking programs in order to communicate and work on projects. It seems as though the telephone has run its course and society is already on its way towards the next step in networking. Its sure to be only a matter of time before everyone has an "avatar" and is making million dollar business deals from the comfort of their own bedroom.

Web 2.0 terms and definitions

User-generated content: reference to types of publicly available media content that are produced by its users. The term was coined in 2005 after arising in web publishing and new media content production circles.

Long-tail: refers to the selling strategy that calls for selling large number of unique items in relatively small quantities over great distances. For example, Netflix and Gamefly use this retailing concept.

Network as Platform: term used to describe operating systems, like WebOS, which provide network services for internet scale distributed computing.

Folksonomy: is a system of classification used for managing tags to annotate and categorize content as part of social software applications such as social bookmarking and photograph annotation.

Syndication: the ability to access information on website from multiple other sites. Web syndication helps networking by making web feeds available from a site in order to provide other people with a summary of the website's recently added content

Mass collaboration: is a form of collective action that occurs when large numbers of people work independently on a single project. Such projects typically take place on the internet using social software and computer-supported collaboration tools such as wiki technologies, which provide a potentially infinite hypertextual substrate within which the collaboration may be situated.

Computer-supported collaboration: focuses on technology that affects groups, organizations, communities and societies, e.g., voice mail and text chat.

Social-Software: encompasses a range of software systems that allow users to interact and share data. This computer-mediated communication has become very popular with social sites like MySpace and Facebook, media sites like Flickr and YouTube as well as commercial sites like Amazon.com and eBay.

Web hosting services: is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own or lease for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center.

content v. message in mediums collage

The focus of my collage is the Apple iPad. The iPad is a tablet computer developed by Apple Inc. Similar in function to an iPod Touch with four times the display area, it will allow multi-touch interaction with print, video, photos, and audio; connect to the internet via Wi-Fi and, on certain models, 3G, and will run apps designed specifically for the iPad as well as most iPhone OS apps. My collage depicts an iPad encompassing all the aspects of everyday like that the iPad efficiently and conveniently delivers in the form of one new medium.

Content vs. Message in mediums

1. RealD Cinema
-Content: digital stereoscopic projection technology, video
-Message: delivery of left and right eye perspectives with complete accuracy, next step in cinema technology.
















2. Satellite Radio
-Content: digital radio signals that broadcast by a communications satellite. audio. Many genre options.
-Message: Much wider range than terrestrial radio. powerful alternative to ground-based radio services, listeners can listen to the same program while traveling across the country.

















3. iPad
-Content: tablet computer, print, audio, video, internet
-message: take it anywhere, convenience, busy tasks complied into a single easy to use medium.