Tuesday 30 September 2014

The Third dive into the Digital World

Future of the Internet

• A description of 3 devices you think will become obsolete, including a
justification.

My List for the Top 3 things that will and must die in the future of technology.

1. The darn fax machine.

As our paperless society draws closer and close to eliminating the need to cut down trees. ( I kind of like trees and oxygen and that whole breathing thing in fact, very attached to the notion at least) But still when we go into the office buildings around the country there it is the big, bulky always jamming, never enough paper, always out of ink scanner printer and fax machine.
Oh I'll work but first go slay the dragon on the fourth floor

A fax is for those too young is like taking a picture of a document and when it arrives at its sent destination is printed. how bazaar is that, in the age of computers and digital signature and emails we still feel the need to use the more ancient of devices to send data.
Inside of a fax machine looks like ancient Greece
2. The wrist watch and phone watches are classic but not practical

a.Hey buddy what time is it?
b. Time to get a watch!
a. Wait i still have my phone on me because I never put it down!

The watch is kind of a novelty and always good to have one encase you forget the phone at home but who can really afford to leave their phone anywhere. I remember in my youth being very much apposed to the idea of having a phone as then anyone could get a hold of me. mostly my parents checking up to see if i was dead or not you, you know the really bothersome calls.
Nope Mom i'm not dead! .. Yes I'm sure
A watch back then even seemed pretty useless as it only did one thing unless you were the cool kid with a calculator watch. Those watches could then two boring jobs math and tell me when I had to be home so my parents don't think i'm dead.
Back in the day this is what we used to pass the time.

All bad puns aside the wrist watch is already dead even if apple tries to make a very pretty one that can read my heart beat, which is just kinda creepy when you think of the N.S.A. literally listening to your heart. Plus pocket watches are where it is at.

3. Stand alone mp3 players.
I still have one of these somewhere 

as with walk-mans and disc mans before them Dedicated mp3 devices may have their days numbered. I Pointed out above that everyone carries a cellphone and most have a headphone Jack built into them so why not put some music on that? better question if i can put music on it why do i need a separate device to play music at all.

I doesn't make sense to carry duplicates well people still use them? i have no doubt just as i have heard people swear that music only sounds good from vinyl and that came back in a big way in resent years. Also with the release of Guardians of the Galaxy mix tapes have come back into style but just because it popular doesn't mean the darn things aren't obsolete.



• what the Internet will look like 10 years from now?
Imp3ncluding an explanation on why you think it will develop this way

I have a dream of where the internet can go from here. there are two paths one looks much the same as today a reasonable free market of ideas and information floating around for people from all over the world to experience and grow with. The other path is a dark one, It is not so far fetched to believe if Internet service providers ISPs begin to charge both the customer and producers of content that the internet landscape will be change drastically.

Website owner who can afford the ransom to be put on the "fast lane" networks? the ISPs just simply have to say "we are stopping you from running your site, we aren't removing it from the internet but you will only be able to be accessed through "normal lane". that normal lane is much slower then the speeds we have now, ISPs were trying to argue that 4 mb/s was fast enough for everyone but what about streaming sites that need to buffer. what about downloading larger files suddenly we are back to the age of dial-up.

So the ISPs are directly harming us by their actions but the side effect is slower speeds unless you pay them. As for that website owner, less traffic comes to the site because people have troubles loading it so they just move onto a site that could page. Soon all the smaller sites whom traffic has been eccentrically diverted goes offline because there isn't enough ad revenue going through. The big websites that spent the money survived and even thrived as they are offering the superior product now, but before where criticize could had been easily made now the website fears to post any negative comments against the ISP because they don't want to end up in the slow lane.

The same could happen to consumers who complain about the ISPs well that voice is easy to silence if they don't have a wide such a wide audience to speak too. So this is my fear that Big business will be blinded by pure profits and greed and acidently kill that which made the internet special to all of us, the freedom of choice.

The Second dive into the digital World

TWITTER is for twits
(I know nothing that has already been said)

For this dive into the world of blogging I dove into the best of the world of micro blogging to see how much value I could pull out of Twitter.com.


Q: What you learned about Twitter, and your opinion of it.

Twitter is blogging for the now. Information constantly pouring in from all over the world into one place. I could tell you that twitter was founded by Jack DorseyNoah GlassBiz Stoneand Evan Williams in San Francisco in 2006 and that the company only has 3300 employees working for them with a reported $664 million dollar profit in 2013 but also reportedly drink 585 gallons of coffee per week. As well being the parent company of Vine a video website in which all the videos are only 7 seconds long, it is kind of awe inspiring to see what people can do in 7 seconds. https://vine.co/
as you may be able to tell I'm more of a fan of visual storytelling and sound bits as most of my day is taken up by writing essays and apparently blogs now...along with group projects and the like so to be able to grab a bit size of entertainment is exactly what I am looking for. so I would say in general i like twitter but there is always a dark side.

o A brief discussion of some of the more common features of Twitter, e.g. how does a hashtag works.

So the actual Hash tag system i think is rather easy to describe. A system in which liked posts can be easily grouped together by a keep word or words. the genuine of the hash tag is that is can be any words or combinations as long as it starts with one of these babies "#" by adding one and adding a word all other post with the same tag are easier to find. It also can give extra meaning to the post as Twitter has a limited word counter to avoid lengthy post the Hash tag can help such as EXAMPLE .

o Advantages/disadvantages of Twitter compared to blogging.

Twitter 

Advantages 
-Short and to the point blogging
-easy tagging system
-easy to user interface (finding new content is fast and enjoyable with a simple design)

Disadvantages
-Hard to make a name because the large membership
- Restricted to only 140 characters. hard to convey complex ideas. 
- Little to no over site on content so very nasty tweets or misinformation spread.

Blogger

Advantages
-Allows for longer posts where twitter is limited to 140 characters, blogger is unlimited!
-Allows for greater degree of freedom of design and templates and total customizable 
-It's Free! And is attached to your google account because you can’t make one without it
Disadvantages
-Also lacks over site and blogs of varying degrees of evil and nasty. 

-finding new blogs is a special kind of pain, there is a next blog button but it was impossible to know what the blog was next.

-layout system is a joke. Difficult to navigate and edit. the system isn’t friendly to new users and thus creates a blog that Twitter simply doesn't have.

140 characters no more, the greatest disadvantage is also the greatest thing about twitter. The limited characters focuses a person’s writing to try and convey the point as simply as possible.  Where blogger seems to go on forever with really long posts about seamlessly nothing and never getting to the point. Perhaps it is my background in business but I prefer the straight forward approach.


o Include an example of misinformation that was spread using Twitter within the last six months.

After the release of the iPhone 6 an image was circulated around the net and on twitter that the new iPhone could be charged using the microwave. Some clever Photoshop to make it look like an official Apple product and enough people endorsing it there is bound to be one or two people try it out because I read it on the internet it must be true logic.


I can't imagine the result being pretty but this shows the power the internet has over most people and this should be a red flag for anyone who is diving into the Net for knowledge.

The First dive into the Digital World


The evaluation of Blogger (usability, usefulness, etc.).

This is a first impression on Blogger as I never have done anything remotely like this format before.
Closest thing to a "blog" as I have come before is Tumblr.com with the use of very quick sharing of information that is liked but fame on Tumblr is very fast and random. In the moment this is very kind of posts but often substance is put aside over style. So i would put Blogger higher on the usefulness scale as an individual blog does not normally cycle through as much content as Tumblr but in an age of sound bites and headline scanners Tumblr is the more attractive model of cheap fast blogging.

I have found blogger rather difficult to use as the system is not intuitive at all as in the template section should have allowed for me to alter the colours of the sections i was directly interacting with instead of forcing me to navigate through another menu and try and find what each section is called to edit the colour scheme.

Identify and discuss the online blogs you examined and their usefulness. Surf the WWW and find at least 3 blogs with subjects that are interesting to you One of the topics you blog about has to be current financial affairs.

The Three Blogs I looked at to get a sense of the blogging world are;


Wollay is a video game developer who successfully Kickstarted a game called Cube world. I choose this blog because I was one of the Kickstarter supporter and he used this blog to give weekly updates on the game to keep all those who back him up to date so we could follow his progress and crowd source solutions to problems with relative ease but by design the blog didn't update every day.

Positives: lots of information for the targeted audience.
Negative: long periods without updates.


Although not blogging in the classic sense of writing and posting pictures the Ning was a site founded by the Vlog brothers, John and Hank Green.

 The Vlog brothers have made a name for themselves on the internet, Thousands of people follow the lives of these two brothers on opposite cost having a conversation in their words to decrease world suck. Through years of growing a cult following these two brothers have donated Hundreds of thousands of dollars towards charity and projects to make life on this planet a little better for everyone. And it all start with DFTBA or "Don't Forget To Be Awesome"

Positive: Large, diverse conversations and lots of community involvement.

Negative: hard to find relevant financial Analysis


As far as financial blogs go it is slim pickings for un-bias of subjectively "good" blogs as everyone is coming from their own personal opinion on economic theory and how financial systems should possibly operate so an analysis is supposed to go off the only thing that is possibly relevant the data. The issue is that there is many ways of interrupting the data from historical and sociological perspectives. The experts in the field of economics don't have a clue because the economic models of how business works haven't been updated since the 50's and John Nash's game theory. So as you may gather I don't hold financial Blogs in the highest regards.

Positive: 
Well organized and intuitive design for a financial blog.

Negative: 
It’s a financial blog, not very exciting or interesting in comparison to other blogs on the Net.


Q: Discuss the place blogging holds in today’s availability of information,
and its advantages/disadvantages over more traditional formats such as newspaper and magazine.

Blogging is the future. We have seen repeatedly new papers and magazine sales decline as companies are embracing online marketing. At the same time the internet is a place where everyone has a voice and too often is the case with spur of the moment writing and publishing, a lot of half-assed poorly worded opinion comes out and it is ugly. With traditional media there are editors and multiple people writing on a wide variety of topics in a single issue. while the online is a single source often mislead into believing a truth. Print medias ability to be held to a certain standard while log for more frequent updating.

Summary- 
Print media

Advantages 
- More control over content. Real research must go into some articles.

- Larger budget investigations, research takes time and money and many bloggers have the type to blog but don’t have the money to do it as a day job.

-Overall presentation is designed to catch a person’s eye

Disadvantages
- slow on distribution. Long gone are the days of walking down to a newspaper stand to buy the paper.

- Slow to react. Digital media is instant, grabbing news from twitter is simply more up to date but sometimes less reliable

-Wastes natural resources to make. Not only the paper and ink to print but also the trucks that have to move newspapers and in the end a paper is thrown out and takes energy to recycle it back again.

Q: Also include a brief discussion of where you see blogging going in the
next 5-10 years.


Blogging isn't the end all be all as in the video game crash of the 80's too many items of poor quality flooding the market caused the overall value to decrease. As to I believe is the way of the Blogger sphere, this isn't to say there is no good blogs out there that are informative or interesting but I don't believe in its current form it can survive. This does not pertains to classic word blogs but also the video blogging or Vlogging as the cool kids say. Over saturation of the market is bad for business and the only ones that can survive will be the ones that can differentiate themselves from the herd.

The beginning of MY Digital World

Now for those who know me they may say hey Molson! Why is your blogger call you Molzahn. It is true from time to time I will use Molzahn as different handle but in this instance it is more to avoid confusion with Molson-Coors brewing company. I am officially not affiliated with them.

This blog is a platform to examine the internet and report back my personal findings.