Essay

Here we go, this is going to be awful: It's a day late, I've had barely any sleep the last few days and I go overseas tomorrow (for which I am yet to start packing!).

This essay will seek to compare and contrast the works and contributions of Adam Curry and Dave Winer to the world of online communications as we know it today. These two are arguably two sides of the same coin. Dave Winer is more responsible for the architectural development of many web features, such as blogs, RSS and podcasting. Adam Curry, while not credited with having any notable technical skills, is renowned for popularising podcasts. What we seek to examine here is how these two contributors to the popularisation of podcasting have brought to the table, how they brought it and where their efforts overlap.

The crux of the work Dave Winer is really responsible for is in RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Dave Winer’s contribution to podcasting stemmed from several requests for auidoblogs in 2001 (Wikipedia 2009). He answered this call by implementing audio components into his RSS feeds. He demonstrated that it was possible to stream music through RSS by enclosing a grateful dead song into his usual feed. Dave took this innovation and developed “Radio Userland” and challenged other developers to find a way to further support and advance his RSS music system. What evolved, through the contributions of Kevin Marks and Adam curry was a way to download an RSS and hand it to an iPod through iTunes.

Adam Curry is the man who made podcasting popular. Dave Winer set the groundwork, but Adam Curry gave the technology legs. Using Radio Userland Adam Curry launched a podcast called “Daily Source Code” (Wikipedia 2009) which basically operated as your standard radio show, just on the internet. It has been said (Wikipedia 2009) that Curry saw himself as the celebrity for this new medium. Curry has worked on numerous podcasts since Daily Source Code but has apparently kept it alive. He has also been sighted on second life advertising from “Curry Castle”.

What the analysis of these two contributors illustrates is the creative, innovative ways a seemingly arbitrary implementation can lead to. Dave Winer was given a challenge by his readers, developed a tool to deliver audio files in small increments and a system to utilise it. Adam Curry saw the potential and created material that was worth accessing through the medium. Now the internet has implemented all manner of different ways to implement streaming audio and video. The Canadian Prime Minister is a podcaster! (Wikipedia 2009)

Reflecting on what I have learned here I would say that I associate most with Adam Curry. I get excited when some new innovation hits the street (metaphorically speaking of course) and start thinking up ways to make use of it. Take virtual machines for example: With Windows 7’s implementation of an XP virtual machine I can’t stop thinking of ways to get more mileage out of my computer now!

References:
Wikipedia. (2009). Dave Winer. Retrieved 15^th September from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer#Podcasting
Wikipedia, (2009). Daily Source Code. Retrieved 15^th September from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Source_Code
Wikipedia, (2009). Adam Curry. Retrieved 15^th September from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/adam_curry#podcasting
Wikipedia, (2009).History of podcasting. Retrieved 15^th September from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_podcasting

Yes, it's pretty crap. Yes I'm the sod that left it this late. No I probably won't learn from my mistakes and get it done faster next time.

Topic 5

Question 1:
The many faces of me.
Ok, to attempt an exhaustive list is a bit daunting but here with the major ones:
CSU (unified login)
Facebook
Skype
Email accounts
News webiste subscriptions
This blog (it's a Google login, so it extends to several other domains)
Steam (unified online games provider)

Do I practice multiple identities?
No. I have no interest in pretending to be something I'm not. As someone with a keen interest in existential philosophy, I can't say I'm that attached to the one identity I do practice :-P
What differs from community to community online is quantity of information I share. I've stated this before in earlier posts that Facebook holds the most information I'm prepared to divulge online and even that could be considered somewhat candid by some standards. For all other accounts it's usually the bare minimum that they ask for. This blog has been a bit of an exception, I put up a photo of myself.

What does it or should it not say about me?
Everything apart from my Facebook account is worksafe. I don't feel like I have a point to make through social commentary or a burning need to publicize an interest in genital piercings (that was hypothetical, for the record). So my online presence for the most part has been quite transparent. Even the content of my Facebook account is far from truly offensive (with consideration to which culture you're from and what actually offends you. A picture of me eating a ham sandwich is offensive in some cultures).

I do like to write a lot don't I?....
Anyway, I continues!

Question 2:
A social architect is the person responsible for engineering the foundations of a social network. They are the ones who establish what will happen and how it will happen. What actually happens usually exceeds the expectations of a social architect but they are the ones who get the ball rolling.

Who could go past world of warcraft for this one.
Objective: Level your avatar through the skills provided to you and by interacting with the social network of other people leveling their avatars. There are many secondary things you can do, including professions where you make and sell items or offer services to other players. But these all serve to assist in the advancement of your character level. Once level capped the quest for better equipment begins. In questing for better equipment you are forced into participating with 9+ other players to venture into team oriented dungeons. Which brings us to:
Rules of engagement:
The basic communication rules that permeate all other social networks apply here. Be polite and civil, no abuse or harassment. It's possible to report issues to in game moderators if there is a breach but the ques for attention can be so long that it's only worth bringing really serious issues to their attention.
Where the evolution of rules of engagement has really shone is in individuals capacity to organise themselves into groups to achieve tasks. All manner of class based techniques have come into existence that were never documented as a part of the original game. These instances of new rules have been picked up by the architects which I will now elaborate on.
The social architects here:
The game developers are constantly running the game through an evolutionary life cycle. From the start the grouping features provided were a meeting stone that you clicked on and it would randomly group you with other players. Now the feature has evolved to the point where you can interact with a database of players and their stats to assemble the most appropriate party you need.

Left 4 Dead
Because I like games...
Seriously though, Left 4 Dead is an online zombie killing shooter game.
The objective is simple, get to the end of the campaign alive using the resources provided. Simple?
Rules of engagement:
Don't shoot your teammates for one.
There are a lot of communication features built into this game that have made fast communication easy and efficient. There is even a voice over IP component that allows players to communicate vocally.
While playing the game there are a lot of unwritten co-operative rules that you learn as you play. Like rescuing your teammates when they're tangled with zombies, or healing them with a medkit to sharing supplies.
Unique features:
Left 4 Dead is run exclusively out of a meta-gaming program called Steam. Steam is a social network unto itself for gamers to form relationships with each other across games. The game itself really fosters a strong bond between you and your teammates by characterizing the avatars really well and by really making you care for them. You want to see them succeed. The urgency and companionship that accompanies it builds real relationships with real people. A lot of my friends play this game on a regular basis with the same group. None of them have ever met in person.
The social architect:
I have a great deal of respect for the architects behind Steam and games like Left 4 Dead. They really know what they're doing when it comes to online communities as they have been responsible for developing on of the biggest distributors of online games in recent years. They have made it cheap and easy and are ALWAYS listening to feedback and they make real changes in good time at no cost to the end user. It's a work ethic we don't see enough of to be honest.

Topic 4: Question 2 & 3

Q2)
a) Three ways of providing users with more control:
1) Customization of their online identity within the community can help them build a confidence of self and individuality. This in turn contributes to the identity of the community at large.
2) Strong participants can be given moderator or leader positions on the proviso that they adhere to some guidelines. Giving control to respected community members can help bolster a networks confidence. Conversely appointing the wrong person can damage the interactions of a community. Much like appointing wrong people to managerial positions, something I've become all too familiar with lately... (Yes, I'll take shots at them in whatever medium to whoever will listen)
3) Allow user created content and modules to be integrated. Facebook are a shining example of this one. All manner of applications and games from quizzes to glorified RSS feeds; all user created.

b)
Big stand out point here for me was the information regarding hosts. I noticed in a lot of the sessions we had I often found myself falling into something of a host role. I'm not a domineering person, or not intentionally if anyone gets that vibe, but I often found myself assisting with the direction of the discussions or helping other users to work whatever program we were using at the time. We all deferred to Ken seeing as he's our lecturer but I got the feeling he wanted someone to sit in the hosts chair.
I know we were never in any one environment long enough for real hosting to occur. The kind of practices a long term host would need to develop though are more centered around mediating the moral code of the users: making sure that a pleasant environment is maintained.
The key to that is reinforcing civil exchanges and encouraging users to interact, usually by giving them purpose to interact. In our sessions everyone was polite and civil. I think it helps though that we are studying these environments from a meta level. Perhaps we would run into conflicts if we were immersed in a stronger, more long term community.
I'm sure there's three points mingled in there.

c)
The reasons one needs to develop a set of rules of engagement in these environments is primarily because so much power is automatically awarded to your average user. As we saw when we used LC-MOO there are a variety of different ways the content in the right pane could be manipulated so all other users were seeing something they didn't choose. It is also possible to create objects and leave them lying around which can be manipulated to a degree by others. All of this is possible at an entry level too. With this much power, when coming together to work on large scale open source projects, as I envisage might be a good use for these types of environments, it is integral that users know exactly how to behave so as they don't disrupt or destroy the work of another. Given how these environments can also be populated with varying numbers of people it is important to know the correct way to get someones attention and feedback and also how to respond in that environment.
In my mind I see these tools as sort of software construction sites, and on a construction site you need safety equipment and rules and protocols with how you conduct yourself on site. I feel this analogy translates well here.
The need for these rules, in the context of document sharing systems, is somewhat lessened, not so much in necessity but in contents. Less power equals less policy and procedure. An individual user can't be as potentially dangerous to a community when it's only documents being shared (true the contents of the documents is important).

Q3)
a)
I tried, I really tried to organise the list of sites into educational and non-educational. But I just can't do it in good conscience. They all have the potential to afford educational opportunities. True, some more than others. So for the sake of having a list:
More Educational: Yahoo!, YouTube, Ning, LinkedIn, Delicious, Teachertube, RevYu, Digg, bubbl.us & reddit.
These sites all offer immediate educational yield.

Of these, the ones that offer the most potential for an educational environment are:
Ning, Teachertube & bubbl.us
They appear to have the richest potential.

While still arugably possessing educational value these are the bottom runners that one could argue are better time wasters than educational tools. Having said that it does not necessarily diminish their value as social networking tools:
Bebo, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr.

For professional development I'm going to stick with: Ning, Teachertube & bubbl.us
All of the other options feel a little too undisciplined to be truly effective in the workplace.

Topic 4: Question 1

Question 1:

a) How would I manage content in a blog?

A blog needs a purpose. An online community needs a purpose: a shared purpose. The blogs we have established and collaborated on are united in our efforts to understand and broaden our knowledge of social networks.

In this, our blogs could kind of be seen as meta-blogs: Blogging about blogs.

It’s our individual responsibility to make sure the content we include in our blog is accessible to our audience, our audience being each other for the time being.

We provide this accessibility through formatting and language choice.

Using blogger most of the formatting has been resolved for us in the way the entries are archived and the way feedback is provided. We do have control over how we space our content and where, in the swarm of posts, we insert an entry (via a backdating option).

Accessibility is also weighted on language choice appropriate to your audience. Given that this environment that we’re interacting in has been somewhat informal my language choice has been somewhat informal to match. Language choice helps to set the tone of a community and affect the way communication transactions take place.

b) Google’s blogger service is simple and useful for our current ends because of its simplicity. It contains enough versatility to manage a steady stream of blogs. One might argue that it meets its needs, if its needs are to provide a skewed flow of information from a dominant source to a listening, sometimes commenting audience. There isn’t a great deal of room for growth and change at a user level, but as the market evolves and users demand more the site owners will likely renovate the site. Community feedback, like I said, is limited in that comments are about the most that can be returned (although the content of those comments can be quite creative). Allowing members to gradually take more control isn’t something the author of the blog has a lot of say in. They can only do so much within the sites environment. Growth of the community is certainly possible, but will more likely be achieved through networking with other social network sites. (Some friends of mine regularly tout their blog on facebook)

Soooo tired....

Topic 3

Question 1: The battle for wesnoth.
I'm afraid at this point I don't have the time nor the bandwidth to get the battle for wesnoth running. But as a veteran of World of Warcraft (I've been clean for almost two years now though) I am VERY familiar with online gaming. As a matter of fact I did an assignment in 2007 on the nature of interpersonal communication and socialisation in online games. What I discovered was that it was quite a difficult discourse to break into oftentimes. Most participants too impatient to assist the newbies. You find helpful people though and I know I did my best to educate newbies in the ways of the world (of warcraft). I participated in several guilds (sometimes simultaneously with different characters) and as a part of that involvement I met some very interesting people and had a great deal of real conversations with people, some of which I am still friends with even after having ceased playing. So if the point of this question was to personally evaluate the merit behind social interaction in online games then I say this: Some of the experiences and memories I've had in online gaming are just as fond in my mind as those I've had out with friends physically. We can debate the scientific and psychological merits or flaws in this environment but there is overwhelming evidence that complex, meaningful social interactions are happening in these environments nowadays.

Question 2: Mobile computing research.
Wifi technology advantages for E-Learning.
This article documents many ways in which mobile phones can be used in a learning environment. Some of the applications of this technology that jumped out at me were:

Use of a mobile device in the classroom:
This one is right at the bottom of the article but it really jumped out at me. Use applications on our mobile phones to submit feedback to the lecturer at the front of the class. This can extend beyond submission of text answers to diagrams or whatever detailed response is needed. It also helps to reduce the stigma of chirping up with completely the wrong answer or input. One other side effect is that with the mobile phones occupied with class interaction they won't be a distraction. The program exemplified here was 'classtalk'.

Gaming & Simulation:
The premise here is that students use a program on a hand held device that they use to view a digital layer of the world around them. A simulated quantity of data overlain on the real world that they are able to access in relation to where they are physically (done with GPS technology). The value for low cost simulated real world training here is quite noteworthy.

There are many other opportunities already, mostly involving ease of communication through social networks and sms. Those two points I found the most intriguing though.



Getting there... On to topic 4.

Topic 2

Question 1: Facebook.
I've had a Facebook profile since 2007 and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned for my personal security the whole time I've been using it. I remember there being some controversy over who owns the rights to the media when it is uploaded to the site. I'm still not clear whether Facebook get ownership or we, the users, retain the rights.

a) I've always thought Facebook is a bit of an intimidating force. Recent news articles have reaffirmed this with Facebook hackers breaking into peoples accounts, locking out the owners then conning their friends into wiring money to overseas bank accounts.
I understand that there has to be a balance between ethics, security and usability. Without the ease of interaction facebook probably wouldn't have become the hit that it is.
There will always be security loopholes, there will always be people calling for tighter security and there will always be people breaking through the security. So I am of the opinion that we need to take some personal responsibility in learning as much as we can about how these networking sites operate and protect ourselves as much as we can without relying solely on the provider.

b) What do I think the difference is between social cognition and visual cognition? Is the word choice here deliberate? Am I being asked for my opinion here without 20 references and a verbose description given from the third person? If I were to hazard a guess right now, before looking up the definitions (as I'm going to shortly) I would say that social cognition is ones ability to comprehend and participate in social interactions. Visual cognition being ones ability to recognize and interact with visual stimuli. Now, be right back while I hit wikipedia and dictionary.com...

(time passes)

What do ya know? I was right (pretty much). The significance of this question I think though is to explore how our social interactions have drifted towards the visual interactions via a computer screen. So ones aptitude at visual cognition has little bearing on their social cognition. Which I guess is one explanation why the more socially inept have fewer problems interacting over the internet.

Question 2: Second Life
I have used second life in the past and my experience of it was rather unpleasant, so much so that I'd rather not revisit it just for the sake of this question. Mark me down if necessary but I'd sacrifice a few marks versus going back there. I found it to be an enormous egocentric chaotic mess. Peoples attention spans are so short for the most part if you can blurt out a life history within 12 seconds of them greeting you they get bored, insult you and fly away. There is user made content everywhere, which requires micro-transactions to build I might add. This user created content is, for the most part amateurish and haphazard. Forgive me if I'm being cruel here but the imagery that comes to mind when I think of second life is that of spoiled children. They have been provided an environment that can be developed completely by the whims of their ego. While I'm making sweeping generalisations here, I can only comment of my own experience, and those weren't great.

Question 3: Online Persona
I have done my best to be consistent in my online presence. I don't seek to misinform anyone of my identity. What I do practice from account to account is how much information I give away. For things like Facebook I have disclosed as much on that network as I am prepared to on an online environment. Every other online persona I own is a lite version of that. Even my facebook profile I do my best not to give anything of real value away (although one might argue some of my photos are incriminating). Because of how much I use facebook and because of the nature of the information I have been reticent to accept friend requests from people in this class that I haven't first spoken with to some length.

Question 4: Online identity and your state of presence.
At the time of writing this the document containing the reading was not available for reflection. As is the nature of the web I will improvise and pull the necessary information from another *cough* reliable *cough* source: Wikipedia.

Phising: This is the practice whereby fraudsters try to trick people into disclosing confidential information by masquerading as the organisations the user is involved with. Preventative measures involve educating the community at large of this threat and how to identify phishers. Usually it's just a good idea to err on the side of caution. If they really are from the group they represent they will respect your caution. Technological measures to prevent phishing are also available like digital certificates of authenticity and the like but ultimately these are really only an aid to the educated user.

Pharming: This is when a hacker re-routes internet traffic from one site to another through whatever means are available at the time. This coupled with phishing can be an effective way of swindling people out of their information.

Privacy invasion: As the name implies, this is the invasion of ones privacy. When personal information is posted on the internet under secure means, it is an invasion of privacy for someone else to access that without authorisation and a step worse to publish the information elsewhere or use it for their own ends.

Identity theft: This is where someone attempts to masquerade as someone else using the personal information of the person they are mimicking. This is prevalent only many social networking sites in regard to celebrities. There are usually a solid handful of accounts claiming to be the real deal. In more severe cases (not to trivialise pathetic fans or anything) people who invade privacy by using phishing and pharming can garner enough information to successfully thieve someone's identity. Using this information it can even be possible in some cases to persuade more organisations that you are who you are impersonating than the original victim. Is this a statement of our societal values? Hmmm...

LC-MOO session

As I said to anyone who would listen on the day, this reminded me of my MUD (Multi User Dungeon) days. Which was basically this environment but restricted the actions of the users in such a way that it could be considered a game.

While there is quite a learning curve for this kind of environment I could see this kind of environment as being extremely useful for educational purposes. Pre-build your environment, bring a class in and conduct a very interactive lesson. This would work pretty well with the class in the same location or dispersed, as we did.

I can see a necessity for a set of rules for communication and interactions sake. As there is limited screen space, too many people doing too much at any given time causes visual overload. Not to mention there are practices in those environments that are just plain rude. Like spamming (the repeated display of the same message) or any number of other character interaction mechanics, like the forceful display of pictures afforded from the picture viewer object.

So in summary, powerful, but potentially messy. Which is kind of a rule when you think about it. The more powerful and versatile a product, the more potential for mess there is.

Topic 1: Question 3

Subject: Sydney Morning Herald Website: Nielsen's Heuristic Evaluation
Sender: tbanks02@postoffice.csu.edu.au
From: tbanks02@postoffice.csu.edu.au (NHE)

system=Sydney Morning Herald Website
date=2009-08-20 04:11:43
comment=
q1=7
q2=7
q3=4
q4=7
q5=7
q6=7
q7=7
q8=5
q9=5
q10=3