Blogging Journal Day 1

For my fourth essay on blogging, I will observe a blogging site called Profootballtalk.com . I wanted to observe a sight would increasingly pickup momentum in the volume of blogs throughout the week. I surely figure that viewing blogs from Thursday through Saturday would depict growing conflicts in arguments between rival fans, right up till Sunday. Monday, depending on game outcomes, would show changes of opinion and attitudes by some. Being well informed and interested in football news would also give me opportunities to write better blogs.

I chose profootballtalk.com for a few reasons. One, it has been around for 5 years now, and is notably rising in popularity, accredited my many prominent sports columnists from Sports Illustrated.com and ESPN.com. The second reason to use this particular sight is that it is not affiliated with the National Football League itself. The sites creator, main editor and contributor is Mike Florio, a lawyer and former employee of ESPN.com, who claims to hate all NFL teams equally. The sight acts as a watchdog for the NFL, keeping an eye out and reporting on players or incorrect, biased stories written by journalists and media outlets. There’s even a section on the site called ‘turd watch’, which tracks any and all arrests or misconduct from any employees of the NFL whether it be players, coaches, or front office employees. Florio often plugs the site on Radio and Sports television shows, conducts live blogs for games on Sunday, and often gets contributions to the site from former NFL affiliates.

The sight is updated with news stories often, everyday, at least during the season. And all reported stories quickly are commented on by multiple users. The one problem I have with the sight is the comments of the users themselves. Often short reaction blogs from relatively uneducated writers giving their simple non-argumentative opinion on whatever Mike Florio posts. So it appears I will have to be the Pariah of the site, and start some of the controversy myself. I will post a blog on an upcoming story and will write it such that it is sure to stick in at least one user’s craw, and they will hopefully lash back. Go Jets/Giants!

Wed. Oct 29 Barlow Ch. 2

A lot about the world of blogging, and bloggers themselves, is expressed in Barlow’s chapter 2 of blogging America. The many themes in this chapter include a bloggers struggle for acceptance in the growing cyber world, and the different views that bloggers take on the theory of what they do. He also discusses woman bloggers, issues of anonymity and plagiarism, and possible dangers and threats that a bloggers faces. Right off the bat in this chapter Barlow quotes Andrew Keen, and the opinion he shares with many netizens that blogs are “collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture…… undermining our sense of what is true and what is false, what is real and what is imaginary.”(Pg 35)

Faced with the struggle that it is easy and anybody can do it, leading more often than not to biased, uneducated opinionated editorials from non-relevant sources, bloggers regularly find it difficult to be taken seriously by a population of cyber people who either share opposite perspective, or just lack knowledge about them.

However it is not always unjust when blogging is looked down upon. After all, the very idea of blogging is to opinionate on a topic of discussion geared towards 2 audiences, those who agree and those who disagree. So the fact that some bloggers such as Kathy Sierra have had critics go as far as to threaten her life often she wrote on controversial issues isn’t overwhelmingly surprising. However, this very incident that Barlow discusses is a prime example of why the way a blogger shapes his argument could be looked down upon. There’s little talk about the words and content that Kathy Sierra or Chris Clark spoke out about, which very well could have been colorful or aggressive enough to be lashed back it with not death threats, but at least cognitive defense.

Then again, a threat, no matter how dangerous, is in a sense one of the benefits of blogging, in that response and communication among readers and authors is encouraged. Even the differing views from Clark and Moulitsas, whether or not blogging itself is a real world or cyber world practice, doesn’t change the fact that they are still part of the same community of free thinkers and intellectuals. Overall, bloggers should encourage response, criticism, backlash, and all other form of exposure like you would in any other practice. And with over 75 million tracked on the net, there’s no end in sight for this new news medium.

Third Essay: Researching Podcasts

For this essay, I chose the Web 2.0 communication Medium of Pod-casts as my research topic. Pod-casts are a dynamic form of Web 2.0 technology and capability, and very much reflect the growing world of digital convergence. How did I find information on them? Like all college students doing research on the web, I started at the questionable information haven, Wikipedia, to find out what a Podcast is by definition. Learning that a pod-cast is simply the audio or video media that are put up on the web and made available for download onto personal computers, if I can then go out onto the world wild web and confirm the very info given by Wikipedia, I could then accept it as credible. But that alone won’t help me write my final essay, and ill have to get some firsthand experience with Podcasts themselves.
This is a newer technology, so when I went to the search engines, like Com-Abstracts made available through the University at Albany’s libraries, I didn’t find many scholarly journals or works that were helpful. So to find out the benefits and usefulness of pod-casts, and why they are so popular, I found it best to go directly to places which offer them through subscription or free download by the thousands. I went to Google and typed the word ‘Podcast’ into the search engine, which brought me to helpful sites. Podcast.com, Podcastalley.com, NPR's (National Public Radio) database, and of coarse Apple.com all gave good clarification for what Pod-casts are, how they work, the software you need in order to download them, the information you give in order to subscribe to the websites, and of course, the content that make up most Pod-casts. Some of these websites even pulled there definitions on the about page from Wikipedia, so I felt even better about that being my starting point.
After Google, I went to browse over the content on the Yahoo search engine. Kaye and Medoff refer to Yahoo in their 2001 reading on ‘how search engines work’ as “The mother of all portals” (pg. 2). So I found it necessary to compare the Google and Yahoo searches and see which links came up first in both. If certain links show up twice within the first or second page unsponsored, I know I could consider them credible and resourceful. Sure enough, the links to Podcast Alley, Podcast dot, and Apple were all on the top search results for both sites, along with podcast links for Slate Magazine and the New York Times which I just haven’t used. In the final essay, I plan to discuss how the amount of podcasted content continues to grow by the thousands every day. To explain or confirm the growth, I visited the sites of major news stations which are now offering new Pod-casts daily, like CNN, MSNBC, ESPN, and CBS. I’m citing the web-page, Chinesepod.com as a useful recourse in showing how pod-casting can be educational, offering over 1500 language lessons on how to speak Chinese. The last website I visited for pod-casting news was ironically, PodcastingNews.
The only problem I ran into during my research was when I wanted to find sights or articles that gave information on the history of Pod-casts. When I went to search engines like Google, and typed in the words ‘Podcast’ and ‘History’, the first link to come up was the History Channels web page, and their available pod-casts. All the links below it for the first two pages were similar history sites, which were simply offering them, rather then sights offering the history of them. In the later point in my searching, I began using Ebsco, my last hope for finding some scholarly analysis on Podcasting. Instead of finding a journal of some kind, here I found something I think is better. This article published by author Scott Sigler, who after 100 rejections by publishers was able to podcast his novel to popularity, receiving a 3 book contract from Crown Publishers. This article not only gave insight to what podcasting can do for exposure in the online community, but the positive and negative affects it could possibly have on other forms of media and entertainment.
At this point, I feel that I have enough knowledge on the technology that I can successfully give an accurate and thorough description of the medium with clarity and quality for the final essay. I’ll be able to state the positive and negative implications of the Medium, and ill form my own opinions and thesis on podcasts based on credible sources. I’m actually looking forward to shedding light some light on them.

October 15 Searching - Issues of Privacy

Micheal Zimmers article on Searching and the issues of privacy deal mainly with the emergence of the web 2.0 phenomenon that has caught on within the last decade or so. With this phenomenon, comes the possiblities of web searching more, efficiant, personalized, and relevant. As Zimmer states in the introduction, the function of Web 2.0 is to "organize and share information, to interact within communities, and to express oneself. In an attempt to make web searching for each an every user more efficiant, whoever be it has had the users of the web be activly monitered throught the web. The idea of a perfect search engine, which would delever results to us besed on our own past searches and general browsing history, has in turn taken away from us alot of privacy, and a little bit of freedom.
These are the advantages and the flaws of the "Search 2.0" concept. There is a fine line between what the web would call "Personal Information Flows", and what i would call, a stalker, tracking my personal online and search behavior. In a sence, i do fully understand the benefits of being monitored. In the case of catching a murderer by surveiling the beb sights he has visited, or a pedofile, or a terrorist, its hard to make a case against it. But then hearing the the governemnt ordered google to turn over the records of millions of their users search queries, and knowing theres an easy chance on of those users was me, these search engines become intimidating and questionable. Overall thought, i feel that it is a users responsibility to conduct his or herself in an appropriate, even proffesional manner when using the web. I think that most people are candid in the way they conduct themselves online. And a company has every right to use the tools at their disposal for making hiring decisions, including googleing your name to see who you really are. I know that for me personally, i dont have any scandelous pictures, or opinionated blogs out there on the web. Ive been hesitant to show myself doing anything stupid on facebook after i heard that a college refused to give a girl her degree after graduating due to how she showed she was conducting herself via Facebook. Every user is responsible for their web activity, and if you truly have nothing to hide, the concept of search 2.0 wouldnt not bother you.

The Early Internet - Usenet

It would be an understatement to say that communication on the internet has come a long way in that last 30 years. Going back to the early days of the Usenet, internet communication has gone from a privilege to some, to a norm for all. With that inevitable change of guard due to digital convergence and massive technological expansion over the last 2 decades, there is no doubt that as internet communication expands and changes, so do the actions, values, and tendencies of the net users. MUD’s IRC’s Usenet Emails and other forms of pre-web internet communication faced problematic endeavors for the users often when some of them would engage in their own personal geared discussions. However, today, with the limitless amount of volume that’s persistent on the web, and the freedom to surf it so widely on almost any topic imaginable, it is my belief that the Free Rider issue is no longer the problem it was for Pre Web users.

The Usenet, born in 1979, is one of the original communication systems mediated through the internet. The Usenet was an online bulletin board consisting of a few hundred discussion groups, or newsgroups. A few hundred groups would become a few thousand. Today, it’s hard to monitor how many discussion groups available not only through the Usenet, but all across the web. The Free riding issue faced by early Usenet users was much more of an inconvenience to the internet community. Kullock and Smith(1996) explain in their article ‘Managing the virtual commons’ that Boundary and bandwidth restrictions would have a direct effect on each user of the group, by the Free Riders of the group (Pg. 116). Meaning they would be argumentative and opinionated in their retorts, ask unrelated questions or post unrelated news and information, and pretty much have a problem staying on the topics of conversation. Today, although the ever growing population of web users and web pages creates more nonsensical material on the net, it also becomes easier to ignore and neglect all the bull.

Taking for instance the Usenet group I monitored and observed this past week, Alt.movies.Kubrick, part of the Google groups chat forum, available through Usenet. A discussion group dedicated to the fans of film director Stanley Kubrick. I chose this thinking it would be hard to be off topic in this group. I mean it’s one man, his life, and the movies he made. As it turns out people can get way off topic with just about anything anywhere. About 50 percent of the messages that had been posted within the last 2 months dealt mainly with the political campaigns going on at this time. For every Kubrick based discussion post that was put up, there were 2 or 3 posts that were nothing more than links to news clips about Barrack Obama with a heading saying, “Check this out”, or “Obama for President”. Some take the Free Riding a step further from non-related political posts to straight spam. One that sticks out is a string of Photo-shopped pictures of John McCain. One with a funny mustache, one with lipstick and mascara, and my personal favorite, a monkey standing on his shoulders excreting onto the presidential candidates bald head.

The reoccurring messages of nonrelated topics were inconveniencing, sometimes ridiculous, but most of all, made the group seem non-legitamate and unprofessional. The catch to all of this is that all of the posts that aren’t related were ignored by all other consistent users. Nobody commented on the John McCain photos, or on ‘Bill Reid’ and his biweekly broker’s column he leaves, or on the rest of the non-Kubrick related conversation. Then, you can look and see a string of 14 messages on the post about a possible Spartacus remake, or a string of 10 messages on the discussion post about the death of film-maker, Michelangelo Antonioni.

One Free Rider, aka ‘StalePie’ proved my theory just this evening. StalePie has been leaving garbage on this site for over a month. The earliest I found was an uncommented on August 29 post ripping on Colonel Pat White. Another was a September 2^nd message where he or she wrote a big paragraph consisting of one sentence, “The body of your message must contain some text”, over and over again. Trying to make a humorous reference to The Shining’s “All work and no play makes Jack a full boy”, which nobody else found funny either. Another September 18^th post has the message heading, “Bad time to fart”, with a You-tube link underneath, which got no responses. Finally today, the 23^rd, StalePie left a post saying “Don’t want to post here anymore..Bye..”

Even with the persisting junk that this Free Rider, and others will leave on the site, this didn’t stop ‘DC’, ‘Harry Bailey’, ‘Ichorwhip’, ‘Wordsmith’, and others from engaging in educated message strings that were informative on the topic of Stanley Kubrick and other events going on in the world of cinema. Sometimes the junk just can’t be avoided but it can always be discarded. A Free Rider is easy to spot and easily ignorable. It says a lot about somebody’s personality to be so off base all the time. A free rider by being so rebellious is to me, trying to show their versatility and their ability to be resourceful in multiple fields of discussion, when in truth it has the opposite effect of seeming lazy, uneducated, and unwilling to participate and coordinate with the community at hand. Internet is supposed to be, a cyber community where those who wish to participate accordingly and properly can and will. If you don’t wish to do so, talk to the mouse.

Kullock and Smith (1996) Managing the virtual commons: Cooperation and conflict in computer communities pg. 109-128

http:/groups.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46854

Sept 23 journal post

Interesting events transpired today on Alt.movies.kubrick. One of the groups leading spammers chose to resign from their free riding position within this branch of the google groups network due to lack of feedback from fellow net users. Translation: Nobody responded to all the ridiculous material that this fool was leaving on the discussion board and they have chose to bother somebody else. This user by the name of 'StalePie' would leave constant links to funny YouTube videos, post photoshopped images of Presidental candidates, or just consatntly try to start a discussion about something off base that nobody wanted any part of. After about 10 posts with no message strings, StalePie left he or she's last post today saying "Dont want to post here anymore..Bye..." In loving memory of StalePie (August 13th - September 23) Thank you for confirming my thesis, its greatly appreciated.

September 21 journal entry

Okay. So i wasnt able to even get onto my google group chat that i was observing for about 2 days. I would type in alt.movies.kubrick like normal, but all i would get were old post from august about possible moderation to the chat group. I couldnt tell if this was a sign or something that the group was under construction, or if it was terminated altogether. Now, its sunday, and im able to get back into the group. Their are discussions posted from even today. But now, i cant find the old discussion that i wrote about on my first day of journal entries. Very weird stuff. Anyhow, their is some tension picking up between people within one conversation. Its dealing with the ideas of wheather or not Stanley Kubrick was a post-modern filmmaker and wheather or not he negleted to relate with humanity in his films. You may not know what im talking about, but to me it all makes sense. What i find interesting about the chat is that this person MP, who spends alot of time on this chat and who i beleive to be a female, seems to be a persistant antagonist to whatever anybody says about anything. To the point where i want to chime in and tell this person that they dont know EVERYTHING, and that its not nessecary to negate and critisize every single comment or opinion somebody offers to the discussion.
Another interesting post was somebody leaving a little tid-bit of information on the death of Michaelangelo Antoinini and how he elegedly starved himself to death. This opened up the floodgates to a highly morally geared convo about wheather or not death at a late age is even a sad thing. I personally know one thing from this site, and its that i would not get along with any of the people who take such an active part in this group. It not only bothers me, the amount of care and searching they do for topics non-related to Stanley Kubrick, but they all have a reall smug sense of arogance for being able to show off what they know about ohhhh Antoinini's suicide. Get a pet to take care of....