Content Sharing

Lets see if I can concisely sum my learning experience up for this portion of the unit...

There seemed to be a heavy focus (in discussions and I suppose within our materials) on Copyright (C), and the online solution Creative Commons (CC), and I suppose rightfully so. After all the Web has made it incredibly easy to share music, files, images, video and many other 'creative works' - but is this really new?

Going back to the good old days when we bought our music on record or tape. Did we not all tape a copy for a friend at some stage? Even taping music from the radio before it was even released. Isn't this too a form of 'theft'?

Moving to the modern day - radio stations are not allowed to include music tracks in their podcasts, but if we look at dj's who mix and 'mashup' several tracks to effectively create a something reasonably new why is this not ok to share (via podcast) if no one is profiting from it but they are allowed to broadcast it? How and where is the line drawn?

Also has C and CC gone too far? People taking photos of artwork for example and then putting a CC on it. Or C now having the ability to outlive the creator, preventing anyone from using it.

You can't help but wonder that the world has gone mad and that these large corporations that enforce C are just getting greedy - especially if you kind of think in some way that (as our lecturer has pointed out) there is no such thing really as original thought - it is all conceived by things around us that we experience (see, hear, do) that then helps us form the thought coherently, and in some cases express it uniquely.

It is nice to see that mashups are considered within 'fair use' but I think perhaps more needs to bee done to strip large corporations from their power and bring them back on an even playing field. We need a digital revolution to bring everything into the 21st Century (2.0).

Social Networking

How much time do people spend on social networking site? Has it become their main form of interaction with people or does it just nuture their relationships? Prior to taking this unit I was quite alarmed when I realised just how much time people seem to spend on SNS.

My concern is of course skewed as I do not use my mobile phone to send updates to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other site. This might just be because I don't have Apps to make it easy, or because when something does happen (however major or minor) my first thought isn't OMG I have to share this with someone - and quickly!

Take for example last week. I am 95% sure I saw Michael Keating (you know Batman and BeatleJuice) on the street. I know this seems unlikely as I live in Melbourne and one first thought is what is he doing here? Did I not share this because I would feel silly (obviously not otherwise I wouldn't have put it here) or because sharing a post/tweet/status that said "OMG I think I just saw Michael Keating on the cnr of King & Williams st Melb" would not be as meaningful or have the same impact if I had to get back to my laptop at work to share this?

Another one of my gripes with SNS is not only the pressure one feels about accepting (or most often the wish to be able to ignore/reject) friend type requests (of people you know of course). Whether its colleagues wanting to join your LinkedIn network or a friend of a friend (or their boyfriend) making a facebook friend request say no is hard because you see these people in real life. The implications of accepting these 'lose' friendship ties becomes messy if for example your friend breaks up with the boyfriend or if you want to pursue other opportunities through LinkedIn and colleagues or managers have access to that kind of activity.

Funnily enough, when we go back to the carton from our lecture, nobody knows your a dog on the internet, it reminds me how easy it is to forget at times that certain behaviours online can't be hidden from certain people in a network for just that period of time, as you might do in real life. As much as SNS can help as engage more with our friends online it can also put a strain on them if we're not mindful of our actions and how visible they are all the time.

Time to get reflective (and catch up)...

I went on a lovely two week holiday right in the middle of this unit and it has come back to bite me, and now I think its gone all festy and pussy (not as in meow).

The dilemma is that my husband was mortified when he found out that I was taking my laptop on holiday to do my assignment. He convinced me to get an extension (which I did successfully) but now I am more than my two weeks behind (as you can see) as I not only had to write my essay in a week when I returned (and still have no grade on it to help my correct my errors for assignment 3) but I am trying very hard to catch up with my blog and activities/discussions on blackboard without getting much feedback for it (as most people have moved on to the last two topics).

Well after I write my reflections for Content Sharing I'll be up to module 3 and feeling a little better. Then I'll just have 3 modules to catch up on (instead of 5), finish my web presence, write my exegesis and then start on assignment 4 all in just two weeks. And with working full time and having to young kids I am not sure how I will manage but will try my best.

Enough rantings now on time to reflect on 2.4 Content Sharing.

My Wikipedia Entry

For one of our activities in the Wiki week we were asked to edit a Wikipedia entry. Not knowing where to start I decided to play it safe and look up my suburb (as it is still a fairly new estate). So I looked up Roxburgh Park and was pleased to see there was enough missing for me to make a (somewhat) valuable contribution to the page as the page is still classified as a 'Start-Class'. Check out the wikipage here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxburgh_Park,_Victoria.

So it's been over a week and no changes have been made to my edit. There are two obvious reasons for this:

1. no body has alerts set up on the page to review changes quickly and therefor no one has noticed my edits
2. my additions have been seen and deemed worthy enough to appear on the page, but either because I am not a registered user or other reasons, no comments have been made on my changes

I suppose I will check on the page and my edits from time to time to see if anything else changes (either to the page overall or to my contributions) and add comments on this post in the event anything does happen.

WWW - the Wonderful World of Wikis

The world of the wiki has always been very strange to me. Other than having referred to Wikipedia (after all it does tend to appear in the top 5 results when googling) for some general information or definition on a vague topic I have never quite understood them.

I generally find them hard to navigate - I guess I show just how old school I am, preferring to use navigation to relying on a search (which often yield nothing useful) and am extremely surprised to discover that they use their own mark-up language! What is with that? They might say that it is supposed to be easier than HTML and blah blah blah BUT I don't get why (a) you'd want to develop and introduce a new language (I mean HTML wasn't that difficult) and (b) why not just create the software with a WYSIWYG editor???

So to broaden my knowledge I decided to do some reading on the subject. Can you believe that some organisations have decided to go with wiki's in place of a CMS to structure, edit and store online information for reference and collaboration? To me that just seems insane. I can understand wanting to use a wiki as a beginning to storing basic knowledge and IP but as the main method for cataloguing all of this, along with documents and other references I find hard to envisage.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying there could never be such an application for them, it's just that I struggle to understand them and exactly how the work and the benefits they provide given my (very) limited knowledge of them. I have considered researching them further for my second WEB101 assignment to help me understand them more and other possible applications, but am not sure if it will result in a less than desirable score on my paper.

Lecture 5 & the tale of the Blog

I am starting to think, in some ways, that I am not cut for the Web (2.0). A few years ago I set up a FaceBook page so that I could keep in touch with friends. During my years on facebook I never really got into it - all the poking, writing on walls, using it as my main email server etc. It just never happened. In fact the only thing I really enjoyed was posting photos to share with my friends instead of emailing them.

Even today I struggle with social networking outside of my profession. I have a LinkedIN account and I use it regularly as the feeds get sent to me by email and then all I have to do is click on the post that is of interest. I am linking up with others in my profession and actively participate in conversations as well as having posted my own questions to bounce around.

I struggle to find the time to maintain the tools that we have setup for this course and rarely check my facebook account anymore (mostly only when an email is sent to me to confirm a friend or notify an email sent).

I have nothing against any of these tools, but for me personally, unless I am gaining a value I can measure instantly I just can't get into them. It's funny really because we watched the clip of Clay Shirky talk about how much 'free time' we spend watching TV. I was stunned by his figures. Mostly because I don't really have that free time to do such a thing. I watch around 8-10 hours of TV a week, and for at least half of those 8-10hrs I am doing something else (eating dinner with the family, washing dishes, ironing/folding clothes). There are only 2 programs that I sit and watch and do nothing else.

I hate to admit it but I find it hard to have a regular social life, let alone a virtual one. It makes me wonder what is happening to the regular family out there? Is it getting washed out by the wave of Web2.0 and social networking?

... and what is the World Wide Web

Eeeek, I feel like I'm falling behind not having posted a learning reflection for last weeks lecture. I guess there wasn't much to post really. Not that they are new learnings but the most important things I guess I will note here about the WWW are:

• it is known as the Internets public face
• its 'tools' are hypertext, web server, html and a web browser
• URLs makes it easier to remember a pages address and is linked to the IP address of that content

And finally, it was interesting checking out the way back machine. I didn't check out much other than the sites we were asked to look at but I did also enjoy going through their histories from the their first page until the 2000's and it brought back some memories of when it all began. And scarily enough there are still quite a number of those amateur sites out there.