Facebook.

Remember when Facebook was fast, purpose-built and generally beat the pants off MySpace? That doesn’t necessarily seem to be the case anymore. With all the extra bloat, advertisements and the insufferable “apps” available now it’s hard to remember what the real purpose of Facebook was- To communicate.

It seems like once they opened registration to all, allowed user-created apps and tried to keep being everything to everyone the purpose and Facebook message has disappeared.

 

The Pros

* They have great technology behind their site and have developed many interesting technologies around their core applications.

* Facebook is still very “light” compared to other social networks (e.g. MySpace)

* Large user base (who hasn’t heard of Facebook?)

* Find people you’ve been searching for from way back (also see Cons for the opposite of this)

 

The Cons

* Insufferable annoying Apps that seem to do absolutely nothing but clutter my “requests” section. I don’t care if someone superpoked me or gave me a flower. I can’t believe people payto send these things.

* Open to everyone. (This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as long as the openness doesn’t contribute to what Facebook has become)

* Too many ads, too much clutter. Get back to what Facebook was supposed to be!

* People you didn’t want to know you or check up on you can (unless you block them)

* Allows for some “social stalking” How many times have you talked to someone else on Facebook in real life only to have them bring something up from the social network? Great.

* Time vampire. I believe that there are quite a few people out there addicted to this particular social network.

 

Conclusion

While I use Facebook sparingly, I can say that it has a purpose but it has been a bit over-done. I believe that simple is better. Facebook, can we have the site from about a year ago back? Can there be a “bloat-free” lite version available? How do I get rid of all the junk that has been added over the years? Please make us a version that is simple, works and provides what Facebook originally set out to do.

 

In the meantime, check Jake’s blog on Game of thrones because I’m such an avid fan of it too. And I regretted not having read the book before watching the series because If any of you happened to watch the last episode of the previous season you would understand and those who read the book wouldn’t have a near death experience or heart attack like I did when I watched it.

And these people too. Hahahahah


 

New age of Confessional Media

 

For most of us, the idea of sharing the intimacies of our life with a stranger would be anathema. Yet more and more young people are feeling compelled to reveal their secrets to everyone on the world wide web.

Let me introduce you to PostSecret. PostSecret, is an ongoing Community Mail Art project, created by Frank Warren, in which people mail their secrets anonymously on a homemade postcard. Select secrets are then posted on the PostSecret website, or used for PostSecret’s books or museum exhibits.

 

The concept of the project was that completely anonymous people decorate a postcard and portray a secret that they had never previously revealed. No restrictions are made on the content of the secret; only that it must be completely truthful and must never have been spoken before.

 

Entries range from admissions of sexual misconduct and criminal activity to confessions of secret desires, embarrassing habits, hopes and dreams.The secrets are meant to be empowering both to the author and to those who read it.

 

Now, from sending post cards, people are starting their own online blogs and blogging out confessions and secrets, without revealing their identity of course (some actually would). However, Why do they do it? And what are the private costs of putting up their secrets online?

 

Because of technology, the world has been made smaller. But the constant use of social networks and online platforms seems to have made us lonelier. It is ironic but it’s something that’s been going on for awhile now. Everyone’s always on their phones, we rather text than have decent conversations.

 

And I suppose this is the reason why so many people are turning to confessional media platforms like Postsecrets to tell their secrets to. Also, many people uses the computer as a privacy screen. Tell your secrets but no one will know who you are.

 

Confessional media is slowly on the rise, people are turning to blogs and strangers to post their confessions. It is an outlet for most, because most of us tend to keep our feelings in. This alarming trend is most definitely something for us to think about.

 

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Blogging for SEO

 

The art of blogging has been around for decades, but many businesses are just starting to realize the true impact blogs can have on their search engine marketing and SEO campaigns. The result: Business-related blogs are popping up everywhere, proving to be a very marketable and profitable SEO tool.

 

Blogs can have the following affects on your Search Engine Optimization campaign:

  • Help your company find its niche
  • Increase the traffic coming to your site
  • Sending your depth of content and page rank soaring
  • Make you a fast friend of the search engine

Every site in the industry could receive a healthy boost in the search engines simply by posting regularly to a company blog. So why haven’t you started one yet?

 

The strength of your blog lies in its relevant, keyword-rich content and its ability to attract inbound links. Because blog entries are usually written on industry-related topics, the search engine will view your posts as being linked together and classify it as relevant content. Your daily posts on industry news, marketing campaigns, product releases, acquisitions or all-purpose general conversation will all count toward your page count as well as your perceived expertise. While creating your entries, it is very important to keep your keywords in mind. There is no need to pack them awkwardly into your sentences, but a few mentions of your company’s targeted terms will help your organic search engine rankings.

 

Blogs can do amazing things for page count. Some blog host applications, such as Moveable Type, will generate a unique HTML page for each individual entry. That means one new page for every entry you write, giving you lots of new pages and a big jump in PageRank. This is an excellent way to create pages for search engine optimization in a short amount of time. A blog entry a day may be all you need to send your page count soaring. This will also help your indexing as search engines typically prefer large sites over smaller ones, working under the notion that large sites are more likely to offer expert opinion than smaller ones. Frequent blogging will ensure that your site is spidered more frequently than sites that do not use blogs.

 

Search engines love blogs for many reasons. First, blogs are usually written in a simple format making them exceedingly easy for spiders to work through. There is no Flash or JavaScript standing in the way. The page code is often very clean, text rich HTML. Secondly, blogs give search engines exactly what they want – original content written in a natural way. What could be better? Search engines love blogs so much that many, including Google, have their own blog search which allows readers to search for information found specifically on blogs. Without a blog, you don’t even stand a chance of showing up on that search. Can you afford that?

 

Something new for our blogs

To embed a YouTube in a post

Simply grab the YouTube URL and paste it into a blank line of your post. WordPress will automatically read it as a video to be embedded and size it appropriately for you.

Just make sure that the URL you choose looks similar to the one below. Delete any ampersands and whatever follows them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY4hdQK7o9g

To specify the height and width of your video, you’ll need to surround that URL with embed tags, as shown in the video.

To embed other types of videos in your posts

  • Vimeo works the same way as YouTube above
  • Check out the related menu on this page for a list of instructions for embedding videos from many different sites

 

Week 2.2 Readings

It is said that s good but critical design will often challenge its audience’s preconceptions and expectations thereby provoking new ways of thinking about the object, its use, and the surrounding environment. Critical Designers generally believe design that provokes, inspires, makes us think, and questions fundamental assumptions can make a valuable contribution to debates about the role technology plays in everyday life.

 

Steerings emphasis on doing things in a literary or generic fashion actually harms one’s ability to mess with people’s heads, which is kind of his end goal. He has the classic science fiction objects such as ray guns, time machines, robots, humanoid androids, urban battle suits, two-way wrist communicators and so forth, and such objects, which are well known to science fiction thematics, are actually a very small part of the galaxy of potentially thinkable objects. Why is it that science fiction writers have spent so much time and intellectual effort on this small set of imaginary objects? Well, it’s because it suits their literary purposes; they can be made to look good on paper and they’re good participants in dramatic situations.

 

Design, I think, has a lot to offer. I’m wondering if there isn’t a much larger space in design fiction than we thought. Maybe there’s something beckoning over the horizon that’s not design and not futurism but just something we might call speculative culture. Like, can we find a set of principles or a way to grapple this larger set of social possibilities? Steerling listed a few of the approaches that he thought both design and science fiction have in common: scientific experiment, scenario work of all kinds, user observation studies, simulation, story boards, story telling, flow charts, analytical software, interaction design, brainstorming, historical analogy, extrapolation and last but not least mash-ups.

Design Fiction

What do we understand about Design Fiction?

Design Fiction uses fictional scenarios to envision and explain possible futures for design. Sterling spoke about Design Fiction and emphasized that the key term in Design Fiction is neither Design, nor Fiction:  it is diegesis.  His current definition of Design Fiction is that it is “the deliberate use of diegetic  prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.”  Diegesis invokes terminology from film studies to refer to “things which are inside the word of the fiction”.

For example: diegetic music in a film would be a song playing on a radio in a scene; non-diegetic music would be underscoring that the audience hears, but which isn’t present in the narrative world.  When Sterling references diegetic prototypes he is invoking a concept by film scholar David Kirby that has also been referenced by Julian Bleecker.

Kirby on the other hand uses the term diegetic prototypes to “account for the ways in which cinematic depictions of future technologies demonstrate to large public audiences a technology’s need, viability and benevolence”.  This is a central aspect of design fiction:  it uses a fictional frame to make an argument about a potential future by demonstrating that future in a context that a large public audience can understand.

A common example of design fiction that many people understand is the gestural interfaces in the Spielberg Film Minority Report.  Gestural interfaces had been around and viable for years but there was no narrative to drive their use. The film gave the public a concrete narrative of gestural interaction that was compelling and memorable.

A design fiction has to imagine a culture of use for a technology or design that has implications for how it is executed and built.  Using fiction to frame design also affords the consideration of the values, meanings, and implications of the design from an ethical and political standpoint, often highlighting social elements of a design’s use and potential misuse.

 

Vlogging

 


Vlogging, short for Video Blogging, is blogging through the medium of video. A blog is any web page updated on a regular basis with discrete entries, often delivered to a viewer who has subscribed to the blog and reads it using a third-party interface, or RSS aggregator, rather than visiting the website directly.

The first known videoblog entry was on November 27, 2000. Although the early 2000s were marked by attempts to create videoblogs, vlogging didn’t truly emerge until 2004, when small communities of vloggers began to pop up and big media started to notice vlogging.

Vlogging is still small today, but online video is starting to take off, with websites like Google Video and YouTube offering free storage space. Vlogging isn’t necessarily an action video. It is a blogger who is using video to get his or her message across instead of the standard written blog. The blogger is actually speaking his message on a video rather than having followers read it. That way, his or her readers can see body language and facial expressions that make the encounter more real and personal.

What’s a blog?

Blogs appear on the news pretty often these days. For example, a reporter is tipped to a story by a blog, or a blog reports another angle on a story. Blogs show up in magazines a lot, too. What are blogs? There are now millions of them — where did they all come from?

One of the things that is so amazing about blogs is their simplicity.

Think about a “normal Web site.” It usually has a home page, with links to lots of sub-pages that have more detail. Most traditional Web sites follow this format. If the site is small, it is sort of like an online brochure. If it is large, it is like an electronic encyclopedia.

A typical Web site has a home page that links to sub-pages within the site. CNN.com is typical of this genre. The CNN site contains thousands of articles all organized into big categories. The categories and all the latest stories are accessed from the home page.

A blog is much much simpler:

  • A blog is normally a single page of entries. There may be archives of older entries, but the “main page” of a blog is all anyone really cares about.
  • A blog is organized in reverse-chronological order, from most recent entry to least recent.
  • A blog is normally public — the whole world can see it.
  • The entries in a blog usually come from a single author.
  • The entries in a blog are usually stream-of-consciousness. There is no particular order to them. For example, if I see a good link, I can throw it in my blog. The tools that most bloggers use make it incredibly easy to add entries to a blog any time they feel like it.

In this article, you will have a chance to enter the world of blogging. You will even learn how to create your own blog and publish it to the world.

Week 1.2 workshop

With prior experience in bloggings, I’ve learnt how to start up my own blog and change my themes, layouts and other settings according to what I want. There are many advantages to knowing HTML, and believe it or not, you don’t really need to know much, and once you get the logic of it, it’s actually pretty easy to learn. Here are a few examples of what HTML looks like:

 

  • Images: <img src="http://yourimageurl.com" alt="cool image"/></img>
  • Links: <a href="http://yourblog.com" target="_blank"/>Awesome Blog</a>
  • Font size: <font size="6">Look at the size of the text!</font>
  • Font color:<font color="red">Look at the color of the text!</font>
Nowadays, when I need to do something in HTML and don’t know the code, I use Google. There are plenty of great resources, for instance w3schools.com has everything you need to know about HTML.
Another way to learn HTML is to look at your posts in HTML mode in your blog editor. I used this a lot when I wanted to have special text treatment or was learning how to imbed an image, or make a bulleted list. Trust me, I’m a slow learner, and this helped a lot.

Finally… practice, practice, practice. Code doesn’t stick in my head easily, but after blogging for the past almost five years, I can make an image with a link that opens a new page in my sleep. Which comes in handy because a lot of times code puts me to sleep. Anyway, learning HTML will really help you get started on being more independent and help you get a good start to pushing your blog to the next level.

 

 

 

I was paid to blog

Prior to this course, I’ve started blogging since I was 16 but have stopped for a couple of years now. The blog started off as a personal journal, going through my daily rants and thoughts. However, somehow viewership started to increase and I was asked to be part of a company that recuits bloggers with a certain amount of viewership. Advertisments are then being placed into our blogs through a simple copy and paste method of certain html codes. We are then paid either by advertorials, through blog posts or pay per click advertisments that are being displayed on our blogs. It was good at the start, seeing money roll in. However, I had to juggle many advertorial posts and my daily life, something I soon found hard to do with exams nearing in. I soon started procrastinating on my blogposts and updates on my blog got lesser in time. So did my viewership. It took up too much time and effort despite the money. I also realised that my posts were no longer personal. But filled with advertorials and posts that my readers wanted to read. But it was an experience and the networking I made during this couple of years was incredible. I’ve met so many different people of different backgrounds. Many from different professions blogged for passion, for fun as a side project but it is through their blogs that you get to see a different side to them. It was an incredible experience, and something that everyone should experience. Now all that’s left is a memory of my blog and all memories of its glory at Http://black-stilettos.blogspot.com