Wiki – Not Just Rapping Onomatopoeia

While looking for something on Wikipedia to edit, I thought I’d take a gander at ultimate, but the game has one of the most extensive pages I’ve encountered on Wikipedia, including a link to Ultipedia, a wiki based entirely on the sport.  Eventually I decided to contribute to the existing page for the Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D, since it was missing some things I thought were pertinent information for people researching the camera.  Check it out.

 

Assignment: Assignment Zero

Wired and NewsAssignment.net’s  Assignment Zero(AZ) project set out to crowdsource  the definitive report on how crowdsourcing is turning  the way  businesses  are operating online on end, and I believe that it did just that.  Just as Rheingold sets out to find how smart mobs are(or might someday, anyway) revolutionizing our world, AZ came out a big proponent of the potential of the masses to collaborate efficiently enough to have a tremendous impact soon and for the rest of our lives, but came to find out that the mass mentality is, in fact, chock full of great ideas and potential for brilliance, but digging the brilliance up and turning it into something as tangible as nearly 100 pieces of high quality group-created journalism is a much harder task than tossing a group of children a ball in the middle of the field and watching them establish a structured game of soccer.

Like the children, the group involved started out kicking the ball around, excited with their new toy and seemingly having more kicks in them than could go around for the single ball, or articles as the case is in AZ.  As time progresses, however, the children grow weary of kicking a ball around without any foreseeable  end result.  So, too, did the amount of and intensity for collaborating begin to diminish as the children realize they want to play and keep score and be able to leave with a story of something they accomplished but that doesn’t seem to be on the agenda.  Eventually the AZ team found they needed to make changes from a completely open-ended structure full of anonymity to an operation that had teams and players reaching for goals and knowing a bit about who they are working with and where they are coming from with their side of the story.  Once the social networking aspects of AZ came about, individuals working on the same thing became a group and they started playing ball.

I think that just as some of the children in the pickup game of soccer may find they enjoy it and pursue the game further, so will some of the pro-am tandems and groups continue to create content and grow the area of crowdsourcing into something that may at some point be used by the majority of people connected to the web, and with the success that some projects, such as A Million Penguins show, crowdsourcing and the hive mind may one day become the most popular sport in the world.

I may be a cynic, but I hold out hope.

 

Maybe not bastard coated bastards, but not quite smart mobs

I think the point I was trying to get at in my response to Smart Mobs is that while technology is, or may be depending on how you see it, advancing at a clip similar to what Rheingold predicts in his book, the people that become the users for these technologies are the factor setting the technologies back. I can’t find the post, but a few months ago I read someone’s opinion that said that MySpace is setting web design back ten years with a bunch of users that have no knowledge of how to use the resources available to them and thus their pages ultimately boil down to a faster loading, more annoying version of the dancing baby or the hamster dance. This is my biggest issue with internet mobs that may or may not be smart, users that refuse to inform themselves on whatever advances, however brilliant, in technology become available to them. The fact that a tech support call usually starts off with the question “have you tried turning it off and on again?” is disheartening to me and makes me cynical as to how far we as a potentially smart mob will go in the next five years.

 

Rheingold – I can’t quite figure it out

I’ve been trying to come up with some sort of response to how smart mobs have been coming along as Rheingold foresaw five years ago for the last hour, but I don’t think we’re getting anywhere.  Instead of collective immersion in new technology, people are isolating themselves further with every innovation in connectivity.  Instead of sharing their experiences with each other, there are only a few experiences being shared with everybody, and for the most part these are not the kinds of examples that lead me to believe that this increasingly connected world we’re in is getting any smarter.  TMZ.com started with a group of people sharing their camera phone videos about celebrities doing stupid things, and it seems that the trivial garners much more attention than the important.  The school shooting at Virgina Tech was huge news for about a week and permeated a huge number of media outlets, but all the while people were still more eager to find out how long Paris Hilton was going to be in jail and who was going to interview her fresh out on parole.  While people such as you and I may not care, for every one of us, there are dozens who live for these news.  Instead of utopian online societies where people can interact  and do things that benefit each other, most people want to know only how what they get from the internet benefits them, not who in their area might need a gallon of milk from the grocery store while you’re out that may later be able to pick your kids up from school when you’re running late at work.  In order for truly smart mobs to become a more common standard, the people accessing the technology have to wise up to the potential of what is at their fingertips.  We need to become more than consumers.  The internet is full of freeloaders and as more people become connected, the number of freeloaders will only go up.  There is not enough natural selection taking place online and this leads to rampant wastes of time and thought.  I think that the main problem is that there are still too many people that work under the assumption that there is nobody watching them online, and until there is an effective, but not too intrusive, means for people to police each other, we as an online society will not prosper.

I seem to be rambling, so I’ll step back for a while and see if I can come up with a more proper way to articulate my thoughts on smart mobs and find some examples to back up my thoughts, but for now I’ve been at this for more than an hour, I’ve written tons and started from scratch more times than I can recall and started with enough time to allow myself to get this in before midnight, but it seems that tonight was not my night to sort out my thoughts.  I think we all have a long way to go to truly smart mobs, that’s if we ever get there, and because of that I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the concepts Rheingold seems to have such a gleam in his eye over.  I guess it’s because “people are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling” and the happy future where everyone contributes doesn’t seem likely when most people on the internet just want to have fun.

 

Football – free (from the preseason) at last!

Last night the Cowboys survived a shootout with the Giants and that inspired me to go back through the pictures I took when my little brother and I went to the opening preseason game against the Colts. I remembered hearing something about a bug being thrown on Tony Romo while he was being interviewed and found Awful Announcing’s take on Pam Oliver’s handling of this situation:

I came to realize that in my picture-taking I snapped a shot of Pam Oliver interviewing Tony Romo just as Romo was trying to get the bug off his uniform. Talk about coincidence… I mean…I totally meant to do that.
The part of the pictures I like best here is Roy Williams and Terrance Newman turned around laughing at Romo and his bug problem at the top of the frame.

 

Bin Laden Arrested By Aussies…OY OY OY!

An Osama Bin Laden impersonator got within 30 feet of the hotel President Bush is staying in Australia. The group of comedians from Australian television show “The Chaser’s War On Everything” staged a fake Canadian motorcade to infiltrate the barricaded area around the hotel the Asia- Pacific Economic Cooperation forum is taking place.

Gemma Daley reports for Bloomberg.com that the group breeched the “Red Zone” designated in Sydney to keep any protesters out and keep the diplomats safe. Her story comes to a conclusion that Foreign Minister Alexander Downer comes to that is “They were arrested, so that shows the security system works.”

Blogger Sea Eagle of Nothing’s Too Sacred reports the story as an embarrassment for the security forces involved that put hundreds of millions of dollars into this operation (roughly $250 million). Sea Eagle thinks the stunt at least helps lighten the mood of those in Sydney who have been inconvenienced by all of the increased security forces put in place for the gathering.

Both articles report that the comedians have been arrested, Bloomberg’s Daley quickly states that charges have not yet been filed, but policy in place allows for incarceration of those protesting that breech security. This leaves some wiggle room for interpretation where a judge would have to determine if the group were protesting or merely highlighting a flaw in the security. Sea Eagle, however jumps straight to the fact that the comedians arrested could face up to six months in prison for their actions and leads a reader to think that the security forces will try to punish the group to the fullest extent of the law for the public embarrassment.

Sea Eagle says it best, however

I guess the breach of what is considered one of the biggest security operations ever mounted shows just how easily the best laid plans of mice and men can go askew.

 

J. David Bolter 2000… and 1

In 2001 David Bolter furthered his argument for hypermedia into the book Writing Space. In his blog, David Mueller comments on Bolter’s views of hypertext and remediation, saying that Space belongs in the upper echelon of writing in the growing world of computers along with the works of Hayles and Johnson, which from the titles of their work(Writing Machines and Interface Culture respectively) sounds important.

Bolter foregrounds much of the discussion of the force of hypertext on writing activity (activity leaning into academic projects and literary pieces) with the idea of remediation: the existence of the old in the new.

Mueller goes on to say that as hypertext continues to grow, it will challenge all perceptions of the written word. Libraries have to incorporate much more than printed works and the need and demand for printed materials diminishes to a point that the author questions weather there will be a need for printed media whatsoever at all in the future.

As we have all come to realize, there is “the future” and there is THE FUTURE. Though it may be hard to accept for most, our future may never become the latter which brings flying cars in the early 21st century like the Jetsons have, and I think the same goes for wholly computerized works of writing. There will always be people that want to be able to hold in their hands that which gives them information. This is why newspapers will still be around for quite sometime. There seems to be some sort of validity and integrity to something in print, so much so that our own UTD faculty will most often reject citing the internet as a primary source of information, God forbid Wikipedia. At the same time however, our library, just like most other libraries, has an increasing pool of online resources and e-books and articles from trusted media that have since their inception converted to electronic format.

I think that just as remediation calls for a sort of backwards compatibility where aspects of the old media are found in new media, so, too, will the aging media do its best to emulate what the new media can do that it cannot. This is evident with books and magazines that ship with cds and dvds full of content that you can only access by getting the printed material that comes with it. The acceptance of new media has led to things such as sing-along books or even books as simple as the ones this generation had as children that would every so often substitute a word with a picture and the reader presses the button bearing that picture on the soundboard along the right side of the book and it would make the appropriate sound to go along with the picture.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to go find out what the cow says…

 

Big names = big laughs? Probably not.

I had never heard of the upcoming movie project “The Love Guru” slated for a 2008 release, but last week MTV Movies Blog reported the following:

Brining sexy back to comedy: Justin Timberlake set to join Mike Myers and Jessica Alba in “The Love Guru.”

In a time marred by the huge gap in quality of movies in general and, sadly, even more in the comedy genre, it seems that studios want to tack on as much star power to a comedy with the slightest bit of promise to maximize their earnings. Yet as many recent releases have shown, this formula of big names + comedy has seldom added up to big bucks. “The Love Guru” looks to be following in the footsteps of recent bombs full of big name actors License to Wed ($43 million, Robin Williams, John Krasinski, Mandy Moore), My Super Ex-Girlfriend ($22.5 million, Luke Wilson, Uma Thurman, Rain Wilson), The Ex ($3 million! Zach Braff, Jason Bateman, Amanda Peet), and even Evan Almighty(Steve Carell, Morgan Freeman, Wanda Sykes) which was a flop at what would be a modest $98 million for any other movie, except it cost nearly double that to make.

Joining Myers, Alba, and Timberlake in Guru will be Hollywood’s favorite midget Verne Troyer fresh off a stellar(…not) performance in a car insurance commercial that made me throw the remote at the tv, and Romany Malco who holds his ground in the Showtime series Weeds and did well in a minor role in “The 40 Year Old Virgin”. Myers will be dabbling into his first new character since he came up with Austin Powers in 1997. I think since then his work has been on the decline with the only exception being Goldmember being a lot better than The Spy Who Shagged Me.

Dying is easy, comedy is hard. I don’t think megastars Alba and Timberlake have what it takes to punch out a good live action comedic performance, though Timberlake did a great job on one particular Saturday Night Live sketch. Jessica Alba has not attempted comedy since her small role in the not-too-stellar “Idle Hands,” and while she is plenty nice to look at, her standard acting timing leaves something to be desired, and with comedic timing being even harder to master, I don’t see her doing too well here. Even with Myers being one of the best comedic minds to pass through Hollywood in the last thirty years, I think fame has led him to think he can do no wrong which shows in the lack of originality in his latest work with sequel after sequel, after Dr. Seuss flop. He need only look to Robin Williams’ latest works to see that even the best can go wrong, and Robin Williams had a much funnier #2 in “License to Wed” (The Office’s John Krasinski) than Myer’s #s 2,3,4, and 5.

I hope Hollywood realizes that big names do not equal good movies, ESPECIALLY comedies, and they start funding more comedies that rely on the good writing like some of the best movies of this and last summer: Little Miss Sunshine (who’s biggest star Steve Carell has gone on to take a step back in his success thanks to Evan Almighty) and Knocked Up (who’s biggest star was an old Ghostbuster) did, and stop feeding us unfunny garbage with ensemble casts that do go well together.

While the biggest loser with Guru figures to be us, the consumers, I feel really bad for Malco, who comes in at a close second, because he has a very promising career and could probably not turn down an opportunity to work with such big names, but will likely come out the worse for it.

 

Blogs I Read

Digital Photography School is a blog that provides tips and techniques for digital photographers as well as news that its readers find important.  The blog gives each entry a designated amount of space for the preview view and each entry has a “Read the rest of this entry” link at the bottom of it.  This is useful because photography tips usually are not the type of things that take up a few sentences, they require examples and the author includes them and at the end of each entry links to related and similar posts are included, which I think is a nice touch.  This blog also has a nice navigation at the top of the page to find posts relating to whatever kind of help you might be seeking as a photographer.  The writing works in that it does everything you can ask for instructional writing to do, which is convey its point without coming across as condescending to its readers.  I found this blog as a result of this assignment, but have now subscribed to it and plan to make as much use of it as I can because I think it will come into use for my photography portfolio class this semester.

Hashmarks by Matt Mosley of Dallas area sports-writing lore (well, maybe not lore, but he is a familiar voice on local sports talk radio and a former DMN writer) is a football blog on ESPN.com, as a result his blog is just another piece of content wedged into the standard ESPN.com visual structure.  I have been reading Mosley’s blog on a fairly regular basis since he started it back in May and it is interesting to see how he’s adapted his writing to the fast, short and sweet style of blogs.  His writing is fairly casual as is the writing of most opinion-based sports writers and most bloggers in general.  Pictures are sporadically used, most likely on the assumption that his readers have already had their share of visual on the topic he might be covering elsewhere on the ESPN website.  He tends to pepper his posts with links as needed and does it neither to excess or too sporadically.  He tends to update just about every time something of matter happens in the NFL, which at this time of year is quite often.  This blog is an easy read and, for me, a fun read because I have a great interest in the NFL and I will likely read it for as long as it stays online.

 

Blog It All

Over the last six years or so I have had many run-ins with blogging. Starting in high school many of the people I knew started posting web journals on sites such as LiveJournal, Xanga, and even the now defunct Ujournal. From there a few friends of mine built their own sites, none of which still stand today. I myself jumped into the fray by building a couple of journal-centric sites, of which only one has been kept alive by a free host that doesn’t seem to monitor site activity, that mostly served as a platform to showcase some of my writing and photography in a very informal manner.

Since those days blogs have grown at a blistering pace changing what they are along the way. Most blogs today try to be informative, or at the very least entertaining. Blogs today allow writers, both professional and amateur, to give people instant updates of what is on their mind. This instant gratification form of writing is the most essential shift blogging has brought to writing over the last decade. Even big media outlets have realized the magnitude of this change and sites such as ESPN.com and CNN.com (towards the middle of the page) have either hired a slew of new writers or have assigned their existing writers to the blogsphere.

It is inevitable, however, that no matter what platform people choose to write in, what they say will not be something for everyone to agree upon, nor will the authors mean for it to be. Opinions will resonate in writing for as long as mankind chooses to write. Blogging merely amplifies this concept by giving everyone a voice, including those who would not have otherwise been able to express themselves to such a large audience.

From this point forward who knows where blogging will go. It may continue to separate into smaller and smaller pieces that eventually become something new and different altogether, or it could become a group that is increasingly closer knit and unified as blogging for the sake of blogging. 2010s here we come.