I Graduated
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My university life is officially over now that I got the piece of paper saying that I graduated with an Upper Second class degree. It came in the mail yesterday morning but I read it in the evening.
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There Are Two Parts To The World Wide Web
Byrichard
the future of the web
the search engine was the king, now it’s social networking.
People had their own home page, now it’s grown to their own website. The blog was grown and grown, replacing webrings
to be developed
For several years the search engine was king. This was the place where everyone went to find content because all the information was so disorganised. Recently though this has changed. The way people use the world wide web has evolved. Whereas people in the past would create just one webpage with a little content people are now creating entire websites.
These websites are not websites in the sense that they were back in the late nineties, rather they are profiles. It used to be that you’d create a static HTML page that would need to be updated manually through the hot metal code. With CGI-bin and later technologies, the nature of the homepage has changed.
Remember Geocities? It’s been replaced by myspace. Remember the discussion about web portals and yahoo and google were trying to corner the market to get the highest audience. That has changed. Look at Digg, Facebook, Bebo, twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. All of these websites are about one thing. Community. They are only interesting as long as your friends are members; no friends means no way of using it. I was a member of myspace for months before anyone I knew joined and by the time had joined I re-created a profile having forgotten the other profile.
It’s the same with Facebook. I joined it a few months before anyone from my environment started using it but recently everyone has started using Facebook to communicate. Not just this, they’re also uploading their lives to the web. So am I. There are two issues that are interesting to look at. For anyone wanting to do a dissertation why not look at the changing nature of privacy with the rise of the social networking website. When I was studying for my HND privacy was key and release forms were essential. Now it’s as though everyone is a publisher and the nature of privacy has changed. It goes along the lines of “Don’t upload anything too compromising or embarrassing”. Your network of friends can see everything. Friends from your high school days can see all your university friends and vice versa.
This promotes the expansion of social circles. Whereas in the past networks of friends were mutually exclusive due to location they are joined online. Take some videos of when you’re at a party in Switzerland and those in England can see it, and so can their friends if you so choose. It’s a shame you can’t select for only one network to see videos rather than others, for example, only London friends can see the London videos and Switzerland friends can see those. It would make uploading certain videos possible.
Anyway, the web has become personal. Within the last 6 months or so I’ve seen the web go from being about avatars and nicknames to being about real names and real networks. It’s about bringing the offline world online and vice versa. This is where I believe for there to have been a shift in perception of what the web is for. Almost everyone I know and see regularly is now on Facebook. It’s amusing to see how it’s become mainstream.
It’s as though Facebook has become a portal although not in the 1998 sense of the word. There is a new part of the internet. If you imagine the web to be like drupal then imagine that Yahoo and Geocities are the old gateways to the World Wide Web whilst various social networking websites are a new ad important portal with one major difference. These portals aggregate and distribute your content to your friends around the world. You’re no longer going online for research. You’re going online because you’re socialising. It’s replaced, at least partially, socialising in the real world whilst nonetheless providing a great way of sharing content. Both “user-generated” and “interactive” have become keywords in describing what the web is today.
In summary, whereas two or three years ago the Web was somewhere people came to find information for future use the web has evolved into an interactive user-generated medium. As a result of this, I think the world wide web has added another node to what purposes it serves.
Web 1.0: static and hard to interact anonymously vs web 2.0: highly interactive user-generated content where real names are now used, especially in places like Facebook.
All that remains from this day
Byrichard
Today a friend of mine was in the news, after being arrested and released in China. He’s a photographer.
At the same time, I’m in England and I am no longer welcome to a place where I have spent many hours.
I have three documents loaded within the browser to continue work on the dissertation proposal I am going to continue on within the next few minutes or within the next day or two.
I’m going home in about 28 days or so, that’s four weeks.
I have a documentary meeting, a tutor meeting, and a multicamera meeting, all for around the same time. There is also a globalisation meeting. After that, I may go home and edit what should have been edited already. This depends on what’s decided during one of the meetings.
It’s the daily life of a student.
Back in London
Byrichard
I’m back in the northwest of London waiting for Monday to come when I can fall asleep in the first lecture of the week…
In reality that’s probably not going to happen. Instead, it’s going to be the final three modules before the course is over. It’s going to be fun since I love the modules I need to do.
The flight was good, enjoyed watching a film on my i-pod, and finally getting a proper opportunity to check my noise-canceling headphones out. They make quite a difference.
List of books on documentary
Byrichard
Theorizing Documentary (Afi Film Reader)
A New History of Documentary Film
Television and the Public Interest: Vulnerable Values in Western European Broadcasting
Documentary in the Digital Age
A few of the books I need to get through over the next few days.
Why a 20% drop is not necessarily a bad thing for myspace
Byrichard
According to recent articles myspace is losing user share in relation Facebook but this is not necessarily a bad thing. When you think of facebook you know that it’s a glorified phonebook therefore everyone “needs” to use it to remain in the loop. In contrast Myspace is a specialised music sharing site for artists and creators of music to come together and collaborate as members of the same art form.
As a result of many users leaving myspace for other social networking websites so Myspace will have far less noise, in other words extra chatter that does not contribute to the appreciation of music. I for one have found myself using Myspace slightly more due to certain bands using the website.
There are a hardcore group of people that are part of many social networks at once and they are able to cope with the demands. Most people spend twenty minutes in front of facebook getting up to date with their friends before disappearing. “MySpace’s lead in terms of “attention” is almost embarrassing: it scores 10.79% against Facebook’s 1.67%.” source. People look at more content on Myspace than Facebook and user involvement is what counts to advertisers.
Myspace is good for the sharing of music you create without people having to install extra api whilst Facebook is personalised by adding api and hoping that your friends install the same. Both will co-exist happily for another few months whilst waiting for the next site of interest.
Unreasonably low – a rant against a certain ISP
Byrichard
Dear Victim,
Yesterday you exceeded the daily usage limit of 500MB as referred to in our Terms and Conditions. Â This type of activity could have a detrimental effect on our network and therefore we cannot allow this to continue. Â Should you continue to exceed the daily download limit we will, unfortunately, be forced to downgrade your service to a throughput limit of 56Kbs dial-up speed, for a period of 5 days.
If you exceed these limits on a regular basis, we may be forced to suspend your account.
For users of Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications such as BearShare, Warez, Morpheus, BitTorrent, iMesh and KaZaA note the following:
Most P2P applications you install will usually be configured so other users can access your hard drive and share your files all of the time. This constant file transfer can degrade your computer’s performance and generate heavy traffic loads on the network, making it difficult for other users of the network to work well. The network is a shared resource and we all must use it responsibly.
Network bandwidth consumption is monitored. If your users could possibly impact the overall performance of the network, your computer may be blocked until the situation can be discussed.
Should you have any queries regarding this email, please contact Customer Services
Regards
Appallingly crappy ISP
I’m a third-year media student who has spent the past decade online practically every day. I know where to find content. I understand the nature of the medium. I’m not your garden variety fifty-five-second user.
I’m the type of user that would wake up every morning and download a gigabyte or more a day when at home. I go to the uni network and I’ve downloaded 600 megs within about ten minutes and my daily allowance is a pathetic 500 megs.
Five hundred megs is not even one full copy of Linux. Some video podcasts are over a hundred megs each. Podcasts can be up to 100 megabytes in size.
I hate their false advertising and promises. I have no choice though, I’m not the one selecting the ISP.
afterthought
Where did Yahoo go wrong with their implementation of advertising along the same lines as google? They took two years longer than they should have to implement what belonged to them. I hope they go bankrupt.