Twitter Nation: Nobody cares what you're doing
Then again, if you don't get it, that must mean you're totally too old

HAHAHAHAHA I love the title of the article so much I didn't bother to read it.

"Or blame Paris Hilton. She's always good in a pinch. Twitter, then, is the latest evidence of the Paris Hiltoning of America. Twitter is always on, always looked at, and at a 140 character limit, doesn't have the capacity to be either deep or meaningful.

Oh well. Who gets hurt?"

- HAHAHa

I thought this article from the Wall Street Journal was interesting. It talks about a couple of different approaches to spreading Wi-Fi out for free. Some cities and communities, such as San Francisco, are trying to offer Wi-Fi for free to everyone. Other companies, such as Time Warner Cable, are trying to create a social network of Wi-Fi users to profit off of. The writer of the article does not give a clear answer to which technology will work best, he just says some combination of them will definately give everyone wireless access in the coming years.

As you guys may or may not know, Digg had a prominent article this morning that revealed a hack of HD-DVD players that allowed people to take the film off of the cd. At this point in time, every article on the digg main page has to do with the hack, except from a different angle. Apparently, Diggs coverage of the hack ticked off some important people in the copyright business. Now digg is reporting that they have to remove every entry that eludes to the hack. I thought it was pretty awesome that the articles on digg mustered over 10,000 diggs, which means that the hack must have been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people (I am just making up numbers, but I bet they are reasonably close.).

I came into this class thinking I would learn about new forms of video editing and modern art, but on the first day I had a radical paradigm shift. As I learned, New Media has very little to do with traditional media or artwork. The first assignment, as we all know, was to write a blog post on something, anything. I, being the constant cynic, blogged about the uselessness of blogging. I could not wrap my mind around the idea that people could blog for fun; it felt disconnecting and meaningless. However, my prejudices were quickly swayed as I dove head first into the blogosphere. While I still don't consider myself an avid blogger (I only blog for the class), I have come to understand what is so special about blogging, it is, in fact, the community. I still can't quite understand why people would create their own blog that nobody reads, but knowing that our blog leads to a discussion amongst peers and friends seems extremely pertinent and important. Much like facebook, I live in the community I comment about and that's where I derive the drive to post and connect with others.

Everyone has to deal with spam and other online nuisances, but with the advent of Ad-Aware and SpyBot adware and spyware are not nearly the problem they were, say, ten to fifteen years ago. This new bill attempts to standardize the penalties of adware, spywae, spambots, and other forms of annoying, malicious software spread by certain people and web pages. I can remember back when my family first got computers we would always have a millions pop-ups all the time because of all the spyware, but it seems to have been more or less neutralized over the past decade to the point where I don't even think about it anymore.

Crazy Enough, I believe it is time for you to check your wiki...

Professor F mentioned in passing today that when someone tweaks a new media technology to use for a different purpose it revolutionizes that medium in some way. Well, wikipedia received that kind of tweak during the VT shooting. While it stayed true to its roots (no one posted original material) it became the spot to get up to date information on what was happening at VT. The article pertaining to the shooting had over 2,000 editors working on it and over 140 footnotes. It received, on average, 4 hits a second for the three days following the shootings. Imagine a newspaper with over 2,00 editors being updated constantly. Off course, because nothing is original material, the newspaper would not be quite as up to date as the newspaper the editors got the info from, but it differently consolidates all the information into one, easy to find place.

Let me start off by saying I just posted, and I quote, "the high throne of porn...", I don't know, I thought that was pretty impressive.

Anywho, Porn is now LESS and LESS popular on the Internet. The Economist article goes on to say that social networking sites, i.e. myspace and facebook, are now getting the bulk of the hits from internet users. While the Avenue Q song The Internet is Made For Porn may have had it right, web 2.0 is made for high school and college students.

Just as a side note, it is slightly interesting that none of the articles we have read this year deal with porn in any way shape or form.

If I signed on under someone else's alias and posted something, would I be that person?

Just wondering. I was reading the "text message alert" post and it kind of dawned on me when I saw three other people on the site with me. If no one knows your a dog, how do you know its not me on as you???

Apparently some crazy lawyer guy wanted to create a link between virtual reality shooting games and the Virgina Tech shooting that happened today. I am pretty sure I read somewhere that people have a very easy time telling the difference between video games and reality, and that there is little to no correlation between violent video games and violence in reality. But, it's interesting to see technophobia out there blasting away video games.

On a different note, I heard about the shooting through Digg, not some major source, like the nytimes. The death toll is actually being updated more quickly on digg than it has been on the nytimes. People with a lot of spare time on their hands can make things happen quickly.