Weekly Blog Post #10 Social Media

The social media big guns such as MySpace and Facebook commonly attract millions and millions of users to use their service. Social media websites provide a place for people to have their own "space" on the Internet. People can make lists of their interests, favorite movies, favorite music, favorite books, etc. People can write blogs and and personal profiles to be displayed on their web page.

Probably the biggest reasons people use social media services is to network with people in their job field and to stay in touch with long distance friends. Networking has long been used through simply getting someones phone number, meeting a person on the job, meeting a person at a convention or conference, etc. Now people can network over the Internet via social media services to stay in touch with their job contacts or potential employers. Does networking over social media services create a face-to-face disconnect? In my opinion it depends on the job field.

Keeping in touch with friends who have moved to place that cannot be visited as often as you'd like can be difficult. Social media services provide a means for people to keep in touch with all their friends whether they are long distance or not. The only problem I have with social media websites like MySpace and Facebook is the same concern I have with networking, face-to-face interaction. If I want to talk to my friends, I'm not going to comment on their web page, I will call them on the phone, go to their home, or chat with them on an instant messenger.

One problem that just irritates me about social media services is they can be used for a place to brag. You can add every person you have ever met to your friends list and brag about having 1,246 friends, who they hell knows that many people? Every single piece of information on someones web page on their "About Me" can be utter crap sometimes. Probably the photos are the funniest part of people's web page. For example, a profile would read 17 years old and the person's front page picture is them drinking at a party. Classy. Some of these reasons make me think sometimes that using social media isn't a good idea to network. Do you want your employer finding crap on your MySpace? If they do then say goodbye to that job offer.

Weekly Blog Post #9 - Kids are Smarter than Me!

This past Friday, I participated in the San Jose State University 2nd Annual Day of Service 2008. I participated mainly because it is recommended to participate in the Day of Service for my Civic Engagement paper in my Political Science 103 class. My professor gave the students in the class who participated and I a choice to do voter registration, leaflet some neighborhoods, or go help out Horace Mann Elementary. I chose to go to Horace Mann Elementary and it was an eye-opening experience and very fun.

I chose to help out a classroom and it ended up being a second grade English class. I was assigned to help the teacher with various tasks and to help the kids work on research projects. The teacher split the class into 3 groups and I had a group of four girls and they were assigned Abraham Lincoln. We were given children's books about Abraham Lincoln and any information that the kids couldn't find in the books would have to be researched on the Internet.

Wait a minute, second graders know how to research on the Internet?

When I was in second grade, our school was equipped with crappy Mac II computers with terribly slow Netscape. Clearly, there is a generational gap that I have encountered here.

I did not get to see first-hand how the kids research on the Internet because there wasn't enough time for the day I was there, but they did have iMac and iBooks in the classroom.

I thought to myself, how media savvy are these kids compared to me right now or when I was a kid? Where will they be when they become my age technologically wise?

I just thought it was very interesting to see a school prepare their students for the future at such an early age. Now all I have to do is learn as much as I can right now before their technological skills kick my ass when they become up and coming interns and I'm the 30 year old fart that doesn't know anything.

Weekly Blog Post #8 - Let's all get Wii Fit

Ever since the 2006 Holiday release of the Nintendo Wii, millions of people are now playing video games for their first time. All of these casual gamers were first hooked by the addictive pack-in game that comes with all Wii consoles, Wii Sports. Wii Sports is a very casual game that lets the player move the motion-controlled "Wiimote" as if they are actually playing the sports depicted in the game. In golf, you swing the Wiimote back and forward as though you were swinging a club and in bowling you swing the Wiimote as though you were actually bowling. Wii Sports has introduced a whole new demographic of casual gamers such as Moms, tween girls, and the elderly.

The Wii has even been demonstrated on a national TV show such as Good Morning America.

Nintendo, realizing the potential of this new market of casual gamers, introduced Wii Fit last summer. Wii Fit is an exercise game believe it or not. Hardcore Gamers are type casted as couch potatoes playing games for hours on end. Well, Moms simply don't have time to do that. Wii Fit comes with a balance board controller, similar to one of those workout steps you use in a gym. Although the balance board is used for a variety of exercises. For example, you can do yoga while the game on the TV instructs positions to you. You can track weight changes with the game, set goals for yourself or all the members in your family, and you can play mini games when you don't want to do a full workout.

Nintendo has just announced a release date and price for Wii Fit this month. Wii Fit will launch on May 21 for $89.99 (the game plus the balance board peripheral).

Reflective Blog Post #1 - Getting Started

I'm doing my final multimedia project on a video game top 5 or 10 best games of current consoles (Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii, or Xbox 360) or older consoles (Playstation 1 or 2, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, etc.). I'm going to pick one system soon and compile my list of what I think was THE best 5 or 10 games of that console.
Some things I would like to accomplish would be to create a Word Press blog hub that also links to other Word Press blog pages to particular categories. The hub page would contain the list of the top games and a description for each game along with a slide show of images from these games. I'm probably going to use a Flickr slide show viewer embedded in a blog post. I'm going to record a couple of podcasts and give the podcasts their own blog page linked on the hub under the categories tab.
Regarding whether or not my project is worthwhile, I hope it is worthwhile or why else would I be doing it? None the less, this project will put all the skills I have learned and refined this semester to the test and I hope I do well.
This project is different from in-class projects because instead of working on only one type of media for each project, this project you use multiple media types, hence the title "multimedia." Also, I'm preparing to get a lot of the work done at home. I have already been getting prepared to podcast by downloading Audacity.
I'm expecting the project to take quite some time to get everything on the blog and at a functional state.

Weekly Blog Post #7 - BBC Changing the Game

Chief Executive of the BBC, Mark Thompson, is redefining media convergence with the struggling oldest and largest news corporation. Realizing the BBC is losing TV viewers rapidly from the Internet, the BBC decided to go all out on the Internet. Unlike NBC who only put select shows at full episode length on the Internet, the BBC basically threw all their news programs, shows, and the kitchen sink online.

BBC launched the iPlayer this past Christmas Day and has become a huge success. With about 17 million downloads the first seven weeks compared to Apple's iTunes only getting one million downloads in its first three weeks when it put up TV shows, clearly BBC has a success on their hands with the iPlayer.

Other news organizations need to take cue from the BBC's risk to be willing to change their philosophy. Too many times I hear from my professors at San Jose State that the newspapers are dieing and the nightly news shows are losing viewership tenfold. If all these news mediums are dieing due to the Internet then why not do something about it?

Weekly Blog Post #6 - StarCraft 10 Years Young

StarCraft, a real-time strategy game from quite possibly the top PC developer today, Blizzard, has turned 10 years young. StarCraft, originally released in 1998, slowly took the world by storm. The game is known for its perfect balance between all 3 playable factions in the game: the Terran, the Protoss, and the Zerg. The game by no means revolutionized the real-time strategy genre, although it refined the genre to perfection.

StarCraft had become a huge competitive online multi player game within a couple years of its release. Tournaments are still going on today with StarCraft and shows no sign of slowing down. In South Korea, with a huge online gaming culture, has basically made StarCraft its national sport. Yes, you read correct, "National sport." Just like America's national past-time, baseball, or America's favorite sport, football, a video game in South Korea has become their national sport. For years now, world tournaments in StarCraft are held in South Korea and they even broadcast StarCraft matches on television. StarCraft players that turn professional make the big bucks and has become their full-time job. Some of the top StarCraft players in South Korea, America, or Europe, can make a salary in the $100,000's from playing and wining in tournaments and money from their sponsors.

Clearly, the standards of what is shown on TV is changing. If watching other people play a video game on TV is crazy, just wait and see what happens next. The sequel to StarCraft, StarCraft 2, has been in the works for a few years and will be released in a couple more years. Who knows how popular StarCraft 2 will become.

Video Project: Champions League in Review

Here is my video project: Click Here!

If the quality is to low then I need to know what is an ideal megabyte size for the video.

Reflections:

The video project was probably the most difficult so far. The blame could be put on me for missing my first ever class of the semester during this project, so I lost a lot of valuable time with iMovie. I decided to do the project at home on my PC using Windows Movie Maker (WMM). WMM gave me a lot of problems from freezing and hiccups when I tried to edit my video camera footage. Surprisingly, I had no problem transferring video off my miniDV tape in the video camera to the computer using a firewire cable. After researching WMM freezing issues, I found out the problem with WMM freezing all the time is from other video codecs that WMM conflicts with. It is extremely difficult to fix all the codecs individually so I just closed and re-opened my video project every time it froze. WMM is easy to use just like iMovie and I would have to give it a gold star sticker for that, but be warned to all who have an older computer that can't close and re-open WMM as fast as I could to finish the project.

My Lunch

Here is the video of the delicious lunch I had.

My Lunch

Weekly Blog Post #4 - A new platform for musicians

Everyone wants to be a rock star, right? Well, with last November's release of the smash hit video game Rock Band, millions of people have been getting their rock star on. Rock band allows up to four people to play music together using 2 guitar controllers, 1 drum set controller, and one microphone. You play cooperatively as though you were an actual rock band hence the title of the game.
Guitar Hero originally popularized this home console phenomenon to play some of the most popular rock songs of the past few decades with a guitar controller.
Musicians have now caught on to the popularity of Guitar Hero and Rock Band by officially licensing their songs to the game developers to put in to the game. This has became a new source of revenue for current bands and bands of the past. Songs have been downloaded illegally over the Internet for quite some time now and having another way for bands to make money again by allowing their songs to be put in to these games, has created a new market. People not only want to listen to their favorite musicians, put play their music interactively as well.