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 Sure some of the scores and things are outdated in the magazines by the time they come up, but 200 word blog entries in my opinion cannot possibly replace three page articles written by professional writers.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.