The Topic of My Discussion

The Topic of my Group (Myself, Mr. Monday & Mr. Finch) is online communities in the gaming world. Basically there are three types of online communities in the gaming world, Real Time Strategy Games (Command & Conquer), First Person Shooters (Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2) and Role Playing Games (World of Warcraft). You talk to people....you interact....you trade.....it's modified social networking for the gaming world. In our presentation we explored all of these different aspects and talked about the negatives and positives that surround Online Gaming Communities.

A visit from Erik Hanberg

Erik Hanberg, an author, Chairman of City Club Tacoma and Entrepanuer, gave a visti to our class and spoke on a number of topics surrounding business.....specifically e - business. Erik has written several books, one in which is gaining some pretty good internet traffic through. He spoke to us mainly about the volitale climate and great reward from starting your own company. Basically.....you may miss on your first nine books or first 4 companies or first 229 ideas.....but then the 230th ends up exploding, generating millions of dollars. Thats rough. I guess you never really realize the plight of someone who works for themselves until they let you know first hand.

Convergence

The term "convergence" refers to the synergystic overlapping of different technologies. The concept of convergence will be 100% foreign in the next years to come, simply because the trend will be the common standard (as it pretty much is now). The iphone for example does not only provide voice communication but also visual data via text and it is a functional web browser. A third dimension is also added with the social networking boom, as today's cellular devices retain the ability to keep the user connected to the web 24/7. Cell phones are probably one of the more obvious examples of convergence but there are many many more. All of the current Video game consoles, PS3, Xbox360 and the Nintendo Wii all provide web browsing capabilities, voice and social networking while holding the primary function of gaming entertainment. Current model automobiles offer GPS navigation, MP3 players and hands free communication via bluetooth giving the car voice capability. The future of convergence is limitless to say the least......so limitless in fact, as I stated earlier...pretty soon the term in itself will be obsolete.

The Scavenger Hunt

The Scavenger Hunt Exercise that I was afforded the opportunity to do last Wendnesday was interesting to say the least. Upon beginning the exercise I was under the impression that it wouldn't be thhhhaaaaaat difficult or Thhhhhhhat time consuming.......My assumptions were incorrect for the most part. On Wednesday I realized there is so much on the web.....within the web.....surrounding the web...that I am not familiar with. A common thread within the class is that since we are collectivley a generation that has grown up with/evolved with the internet..... And I think sometimes my generation takes that for granted. Naturally the internet grows/moves faster than we do, So there is so much ever changing content out there that I simply am just not aware of right now. Twitterfall!?!? I mean come on......This time last year twitter itself wasn't even nearly as popular as it is now.....and there are already sites that piggyback on it's fame. Or search clouds....If anyone has used the internet in the past year or so....I guarantee you have seen and probably used a link on a search cloud.....however if you are like me.....You may not understand the whole concept behind it, or for that matter even know what one is called when you see it.

A Visit from Mark Briggs

Mark Briggs impressed me. I mean........ what an adaptive entrepanuer. Through his business ventures he has managed to position himself right in between the death of the modern newspaper and the possible takeover of online media. His company Serra Media & thier premier product Newsgarden focuses on the niche of local media. The position that mark has is that people want to know what is going on where they are. The only reason why people even still buy newspapers off of the stand is to stay in touch with thier locality......that combined with the new direction of media in a general sense; personalized media, Newsgarden hopes to connect users with products and news that is site specific to them. It's great.....I played around with it on the olympian's website.....It's like a twitter button on google maps meets facebook......U send up a news story that is happening where you are, and the Olympian will choose the best stories to publish in the paper. It's somewhat in a primitiave stage on www.theolympian.com but you can get a clear idea of what it could possible grow to become.

A Visit from Chris Richardson

So......Chris Richardson came and spoke to our class a couple of weeks ago about his company, Internet Identity and thier primary function. Kind of like the Bounty hunter's of Phishers, I understand what his company does and why people pay him.....but what I don't understand is why are they so nice about it? I mean honestly, c'mon they are dealing with identity thieves for pete sake! Who cares if you overload their site illegally so it doesn't work. ESPECIALLY if they are in another country. Why waste all of the time and resources into contacting them, and THEIR local authorties, finding a civil way to handle THIER illegal wrongdoings? Kill their site! Kill it! Send them a virus, hack into thier website....whatever....just don't be so diplomatic about it. I know...there has to be another Phishing Bounty Hunter company out there that doesn't care how they down a site---they just down the site.....and it probably way more efficient than the methods internet identity accomplishes the same thing.

The Digital Copy V. The "Real Thing"

Prior it being mentioned today in class...... I never really thought of the volitility surrounding digital storage. Obviously we all know the dangers of hard drives/thumbdrives ect. but the safety of documents stored in an online server somewhere.......Myspace, Facebook-we all have picture albums.....Email-I tend to use my email account as a virtual backup for important documents. Andy brought up a very good point today though..... "What if that company goes out of business?"......As simple as it seems, I never thought of that one....That would be horrible. I guess the only way to truly stay safe is to practice the same thing you do with Hard copies of important documents............have copies.....in multiple places. Send one to yourself, one on the computer's HD, one on an external, one on a flash drive. I think that is a control that can be emplaced to reduce the risk of losing something important.