Facebook in the news again

Recently facebook has been in the news due to the amount of time that employees in the UK are spending on the site. It is in the news again, this time Facebook has angered mothers who choose to post pictures of themselves breastfeeding. In fact they are so angry that they have launched a petitionin the form of a Facebook group called "Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!". The group now has almost 7000 members. (http://www.stuff.co.nz/4193942a28.html) They are arguing that if women are allowed to breastfeed in public they should be allowed to on a website.

I personally find images of breastfeeding offensive but I see what their point is when they say that images of naked women and men for that matter are shown on the internet.

Virtual Reality or ONE Reality now? That is the question.

The Electronic Messages Act

Sure, it may seem like a good thing that this act came into force on the 5th of September but is it really going to make a difference and who is really to blame? I don't know about you but when I sign up to a new email account I NEVER sign up to receive mail from various categories and when I browse websites I NEVER sign up to receive newsletters, and guess what! I don't receive any spam, none whatsoever. All the emails I receive are ones that I want to.

What this blog is really about is that we shouldn't just be blaming "viral marketers" or whatever it is you want to call them because chances are at some point you agreed to receive the mail.

The best ways to avoid spam are to not sign up to anything (coz chances are if you are on one database you will end up on another) and when you sign up to things such as myspace and facebook don't use your everyday email. Use an email that you never use (or intend to use again).

Personally I don't think this Act will make an ounce of difference because most spam also comes from overseas and therefore is not covered under the law.

Cyberspace Goggles.

Russian artists have created wearable goggles that translate what the people wearing them see into the kind of visualisations used to represent the vision of robots, or cyberspace, in films from the 80s onwards.

Video available here.

I think it looks disorienting while possibly fun, although I have to admit that I'd mainly be interested in how people would react to you wandering around in a little VR visor.

Certainly raises issues about occupying digital spaces.

- Kevin.

Money for nothing (and books for free?)

Up-and-coming soon-to-be-novelist Bianca Zander is trying to raise $8000 to "enable [her] to write full-time for six months." She's using her blog Sponsor My Novel as a way to communicate with — and hopefully raise funds from — people she's never met. It's attracted a bit of attention already, with novelist Rachael King and poet Anna Jackson commenting on posts. (I'm not at all sure if they are actually posts from these people, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that they might be...)

There's also a Facebook group, and you can download an extract of the book as a PDF — again an innovative use of the Internet to reach a much larger audience than would have be traditionally possible.

The only problem there is that I — along with many of you reading this — hate reading off screens. That seems like a stupid thing to say because you could quite correctly say "But you're reading off a screen right now! You can't hate it that much!"

What I mean, of course, is that I hate reading anything longer than a few paragraphs off a screen. Reading news articles is fine because of the way they're presented on the web: as chunks of information often broken down into several separate pages, with an aesthetic similar to that of a broadsheet newspaper. Anything longer than that, or significantly more "book-like" in appearance, I usually print out. This is for one of several reasons, but mostly so that I can give such long-form writing the attention that it requires in order to be understood and consumed properly.

Cory Doctorow, in his essay "You Do Like Reading Off Screens," examines how people generally prefer to read full-length works of fiction in their native format: on paper. The main reason why people don't like reading off a screen, he says, is because computers weren't designed with that in mind, and especially now with the advent of always-on broadband Internet technology there are simply way too many distractions to provide an environment in which to properly read a book. Think about it: you can't curl up with a computer on a rainy afternoon, can you? As an aside, Doctorow's article on giving away e-books in order to push dead-tree version sales is as equally interesting a read.

Of course you could argue that emerging technology such as the Sony Reader will change the way we think about reading books, but for now such technology is fairly limited in its availability, and still relatively expensive. It's also cold, emotionless bits of electronic boards and metal, not a nice little paperback book. :)

Topping Up a Cellphone has never caused this much drama!

Cellphones are a vital part and make up a large part of what we see as technoculture today, and therefore this brings me to my next blog entry!

Its the 21st Century. Toping up your cellphone should not be a one hour experience. For me, this is not a problem as i am on contract, however, the other day i decided to top up my grandmas 'Telecom' mobile for her. Firstly, my grandma is 82 and has recently learnt how to text and therefore her phone credit goes flying out the window each time we top her up as she has become the texting pro and fills up much of her day sending texts.... to everyone....!

I was topping her phone up via credit card and therefore had to ring the customer service desk on the Telecom help line. My phone call was soon picked up by a male who had a distinct 'American' accent. He asked me what i wanted and i replyed that i needed to top up my grandmas phone with $50 credit. After taking my credit card details he said sure and said "one moment please i will do that for you now" returning 5 minutes later he said im sorry but the system is slow today and could you repeat your details. Anyway, to cut my extra long story short, i ended up staying on the line for almost 45minutes after he told me tht Telecom had recently set up there 'Top Up" office in the Phillipines and that i was actually talking to him on the other side of the world.

I ended up having a good old conversation with a stranger, finding out that his parents actually want to move to New Zealand, maybe Wellington or Palmerston North..... and that many customers get so angry with the slow service that they hang up on him... funny that!!

He told me that it wasn't the Phillipines with the slow internet connection tht was preventing my request from going through, but instead that it was New Zealands slow internet speed. What a coincidence to what we have previously discussed.

In the end i said farewell to my new found friend, and made sure i wasnt being charged for an overseas call, he reassured me tht i did in fact ring a 0800 number.

Next time i think ill just go and buy my grandma a top up card.

Minnie S

Blogs

This is the first time I have used a blog. Blogs are a form of web log that was first made in 1997 by John Barger. (www.robotwisdom.com) I visited a few blogs to find out what exactly a blog is and I realized there are advantages and disadvantages to having a blog site. The best feature of the blog is the latest brief articles appear at the top of the blog and normally in the form of short essays. The on-line community is built up by normal people commenting on the blog site about what they are interested in, so even normal people can be on-line journalist. Also in a blog the topic can be really broad from the bloggers’s personal lives to social issues, therefore blogs are a really free space to write their own opinions.

I think blogs are for sharing ideas with each other, a blog is not just for people to write and keep some information, articles and photographs about what they know, so the information may / or may not be true. Therefore when a netizen reads the information they may or may not agree that it is correct information. Netizens need to be careful when they read a blog because that is a just personal idea for a certain topic.

First post, New Media

So this is my first post and I find myself wandering what really is new media and technoculture... I can justify my lack of postings until today because for the past few months my family and I have been plagued with depression, cancer, deaths and outings (of the closet variety), but inspite of all these struggles, there was one thing that was constantly in the back of my mind, e-mail. Of course, I'm enrolled at university, so I must have a vested interest in the outcome of my papers, but I had come to a stage where I had lost any care for university. Luckily, Kevin Veale's reminder e-mail was there, like a shining light. So here I am, discussing the all encompassing nature that is new media. Whether you're facing struggles in your life, whether everything seems down and out, some things, such as e-mail seem like the only viable connection left in your life. Viable connection to what? That question seems a mystery, but it is the idea of a connection to another life that perpetuates the constant fixation upon it. From this idea, I built up how to somehow define what new media and technoculture is. They are very broad terms and so in order to understand the two terms I had to try to understand their purpose. The purpose for me is exactly that, to extend a connection, and a lively connection at that, to another life source. This is extremely apparent in the new medias such as facebook, bebo, myspace and many others. The idea of connection is the motivating factor for all society, whether from Maslow's hierarchy of needs, or by simply looking around us, the societal need for connection is a fact of life, and these new mediums are simply exposing that.

A web without science...

Via Science Commons, a FT columnist posits that the web isn't being used enough by science. This is ironic because the web is, at its most basic level, wholly scientific.

Snip:
"The world wide web was designed in a scientific laboratory to facilitate access to scientific knowledge. In every other area of life - commerce, social networking, pornography - it has been a smashing success. But in the world of science itself? With the virtues of an open web all around us, we have proceeded to build an endless set of walled gardens, something that looks [...] very little like a world wide web for science."

His argument is that the world of scientific research should make much better use of the basic function of the web, its ability to connect two hitherto unrelated points. This "web of interconnections" and its ability to allow people to connect the dots is what makes the World Wide Web so unbelievably powerful. "We gain not only the knowledge in the content," Boyle writes, "but the knowledge supplied by those who read the content, who make connections the original author could not."

The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007

The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 came into force today, and 95bFM has an interview with the heavily-Scottishly-accented Joe Stewart, spam fighter for the DoIA who have set up antispam.govt.nz in a bid to put a halt to mass-e-mail-marketers operating within NZ.

In space, no one will hear you pirating movies

As part of the Guardian Unlimited's "copyrights, copy wrongs" series, Cory Doctorow has taken a look at the impossiblity of creating a truly uncrackable DRM copy-protection scheme. Invoking every nerd's favourite movie, he says "it'd be easier to go into hyperspace".

Also, Facebook is planning to make its user's profiles publically searchable, so that now when you look up your own name on Google, a link to your Facebook will appear alongside the results.

And over on the Creative Commons weblog, Sony is to CC-license the (viral) marketing material for an upcoming BluRay promotion.

HBO buys rights to Second-Life machinima, promotes it as an oscar contender

Via BoingBoing; Major US cable TV Network HBO have bought the rights to machinima documentary created within Second Life, a wholly immersive online gameplay environment.

This is a pretty big deal; to quote Wagner James Au, "it's probably the biggest Hollywood purchase of a video which first aired on YouTube, and the most prominent distribution deal for a machinima project made in any 3D platform."

first time!

Greetings~

This is my first entry to the blog and I never done this before,,^^;;
I'm not so sure what2 write about but I thought I must post one today before its just too late.. k
Kevin mentioned in his entry it has to have a relevance to Technoculture and New Media so,,
I wanted to have a clear undrstndn of what that is so got the definition from Wiki~

New Media
Uniquely individualized information can simultaneously be delivered or displayed to a potentially limitless number of people.
All involved (publishers, broadcasters and consumers) share equal or reciprocal control over content.

Technoculture
Technoculture is a neologism, not currently in standard dictionaries, popularized by editors Constance Penley and Andrew Ross in a book of essays bearing that title.It refers to the interactions between, and politics of, technology and culture.echonoculture


well.. this is my first step to get started for my 5 remainin blog entries~ perhaps, I will have
some mre ideas and broad sense about what to write about after the lecture nxt week!
first time is always so hard~^^:;;

Shapshifter Concert

I Have taken this long to post my first blog because as each week has gone past i have struggled to think of something i thought was worthy of posting. However, after going to Shapeshifter (NZ drum and bass group) on Sunday night at Studio K Road i thought i may briefly talk about that and also post a video that i took at the concert.

After seeing Shapeshifter a number of times live, they have quickly become my favourite NZ band as they consistantly play a great set but more importantly (in my opinion) whenever they play live, it sounds very close to the sound of their recorded cd's. for me this is the sign of a great music group, because we all no how dissappointed we get when we here a band we like live and quite frankly the quality sucks as they cannot reproduce the sound to that of the quality recorded on cd. Now i dont want people replying to this saying that Shapeshifter is good live because they use manly samples and what not to create their sound. Despite this, it is all done live not to mention P Diggs unbelievable talent on the mic. His voice alone is amazing how he sing to the same quality that is voice sounds like on CD. Also, there are bands out their across all genres who are able to play great quality music live.

Anyway i just wanted to share with you what i thought of the concert and if anyone was there or at the saturday gig, would love to hear what you thought. check the video out. Peace. Dave D.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1g7YHu7nTk

DRM and the politics of corporate control; environmental 'responsible' computing in the 21st century

"When you turn on your computer, you're making a political statement. If, like most people, your computer boots Microsoft Windows, the statement you're making is that transnational corporations should control access to the most powerful public media that ever existed."
-- New Internationalist Magazine Nov. 2006

A coalition calling themselves "Free Software Free Society" -- a collective of left-leaning and socialist groups supporting ethical computing -- has posted a manifesto damning Microsoft's corporate stranglehold and the Digital Rights Management (DRM) present in their latest operating system, Windows Vista. There's a petition which you can add your signature to. At the time of writing there were 692 other signatories in addition to the members of the groups involved in writing the petition.

A strong opponent of the DRM present in Vista is The University of Auckland's Peter Gutmann, a researcher in the CompSci department. His "Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection" (a CC-licensed work) was Internet-famous for a short while earlier this year and, judging by the new preamble added to the top of that page, has generated a fair amount of criticism and comment.

The article mentions the notion of a 'disposable computer culture'; one where the corporations who control the invention, production and distribution of technology allow built-in obsolescence to act as a profit-making function within their business architecture. Their central argument is that in order to make use of many of the "fantastic new features" built into Microsoft's latest operating system, "most people will have to throw their current computer into a landfill, and buy a new one." Environmentally this will be nothing short of absolutely devastating. If this were any other industry, they would have a very hard time convincing the world that what they are doing to the environment, however inadvertent it may be, is OK.

Furthermore, there appears to be an almost "JFK" level of conspiracy nutcase ideology at work here. Except that this time, they might not be so nuts. To wit:

"Vista was engineered from the ground up as a Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and Treacherous Computing (TC) platform. Microsoft hides these defects under more benign-sounding names like “Digital Rights Management” and “Trusted Computing”. But the fact is that Vista is designed to monitor what people do, and in particular to limit what they can do with digital media files. These limits obstruct common and legally protected uses like sharing news story clips and copying text from government documents."

It would appear that in creating new products, the PC industry needs to also come to terms with the environmental and political damage it is inadvertently doing to society.

Flying Man

Im not too sure what to write for this weeks blog.. But heres a video of a flying man. Thank god for YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHYXrqoS08o

Scientific out-of-body experiences

“Scientists have induced the age-old phenomenon of out-of-body experiences in healthy volunteers for the first time.
The technique, which uses a virtual-reality-style set up of cameras linked to a head-mounted video display, will help researchers understand how the brain assimilates sensory information to determine the position of its body.
The technique could also improve virtual reality games and remote surgery by creating the illusion that a person is somewhere other than in their own body.”
For the rest of the article, go to:
Scientists develop technique to induce out-of-body experiences
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/aug/24/2

Facebook is also in the news again, this time for its use by students campaigning against HSBC Bank who were going to withdraw their interest-free overdrafts to students. Student campaigners set up a group on Facebook, and the bank paid attention.

Bank's U-turn on student charges
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6970570.stm