Jesse's New Media Issues Blog

End of Class and What I’ve Learned

Jesse Orona Jr — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 20:39:03 +0000

I think the thing that surprised me the most about the topics we covered in this class is the value of data. After reading and learning more about Google, I see that this mammoth company’s entire worth centers around data mining and I finally started to understand what cloud computing was through the articles about Google. For example in the article “Google and the Wisdom of Clouds” by Stephen Baker helped clarify what a cloud was, “What is Google’s cloud? It’s a network made of hundreds of thousands, or by some estimates 1 million, cheap servers, each not much more powerful than the PCs we have in our homes. It stores staggering amounts of data, including numerous copies of the World Wide Web.” This super computer will never age, the article explains, and will always grow and change. But how Google worked was still a mystery to me.

In the article “Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web” by Steven Lev, Lev explains how Google works through what are called algorithms. Basically they are made up of the data you and I enter into Google’s massive search engine. This data is “mined” and categorized to make sense of what we are searching for and then, in a matter of a tenth of a second, gives us our answers. I think this is so interesting when you compare it to the article, “Toward the Semantic Web” by Larry Hardesty where he explains, “If the current Web is like a giant text file — which you can search for instances of particular words — the Semantic Web would be like a database, where every item of information is categorized, and new queries can combine categories in any imaginable way.” This seems to echo what Steven Lev says in his article about Google, “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,’ Singhal says. ‘People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.’” This sounds so much like the semantic web.

One more thing about cloud computing, I really loved what Doc Searls had to say about it in the Pew article “The future of cloud computing” He said,“Clouds are only as useful as connections permit. And right now the big cloud utilities (notably Google and Amazon) are way ahead of the carriers at imagining how connected computing needs to grow. For most carriers the Internet is still just the third act in a ‘triple play,’ a tertiary service behind telephony and television. Worse, the mobile carriers show little evidence that they understand the need to morph from phone companies to data companies – even with Apple’s iPhone success screaming ‘this is the future’ at them.” I really don’t understand why other companies are not seeing the power of the cloud. It just seems to make so much sense.

One thing in class I wish we could have learned more about is HTML5 because it is the next big thing and, like we learned last night, its really not important for an online journalist to learn a software then say, “Ok, I’m done this is what I’m going to be using forever.” Instead we need to keep a constant eye on what is next and it is obvious that is HTML5. Great class; I learned lots.

The importance of data to the future of journalism.

Jesse Orona Jr — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 20:26:36 +0000

Using skills traditionally thought only for programmers to harness data into meaningful, interactive features for users seemed to be the theme to today’s readings.

Laura Ruel explained in her article, “The Online Journalism Skills that Get Jobs” that skills in programming are becoming vital to online journalists. This article was written in 2008. Today more news agencies have added online content so the skills Ruel tells online journalists like Flash, PHP, HTML, CSS etc are still important now and aren’t going away anytime soon. However, I wonder if Ruel would agree that skills like editing audio and film are not just for online journalists but for journalists period?

Not even the New York Times is immune. Cindy (that is Cindy Royal our instructor for those out there that might not know) wrote a paper about her experiences with the Times during a week she spent with their Interactive News Technology department. What was interesting to me was the emphasis of, “data-driven-interactives”. These dynamic pages use multi-media (audio, video, PHP, links and other interactive features) to present the news to an active audience. Cindy explains that, “Interactions are often non- linear, offering multiple ways a user can navigate through a presentation, which can result in a great amount of time an individual spends with each presentation.” And keeping people engaged on your site is the point.

Research Question

Jesse Orona Jr — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 19:53:58 +0000

After reading the articles, “Googlemania”, “Great wall of Facebook” and “How Twitter will Change the Way We Live.” I’ve really become fascinated with the idea of the extension of the “self” through the lens of social media identity. How much of our “selves” are we giving away on social networking sites? In other words my research question would be how much of our privacy are we willing to give up in creating our social networking identity?

“Facebook and Online Privacy: Attitudes, Behaviors, and Unintended Consequences”, an article by Debatin, Bernhard; Lovejoy, Jennette P.; Horn, Ann-Kathrin; Hughes, Brittany N. in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication have touched on this subject and so I would like to use it in my lit review. As well as, “Disclosure of personal and contact information by young people in social networking sites: An analysis using Facebook™ profiles as an example.” by Taraszow, Tatjana; Aristodemou, Elena; Shitta, Georgina; Laouris, Yiannis; Arsoy, Aysu. in International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics.

What I’d like to do for my methodology is go on Facebook and pick a random section of profiles and record how much personal information I can obtain from them without actually having to friend the person. I will also look up Twitter profiles and Myspace profiles to get an awareness of how comfortable people have become with giving their information away to anyone with a modem. I’ll check hom many profile pictures are of the person themselves or if they use another picture of a cartoon character for example in its place. I’ll check to see how many users give the location of where they live/work, their age and try to determine if it is mostly young people (21 and younger) how freely give up this information or if it is equal across the board. Also, do more men give away their private information then women? Does race play a part.

The Long Tail and Free

Jesse Orona Jr — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:52:31 +0000

In “The Long Tail” Chris Anderson explains the phenomenon created by sites such as NetFlix, Amazon and iTunes that make available songs, movies and books that brick and mortar stores like Wal_Mart would probably not shelve. With the old system a company like Wal-Mart would be very selective as to the cds, dvds and books it would carry in its story due largely to physical space. There thinking was why use up valuable shelf space on merchandise that caters to a small niche market. Instead they stocked merchandise with high sale volume. The article explains that, unlike the brick and mortar stores, virtual stores like Amazon and NetFlix have an infinite amount of space and so can carry the lesser known more niche market merchandise. And they also found, much to the contrary of traditional “hit-driven economics”, that these products sell and sell well.

The next Chris Anderson article “Free” also bucks another traditional business ideology: never give anything away for free. Anderson explains that sites like Google and Facebook give away there product for free and are two of the most successful companies in the world. Google, in fact, doesn’t even advertise yet is a house hold word. The idea behind “Free” is that if you get enough people to look at your site and begin to use it everyday you then get something very valuable in return: data about your user. This data is then mined for advertisers who pay to advertise on these sites. Anderson explains,”Technology is giving companies greater flexibility in how broadly they can define their markets, allowing them more freedom to give away products or services to one set of customers while selling to another set.” He also says, “When Google turned advertising into a software application, a classic services business formerly based on human economics (things get more expensive each year) switched to software economics (things get cheaper). I think these two articles are asking us to reconsider the old model of spending lots of money on adverts on a wide scale hoping to attract the right consumer for our product to a more focused and cheaper “software economics” approach. There is something for everyone and on the web there is space for it too.

Tutorial Video

Jesse Orona Jr — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:17:39 +0000

This video’s production quality is basic but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Instead of spoken instruction, the creator uses typed text to explain what he’s doing and you’re supposed to follow along and create javascript with a text editor. The only sound is classical music dubbed over the video. This video is short (only a little over eight minutes) and there isn’t much happening graphically. You can pause the video or rewind it if you get lost or need to go back to clarify something. This is only one in a series of other videos by the same creator. With over 100,000 hits and several positive comments this video must be helpful to some people. It is successful in that i does what it promises: it offers a very basic intro to javascript.

What’s the next big thing in social media?

Jesse Orona Jr — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 21:08:43 +0000

In the piece by David Carr, Why Twitter Will Endure”, he quotes Steven Johnson as saying, “The history of the Internet suggests that there have been cool Web sites that go in and out of fashion and then there have been open standards that become plumbing,” “Twitter is looking more and more like plumbing, and plumbing is eternal.” But what does that really mean? What exactly is “plumbing”?

Steven Johnson says in his article, “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live”, “…the key elements of the Twitter platform — the follower structure, link sharing, real time searching — will preserver regardless of Twitter’s fortunes…” So does these mean that the elements of Twitter, and not the company itself, will survive? Johnson goes on to call Twitter, “a more efficient supplier of the super-fresh Web than Google.” Super-fresh, coined by John Battelle to mean this very moment, immediate communication. So, this “plumbing” combined with the “super-fresh web” maybe be two elements that future social media may expand on?

In the article, “How Mark Zukerberg Turned Facebook Into the Web’s Hottest Platform” Fred Vogelstein quotes Dustin Moskovitz as saying, “What people really want is one online identity to do all these different things. What users wanted was the long tail of applications.” Zuckerburg opened up Facebook to users to create their own apps thus giving them more control of the use of facebook, a very new concept in the world of media which states that it is the content provider who has all the control. This article also talks about the “social graph” a concept that explains the interrelatedness of those on social networks. So, perhaps, the next big thing will also expand on this potential? So the next big thing will probably have user controlled, immediate communication with both local and global interrelatedness.

How does Google make money? Is this a business model that other media organizations could successfully adopt? Why or why not? What are issues/challenges?

Jesse Orona Jr — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:35:06 +0000

In Fred Vogelstein’s WIred article, “As Google Challenges Viacom and Microsoft, Its CEO Feels Lucky.” Eric Schmidt explains that Google’s largest source of revenue are ads. The article, “Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews profitability.” Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, explains that Google auctions off its ad space to the highest bidder. Google uses a method called AdWords Select which monitors Google’s traffic for clicks. That is it notices what people are searching for and the most popular searches become prime real estate and goes for the most amount. Companies bid on these as slots and the winner pays one penny more then the second highest bid.

According to the article this, “new era…of the datarati” can be used by other companies. This could work as more media organizations are putting their content online. For example hulu can monitor clicks for popular shows and place a premium for ads placed there.

The different ways the concept of interactivity is define. What is your definition of interactivity?

Jesse Orona Jr — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:20:51 +0000

Before reading these papers I didn’t really have a concrete definition of interactivity. If anyone had asked I would have told them that interactivity is how a person uses a technology. For example dialing a number on a phone, searching for a word in a search engine or entering a comment on a news site is what comes to mind. In each instance a person uses a piece of technology (cell phone, computer, search engine etc…) as a tool for communication.

A user interacts with a computer by writing an -mail. That e-mail is sent to other computers till it reaches it intended target and another person opens it and reads it. It goes something like this: User-Computer-Computer-User or multiple users. An idea mentioned in the articles is: Must the technology being used for communication be ubiquitous? As technology moves from a computer sitting on your desk(telepresence) to a small phone you can carry in your pocket and, perhaps in the future, in your clothes or imbedded in your body (called sub-media in one article), can the experience of communicating through a tool truly be called interactive or is it something else? The boundaries become blurred as new media changes.

Another part of the definition of interactivity is the user has control of the technology. For example a person using an online booking site to make a flight reservation. It seems simple enough, the user pushes the buttons till he or she gets the flight they want. But, according to the articles, does the user really have total control. Not really. The sequence of buttons, the number of pages and sequence of steps is determined by the software to guide the user who gives up total control in exchange for the information he or she wants.

I think in the end I pick different pieces from each article to give my definition of interactivity. It is a platform through technology giving its users a simulated communication experience. As technology changes this definition will change also.

Compare and contrast the articles by Bush, Engelbart and McLuhan. What is the central theme of the three pieces?

Jesse Orona Jr — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 20:52:40 +0000

I think the central theme to all three readings is technology as an extension of self and combining human thought into one continuum. That is the ability of technology to take ideas from fragmented pockets of individuals and society and placing it in the hands of the global community. As Vannevar Bush puts it in As We May Think on page two first full paragraph, “Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather that that of an individual.”

Although the three pieces may differ in the details (McLuhan’s assertion that technology is not defined but what it is but what is does in the hands of the individual is one example) all three seem to acknowledge that as technology was getting cheaper to produce, modern society was sure to change from one that was anonymous and industrial (where the individual might feel like just cog in the wheel) to what we have today: a more centered and global community where technology caters to the needs of the individual.

Jesse Orona Jr — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 03:59:39 +0000

Hello world,

Bio: My name is Jesse Orona, Jr. and this is the start of my second year here at Texas State. I live here in SM and for the most part enjoy it. I like to listen to classical music in the car because I’m old and it relaxes me. I grew up mostly in the Rio Grande Valley. For those of you who have no idea where that is just think South Padre Island and you’ve got it. I’ve been on the web since the 90′s but am just now really delving into the creation of sites.

Question: My definition of new media: I once had a disagreement with a professor who explained that the internet was simply a repository for old media. While new media has evolved from past media coupled with new technology (like all media has) it is not a simple dumping ground for traditional media. Of course there is the combination of audio, video and script in new media but that is just its individual parts. It is the users ability to not just passively view, read or listen to the content but to actually interact with it that makes new media what it is. This in turn takes control away from the producer and changes the user’s experience from something linear to something dynamic. It is this interaction between content producer and content user that makes new media evolve into something different then traditional media.