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.

The HTML Expirience

The internet has evolved so much since the days of AOL. Creating a web publication using HTML was comparable to riding in a classic car, or listening to oldies, Except not nearly enjoyable. When I was in middle school ( 1997ish) prior to the social networking explosion that was to come a decade later, my friends and I used to have web pages provided by anglefire.com. The thing was, there were not tools to help you create.......and in order for your page to not be completley lame.... you had to used HTML. I disliked it then, and I dislike to an even greater degree now. I simply do not have the patience. I'd much rather drag & drop, cut & paste, type and delete. As HTML was once a thing I did for fun as a kid (Having the webpage was fun, not making it) You couldn't pay me to do that stuff now. (If you could I would have majored in sofware engineering) Due to the rapid innovation and advances in the internet, people have become sheltered, spoiled to the rigors of computer technology. The sheer content and options available in the form of webtools.....and the effects that can be created from them today, have absolutely killed any possiblilty of the average person wanting to create something using the building blocks of the web. At the present time, because of advances in technology, what it would take the average person to accomplish using HTML, someone could add fifty times the content using a web tool. As many things within the web have evolved from something only a skilled individual within the field is/was able to do, HTML is the perfect example of a technology that has digressed from something the average joe would do to now only those skilled to semi-skilled within the field would attempt. When automobiles were first introduced to people, mechanics did not change the oil, that was a user function. But now, due in part to advances in modern engines, and the evolution of the automobile to become more user friendly.....People rely on the local Jiffy Lube to change thier oil. It is the same way with the interent. All a person needs to know how type, and they too can create a webpage. Why use HTML when you never have to?

Death of the Newspaper (as we know it)

This is something that shouldn't even be up for debate any longer. Newspapers and all forms of printed media for that matter are dying...very fast.... The debate now is when will it be extinct? I say within the next decade, newspapers as a whole will not exist. Even if coupled with online supplementation....... the bottom line is this: they won't be able to afford it, nor compete with the immediate news reporting of online media. An event takes place, and an entire article is written and posted on the internet within minutes. It takes newsprint an entire day to push the same information out. Portability may have been an issue during the turn of the century, but now we are connected everywhere: Cell phones, WLAN/Wi-Fi, Kindle.....you can get news at any time you need it. Advertisers are not going to waste thier money utilizing a medium that no one needs. Therefore, the newspaper will be a novelty item by 2020.

The issue however is this : The realibility of the "immediate" online news we do recieve. Any and everyone has the ability.....and does (twitter, facebook, myspace) to write whatever the heck they want to on the internet. True beat reporters, real journalism, investigative reporting is what the consequence will be with the death of the newspaper. The line between fact, fiction, and opinion will become even more blurred than it already is (scary thought to think that is even possible).

The only way to salvage investigative reporting......real news for that matter..... is to have some sort of regulation on internet media. Hear me out, this is not a complete Nazi idea. Something as simple as a designator for websites, that were once print, that conducts real investigative reporting......to let the consumer know what they are reading is legit. An accredidation of sorts. I never said government regulation per se, but a combined regulating body of news entities that give the thumbs up on certain websites.

Email vs. Snail Mail

Email and traditional mail have many similarities. Both are used to transfer information from one location to another, both utilize central routing stations: mail servers & post offices, and both need a recipeint identified by a unique address. Even with similar core components, there is one huge thing email will never be able to do that traditional mail can do, and that is the transfer of physical matter......mass.....built from atoms.....

Ahhh.....but is email able to do so? Obviously, at this time my mom can't send me her homemade cookies to Blacknwild83@yahoo.com....... but the transfer of a physical object can in fact happen utilizing e-mail/internet. In the same fashion anything else is sent rather it be via snail mail or email, a third party..... a router or a hub of sorts would be needed. Amazon.com or any other online retailer for that matter uses this concept. You place your order online and it is recieved by a central wharehouse where it then distributes goods to waiting consumers.....So in a sense physical objects can in fact be sent via email.

I think a more relevant thought should be more so along the lines of how these two forms of mail are merging, rather than the focus be upon differences and similarities. Traditional mail services, USPS, UPS, FedEx have all already adapted; shifting thier enterprise towards online dependence. If you send a package, you are able to track it's progress in real time until it arrives at it's destination. You can change where physical mail is sent to you online. Neither industry will ever outcompete each other, nor will they completly merge and become as one. Each is dependent upon each other at this point. Online retailers could not be in existence if there were not a way to physically get goods out to the consumer. Now that postal mail is nearly 100% automated in every aspect with the exception of physical delivery, a company could not afford to continue operations without online customer self service such as tracking, postage purchase and address changes.

Hmmmm.....

So....I created a blogger account a while ago.....and set up my blog a while ago.....But I have no clue what email address I used since I don't use gmail (even though it is probably one of the more useful email providers)......therefore......I created a completely new one that is utilizing my yahoo account Blacknwild83@yahoo.com........

Stay posted.......More to Come!!!!