Response to Next Media

Five years from now I think the media landscape will not be too terribly different from the way it is today. It all depends on the underlying technology and I really don't think anything major will occur in the next five years. I am a little confused on how I feel about printed materials such as magazines. I personally like magazines such as sports illustrated and espn the magazine because of the articles written in them. Sure some of the scores and things are outdated in the magazines by the time they come up, but 200 word blog entries in my opinion cannot possibly replace three page articles written by professional writers. In the end it's all about money. If the market for magazines and newspapers isn't large enough people will stop producing them.

I don't believe famous bloggers will ever reach the level of notoriety that celebrities and athletes do. The chief reason I believe this is because most people who aren't seen in the public eye aren't that famous. I'm talking about people like writers and radio hosts. Members of these professions don't often gain a high level of notoriety because they aren't seen. Athletes and celebrities on the other hand, are seen in movies and sporting event so they are easily recognizable. Also, bloggers don't always list their names so they themselves probably will not become famous, rather their blog or online persona might. For these reasons I believe that bloggers as a whole will be nor more likely to be famous than writers or other people who are not seen by the public.

As far as television goes, I don't see any way possible that it will be gone in fifty years. There's too much invested in it, and it's so much a part of our lives that I think it will take more than fifty years to remove it from our lives. I think people read news online and shop online because it's more convenient. I don't think that watching television online is any more convenient than watching television normally. I think television may move to a more on demand style where people can choose what they want to watch, but the television will still have to be there. You also have to consider the massive bandwidth bottleneck that would occur if everyone was watching television online instead of on their tv sets.

Response to Political Engagement

I feel that my generation is indeed more engaged in politics and knowledgeable about politics because of the internet. Now I'm not trying to say that we are completely involved or as knowledgeable as we should be about politics, rather we are more involved and knowledgeable than we would be if we didn't have the internet. I think it's hard for us to ignore political messages online because they are all over the place. There are many Facebook groups dedicated to a candidate or a particular issue. Youtube had debates and their site was all decked out in red,white, and blue when those were happening. These are two sites visited quite often by members of my generation, so it was hard to ignore.

I also think that since we are very near to a presidential election, political activity has increased and people are starting to take notice of candidates and issues. I'm not so sure I could say that our generation is aware of political issues if we weren't in an election year. I also sense a bit of dissatisfaction with the current president amongst my generation which could also lead to them supporting a candidate who is least likely to be like the current president.

As far as my political involvement, I haven't done much online. I did watch all 38 minutes of Barack Obama's speech on race and I looked at his policies on his website. I can say that as an Obama supporter, that my activity online has been very one-sided. This is certainly a problem online that we discussed in class. The ability to only look at the candidates you want to and ignore the other candidates allows us to isolate the information we see. I did look at McCain's site, but my opinion was pretty much cemented because of the one-sidedness of my previous activity online.

Overall, I think that politics online stand to make our generation more aware of political issues than before the proliferation of political information online.

For those of you who like music.

I have been recommended several online music related websites I really enjoy by a friend and I thought I would tell anyone interested about them. The first one is pandora, which I think is a little more popular now than when I was told about it. For those of you who don't know what pandora.com is, it is basically a site where you can enter a band and then it will create a station for you for that band. This station will then play a song by the band you entered and then songs by bands that are similar to the band you created the station for. I've found this site very helpful in finding new bands as well as new songs by bands that I already knew of. You can also mark favorite songs and pandora provides links to amazon and itunes where you can buy the songs. It's also a good site to leave up while you're doing homework.

The second site recommended to me is The Hype Machine. This is a site that tracks blogs that have mp3's posted to them. You can then search the site for a particular song or artist and there's a good chance that song or artist will have songs posted on blogs somewhere. The hype machine doesn't allow you to download the songs, but it allows you to stream them. You can follow links to the blogs and sometimes you can download mp3's from those. There are also links on this site to buy the song from itunes,amazon, and emusic. The good thing about this site is you can sometimes find songs to listen to on cd's that have not been released yet.

Blogger.com sucks

Yes I am blogging about how the site I am blogging on sucks. The main grief I have with this site is incredibly stupid navigation. When you are viewing your blog there is absolutely no descriptive link to go back to your dashboard so that you can edit posts and such. It took me a while to find out that the orange b in the upper left hand corner links there, but they should seriously have a descriptive link back to the dashboard. Another reason I find this ridiculous is that the dashboard page has a link to the dashboard. So they not only don't have a sufficient link from your blog to your dashboard, but they also have a link that links to the page you are currently on. I wonder if blogger is going to kick me out for criticizing them. Good Lord!

More on protecting children

Through my experience of programming web pages and web services is seems apparent to me that every single web page contains html. This would probably be something obvious to most people. If you were to right click on the page you are on at any time and go to "view source" you can look at this html. One thing you might notice at the top of the page is the < meta > tag. This meta tag can be used to have keywords in it to be used by search engines or the name of the author of the page. It seems rather obvious to me that the government could easily go to the W3c, which basically sets the standards of html, and ask them to put some flag into the language that would be able to designate if the content of the page is legal to show to people under 18. Since a browser would be able to see this tag, it would be able to prevent itself from going to a site if it is restricted. This could be then government enforced. Maybe something like this already exists and I don't know about it, but it seems like common sense.

Response to Kids online

Well I guess I should start by saying that I think that the Communication Decency Act is pretty much useless. Seriously, how hard is it to put a page up before your page that confirms the age of the person about to visit your site. This is something I could make after a few classes of experience in web programming. I guess the only thing easier than this is the ability for a user to bypass this page by putting in a false birth date. I often view trailers on ign.com of video games that are going to be released or are already released and some of them are age restricted. I simply just put two numbers in the for the month and day and type my birth year and I am able to see the content. This is in no way would have been difficult for me to do when I was 11 years old. I certainly think this law was made with the best intentions in mind, but it seems pretty useless to me.
I think web filters do a good job, but at the same time they are just as easy to bypass as the forms where you need to enter your date of birth.

I think the best two ways of filtering content for children are browser filters and computer knowhow on the parent's part. You can choose sites to exclude from a browser, but I am not too familiar with how to do this because I've never needed to do it. I know at my junior high they had software on the computers that flagged you if you entered a certain keyword and you would get in trouble for that. I have never investigated any software like that, but I'm sure one could find it pretty easily. In the end the best method of censoring what your children see is to know what they are doing online. Luckily I'm a computer science major and I spend a lot of time around computers, so I would be able to track my children's internet behavior quite easily. Alas, not everyone can afford to spend as much time around computers as I do and they may not know how to track their children. This could be solved by having classes at local colleges that teach parents how to track what they want to track. Parents can't expect to have legislation come about to make sure their kids are safe on the internet, they need to take some initiative and protect their kids themselves.

Crappy Flash Final

Well here it is. The culmination of my five weeks of learning Adobe Flash. I'm gonna go ahead and state right now that the green button does not work because this is not the final version of the project. In the final version the green button would show a leg stepping on freddy the football and smashing him into the ground. It's quite entertaining, but I'm afraid you will not get to see it. I probably spent the most time on the most useless part of this animation. The bottom bar with the buttons took me at least twice as much time as anything else. I was very happy with the end result, although I inadvertently made this bar look almost exactly like something out of a Mac operating system. To me it looks better than any bars on leopard or tiger or whatever large cat Apple has named its newest OS after. Obviously the smiling football is a piece of crap that I spent very little time on because I didn't want to try to make something look nice only to realize that I couldn't possibly do that. Well that wraps up my three part series on my crappy flash animations. I hope you have enjoyed.

My foray into uploading real videos

Well I now have the knowhow to upload real videos instead of the crappy flash stuff I made! I'm sure glad that someone was videotaping this because this was my best throw of my collegiate career. This is much more fun than creating flash stuff because I don't have to come up with my own stuff. Well I suppose there's nothing more to say than enjoy my discus throwing.



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Crappy Flash part Deux

Here goes the second attempt at making a flash movie. I was able to incorporate characters in my crappy animations that now call my crappy animations crappy. As you can see, my walking people are a little too stiff. It think I should've at least made their arms in a lower position because nobody really walks with their arms at a 90 degree angle. I also thought it would be cool to put my old animation in a tv within the new movie so I went ahead and did that. The lava lamp is also something that I really liked. Although a lava lamp doesn't really behave in that manner I was still happy with it. I probably should've had the sun move and daylight turn into night, but I wasn't that motivated so I did not. Well I only have one of these bad boys left to show you all.

Can't see my 490 homework

I have been making some spectacular JSP's for my Computer Science 490 class, but I don't think I will be able to post them anywhere online because I really have no clue how to. I tried putting them on my W drive and linking to them from my main page, but I couldn't get it to work. Oh yeah, I suppose I should tell you all what the heck a JSP is. Because I don't think I need to go in depth about what a JSP is, I will just tell you that it is a web page that is capable of being generated dynamically. This just means the web page can be displayed different based on actions you take in the webpage. The best example of dynamic web pages I can think of is Amazon.com remembering what products you have looked at and it dynamically generates a list of other things you may like based on what you have looked at. If you'd like to learn more about JSP's you can visit here. If you would like to see why it takes me forever to finish writing these JSP's you can visit here. I suppose you don't really want to hear anymore about cool things that I can't show you so that will be all for this post.

Crappy Animation Part 1

Well I was asked to show some of what I considered to be my "crappy" flash animations so here is the first one I made for class. I modified it since it was graded so that the mountains move slower than the cactuses, which move slower than the road. As you can see my artistic ability is quite terrible by looking at the driver. You can see him closer by right clicking and zooming in on him. I thought the truck wasn't incredibly terrible, although it could've been better. I shall post more of my crappy flash work as I complete some more.

MUDs are for puds

Why on earth would anyone want to read text in probably the most boring interface ever. I understand it's like a story and such, but seriously, can't you just read a book? Sure a book doesn't have the sort of interactivity of a MUD, but after a while the command line just hurts the eyes. If I wanted to stare at a command line all day I would become a Linux programmer. Now I consider myself to be a computer nerd by default because I am a csc major, but the command line is just not fun. You can change the background color and the font of it, but that really doesn't make it any more exciting.

The Digital Divide

Upon listening to the description of the idea of the digital divide in class I saw that I not only am on the privileged side of the divide now, but I would've been when it was first created because I am a white male who is majoring in computer science. Although I am highly privileged in the divide, I do feel that people like me should do something to make the digital world accessible to all. At the same time I feel I am only really responsible for helping people in this country and the rest of the world can go figure it out themselves. In this country I feel that access to the internet and new technologies should be on par with driving a vehicle. Now this doesn't mean that I think you should have to have a license to use the internet, rather you can use the internet as long as you have the right tools. The tools for driving would be a vehicle and insurance and the tools for accessing the internet would obviously be a computer and an internet connection. Just like driving, if you do stupid shit on the internet you should be punished. I don't think people realize how much programming goes into making things idiot proof and then someone comes along and screws something up. One other similarity between driving and using the internet that I see is that old people should not be doing it. The one thing that would have to be done would be to make sure that if we are pushing to allow everyone to use the internet that we make sure that they aren't using it for dumb things. There is no advantage to me being able to watch stupid crap on youtube than someone who can't because they don't have the internet. If we give people the internet and all they do is screw around on it then I think it's too bad for them.

IMS Minor

If I've learned one thing from the IMS courses I've taken at college for my minor it's that I have little to no artistic ability whatsoever. I'm currently taking a flash animation course and saw some of the stuff that other people were doing and realized just how bad mine was. I have also taken two courses about designing websites that have ended up in good grades for me, but I can't help but think that the garbage I made would never be allowed on the internet because of how bad it looks. One of my computer science teachers recently discussed how user interfaces should be left to graphic designers and the code should be left to programmers and I certainly agree with him. I suppose I will finish with my IMS minor and be happy if I never have to try to create something visually appealing, because I really can't stand looking at the crap I've created so far.

Response to Jason Kottke Interview

Upon reading the interview (which I very kindly linked to with my title) between Rebecca Blood and Jason Kottke I didn't really feel like I gained any more knowledge than I had before. Some guy likes to write his random thoughts online blah blah blah. It seemed rather odd to me that Jason graduated from Coe College with a degree in physics and is now a full time blogger. He mentions that his blog is not focused on one subject such as politics or technology, rather he sort of writes about whatever he feels like. Upon visiting his site I found this to be very true. One post he may be talking about old web browsers, while the next post deals with a man getting mugged. Some of the stories I came across were interesting, but I just couldn't get myself to enjoy the unorganized feel of the blog. I suppose I usually go to websites for certain information because I know they have that information and I don't like sites with a seemingly random selection of information. He also has a bit of mystery meat navigation that I'm not very fond of. (For those of you who don't know what that is you can go here)

My First Blog Post

A sentence or two about how excited I am to finally be blogging.