Topic 3.0 - Your Internet Footprint

What do we leave behind?






One of the most important things I have learned today from the lecture and notes is that people do not consider what they leave behind in Cyberspace. It is so easy to write about oneself, that you forget your audience is the World Wide Web. Qian and Scott (2007) state that people don't think about the consequences when they disclose too much of themselves online. This is especially true, when people blog about themselves. I would argue that people made the Internet personal... too personal.  However, it is important that people keep in mind that what they write in their blogs will stay there forever as digital footprints. 

Another point to consider is that when people make use of Facebook or MySpace, they must rethink what they write, especially if the employer has access to their sites. During a survey conducted by Qian and Scott (2007) one of the participants said that "revealing too much personal info thus facing repercussion about something I write negatively about, in particular my employer".

Maybe it is time we rethink what we leave behind online....

Reference

Qian, H., & Scott, C. R. (2007). Anonymity and self-disclosure on weblogs. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4). Retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/qian.html

Topic 2.4 Content Sharing

Content Sharing

This week’s lecture was very interesting. Must admit, I have really enjoyed it and learned a lot. I have learned how people create and share their creations in a collaborative manner. Creating your own inventions can also be fun and rewarding. It was interesting to see how people create and combine existing media to produce a totally different product. For example, Szuch (2009) took two movie trailers, Avatar and Pocahontas and creator his own short combined version. With his clever remixing skills he could create something totally unique.

However, it is important for people to clearly state from where they got the information. It is also important that when people create their own videos, music, etc. they have to adhere to the necessary copyright laws and regulations. For example in Australia creators must adhere to the Copyright Act 1968. According to the Australian Copyright Council (2007) people must seek the original author or creator’s permission to copy material from authors. In general “copyright generally lasts for the life of the creator plus 70 years and where duration depends on year of publication, it lasts until 70 years after it is first published” (Australian Copyright Council, 2007).

Important considerations: 

• Copyright protection is free and applies automatically when material is created.
• There is NO registration system for copyright in Australia.
• Copyright does not protect ideas, information, styles or techniques.
• Copyright does not protect names, titles or slogans.
• There are no general exemptions from copyright law for non-profit organizations.
• There are some situations where copyright law allows people to use copyright material for their own personal use, but these are narrow and specific.
• Generally, Australian copyright law applies to actions that take place in Australia, even if the material used was created or first published in another country. (Australian Copyright Council, 2007).

In saying this, in some instances people do not have to ask permission to use material. For example “where the material is being used as a “fair dealing” for one or more of the following purposes: criticism or review; parody or satire; and reporting news”. Also “material may be freely used if copyright has expired” (Australian Copyright Council, 2008). There are six licenses the creator must be aware of to ensure that the correct procedures are followed when information is shared.

For example: 

• Attribution - others must give you credit as the original creator
• non-commercial - others may not use your work for commercial purposes
• no derivative works - others may not alter, transform, or build upon your work
• share alike - others may alter, transform, or build upon your work, but they are encouraged to distribute the resulting work only under another Share Alike licence (Creative Commons Australian, 2005).

People may also use materials under creative commons. According to the Creative Commons Australia (n.d.), “Creative Commons is a worldwide project that encourages copyright owners to allow others to share, reuse and remix their material, legally”.

Apart from this, it is also important to note that when people download images from e.g. Flickr, they should use correct tagging in order to find images quicker. This will also simplify matters when they create material. According to Mathes (2004) tagging images is important for the user to be able to retrieve the required information again. However” folksonomy is not, will not, and should not be our only way of ordering the world” (Weinberger, 2006).

References


Australian Copyright Council. (2008). Information sheet G103v01: Copyright permission & clearances. Retrieved from http://www.copyright.org.au/admin/cms-acc1/_images/10696221344c8dd3878a3dc.pdf

Australian Copyright Council (2007). Information sheet: An introduction to copyright in Australia. Retrieved from http://www.copyright.org.au/admin/cms-acc1/_images/1889836124c8dbfe7b2fba.pdf

Creative Commons Australia. (2005). Creative commons licences explained for content creators. Retrieved from http://creativecommons.org.au/content/licences-explained-content-creators.pdf

Creative Commons Australia. (n.d.). Learn more. Retrieved from http://creativecommons.org.au/learn-more

Mathes, A. (2004). Folksonomies – Cooperative classification and communication through shared metadata. Retrieved from http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html

Szuch, R. (2009). Avatar/Pocahontas mashup [Video file]. Retrieved from http://vimeo.com/9389738

Weinberger, D. (2006). Folksonomy as symbol. Retrieved from http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/3281

Topic 2.3 Social Networking

Social networking is so popular! 

http://www.reddit.com/domain/1.bp.blogspot.com

This week's topic is not only interesting, but it is also fun. Social networking is everywhere on the Internet, actually everywhere you go. Online users want to share their experiences and everyday life activities with others. According to boyd and Ellison (2007), “What makes social network sites unique is... that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks”. So in other words, social networking allows people to make them known to the world.

There are many popular social networking applications, such as: Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, Linkedin, MySpace, QQ, Hi5 and so one. However, one of the most significant and well-known social networking sites is Facebook. Facebook is the World's second biggest social networking tool people turn to. Obviously, Google is number one. However, for a very short time, last March 2010, Facebook was number one. According to Rosen (2010, p. 139), Facebook attracts more than 400 million people a day! This is absolutely incredible. People not only use the Desktop to interact socially, they also use mobiles and other devices to go on Facebook. Facebook is not only popular for making friends and sharing images, links and profiles. Facebook also attracts millions of users to their favourite game, Farmville. There are more than 50 million players interacting in this game. Clearly, this game not only benefits the users but also the creators of Farmville.

The problem however with Facebook is that all your personal information is out there to everyone. People can view your profile, your birthday details, your political preferences, occupation, etc. Even the images people share, can be used by Facebook. The question users do need to ask, ‘Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I have to argue, that it can have a negative impact if the information comes in the wrong hands. It is therefore vital that Facebook users read the Privacy statement. Because, Facebook is entitle to access personal details. To accentuate, Facebook states the following: 

In order to provide you with useful social experiences off of Facebook, we occasionally  need to provide General Information about you to pre-approved third party websites and applications that use Platform at the time you visit them (if you are still logged in to Facebook) (Facebook, 2010). 

Twitter is another very popular micro blogging service. People can tweet about their everyday life all the time, anytime, anywhere. Short messages can include anything from minor to really important information. Everyone tweet about something. Notably, people can only type up to 140 characters per tweet (Rosen, 2010, p. 347). So, there are a lot of short messages constantly. Arguably, Twitter can be a great social networking tool to inform people and update people on the latest world news and developments.

Reference

boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1). Retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

Facebook. (2010). Privacy Policy. Retrieved from http://www.facebook.com/policy.php

Rosen. M. J. (2010). Donor-centered planned gift marketing: (AFP Fund Development Series). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.



Topic 2.2 Wikis

Wikis

Wikis are very interesting and helpful tools. Wikis were designed with the intention to help individuals to collaborate in a social manner. Wikis were also created so that anyone with a web browser could edit and contribute freely. It is therefore very user-friendly and easy to use. People often refer to Wikis as a Collective intelligence. "In the classic formulation, collective intelligence refers to a situation where nobody knows everything, everyone knows something, and what any given member knows, is accessible to any other member upon request on an ad hoc basis" (Jenkins, 2006).

It should be noted that Wiki (form) is not the same as the wiki software. Different wikis run on different software. Also, Wikipedia is one form of a wiki - it is not the only form.

Wikipedia was first established in January 2001. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Wikipedia initially started off with a few articles, but very soon articles accumulated rapidly. Today, there are more than 3 million English-language articles. Articles are also available in more than 250 languages. This is amazing! Personally, I thought there were only a few languages. In saying this, German, Japanese and French are very popular languages in the Wikipedia world.

The issue with Wikipedia is the reliability or authenticity of articles and resources. In 2004, a professor from the USA conducted a study to find out just how reliable Wikipedia was. He deliberately made 13 errors on Wikipedia. He originally thought it would take three days to fix these mistakes. To his great surprise - the errors were fixed within 3 hours. There are people that edit and administrate Wikipedia on a continual basis.

However, Wikipedia is not flawless, there are mistakes. In saying this, for an online social encyclopedia (with a Worldwide audience), the Wikipedia is not that bad. Though it is true, academics and teachers do not particular like students to quote from Wikipedia for the simple fact that Wikipedia is not entirely bulletproof. Interestingly, Wales suggest people consult other scholarly resources too when researching. “In most academic institutions, Wikipedia, along with most encyclopedias, is unacceptable a major source for a research paper” (Wikipedia, 2010).

There are also other interesting wikis. For example, there is Lostpedia, Wikia, Wikianswers, WoWWiki, Wookieepedia and many more. A very famous Wiki where people could engage and collaborate is called Wetpaint.

References

Jenkinks, H. (2006). Collectibe intelligence vs. The widom of crowds. Retreived from http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/11/collective_intelligence_vs_the.html

Wikipedia. (2010). Wikipedia: Researching with Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Researching_with_Wikipedia

Topic 2.1 Blogging

We all need to Blog

Blogs are probably one of the most valuable Web 2.0 social networking applications. A blog is the ‘shortened from of weblog” (Leaver, 2010b). Blogs started in the 2000s. One of the first blogs ever created was by a guy called Justin Allyn Hall. He recorded his everyday life activities and thoughts on his blog. In actually fact, his blog was more like a Diary of events. Back then, it was difficult to update information on your blog. In most instances, the ‘blogger’ had to know how HTML worked. It was “only those people who knew how to code a web page could make their voices heard” (Blood, 2000). However, this was not what Berners-Lee had in mind – the Web was supposed to be interactive.

Today, there are more that 150-200 million weblogs. There are more than 1.6 million legitimate posts per day and more than 67,000 post per hour or then 18.6 posts per second (Leaver, 2010a). When considering these figures, it is amazing how blogs have changed our way of communication and interaction with people online. Blood (2000) puts it more in perceptive, stating that weblogs transforms both the “writer” and the “reader” from “audience” to “public” and from “consumer” to “creator”. Blood (2000) further states that “The promise of the web was that everyone could publish, that a thousand voices could flourish, communicate, connect”. Therefore, blogs can be created by anyone, anywhere. People moved away from the non-interactive Web 1.0 to the more inter-active Web 2.0.

One of the earlier blogs was written by Salam Pax. In my opinion, this is one of the most significant blogs ever. Salam Pax lives in Iraq and he was caught up in the Iraqi war everyday life. From inside Bagdad (Iraq), Pax could portray his views and ideas about the Iraqi war by writing on his blog. He wrote in a humorous manner and pretty soon his blog became very popular world-wide - from 200 readers per day to thousands. In a way, Pax became the ‘Gatekeeper’ or ‘Gatewatcher’ for the Iraqi community. According to Leaver (2010a), “Citizen Journalism [Blogging] doesn’t replace mainstream media, but examines, refines and filters it through gatewatching”. In saying this, blogs also influence by the media. Because everyone can become journalists. 

Most blogs have RSS feeds, which is a great feature. This means you can link important and interesting websites back to your own blog. You have to subscribe to the links and up-to-date information will be added on to your blog.

Blogging is not limited to the English language. From 2004, there were more blogs created in other languages. In 2006 the Time Magazine named the Blog (You) the ‘Person of the Year’. Clearly, blogs are here to stay. Johnson (2006) states that there are many blogs today, “But diamonds in that rough will be abundant as well”.

References

Blood, R. (2000, September 07). Weblogs: A history and perspective [Weblog post]. Rebecca's Pocket. Retrieved from http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

Johnson, S. Five things all sane people agree on about blogs and mainstream journalism (So can we stop talking about them now?). Retrieved from http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2006/08/five_things_all.html

Leaver, T. (2010a). Blogs [Lecturer]. Retrieved from http://dbs.ilectures.curtin.edu.au/lectopia/casterframe.lasso?fid=387344&cnt=true&usr=not-indicated&name=not-indicated

Leaver, T. (2010b). Topic 2.1 – Blogging [Course notes]. Retrieved from http://lms.curtin.edu.au/