Pink Elephants

Until i took this course I have never really seen much about these second life type of virtual games.. now though the stories keep seeming to find me, first it was a few trashy magazine articles.. you know those "real life" i married my lover online before we even meet.. and today as i was studying hard i happened to turn on Dr Phil to see that even he was addressing this issue with a 14 yr old girl who was being sucked into a second life type game. Her mother got worried when her scantily dressed avatar was kissing a boy in her virtual bed. Dr Phil being the fantastic psychiartrist that he is quickly told her to "get real" pun intended.

anyways as i have said in other blogs I find this world of avatars really facinating so i thought i would go and try my hand at making an avatar Thats her on the left yes thats right she is wearing the famous Bjork swan dress (i couldnt resist), I'll admit it was alot of fun took me back to years if dressing up barbies and what not.. i have already started to see how addictive they can get. I sat down thinking i could whip up a quick little picture slap it on my page and that would be it. How wrong could I be first i had to pick which kind of avater i wanted.. whch face shape.. eye shape and colour hairstyle and colour, body shape, makeup and finally a dress.. next thing you know an hour or so of my life is *poof* gone, i still have no idea what my flatmates were laughing about...
So now i have some idea of how addictive it can get and that was only the creation stage, but i still stick by the fact that i dont think i could ever get sucked into a virtual world enough to spend every waking minute there.. well to be safe im not going to try!

Augmented Reality Games if your like me and had a hard time getting your head around them follow the link it should (fingers crossed) take you to a video of a demonstration of how the augmented reality game work, its really interesting and well ...really very cool even makes me want to have a go and watch another couple of hours dissapear before my eyes.

Web blogs, virtual craze or here to stay?

Alrighty, so last week i missed out on the lecture thanks to my frustrating cough and the resulting lack of sleep causeing me to sleep in!

I managed to make it to the seminar and the thing that realy sparks my interest is not the political blog *yawn* (if i want to be entertained by american politics ill watch FOX news) but instead the idea of corporate blogs as Byron said on his blog i too wouldnt mind being asked to write a blog for money. Infact it seems enevitable that i will be as my career of choice is to go into PR (think "thank you for smoking" but a little less controversial") Anyways as i was saying because this area interests me i thought i would google some PR blogs and what a gold mine of information! there are even blogs dedicated to listing the blogs of PR companies worldwide. I know this may not be exciting to some but for someone trying to break into an industry that is largely about networking and who you know, not what you know its a well needed starting point!

In saying that I should probably be practising blogging in more formal way rather than a stream of consciousness but its late so i wont start tonight.

The second reading as those of you who have read it know looks at credibility perceptions of web blogs amoung blog users and it made me think about what i think about blogs as a news source.

Before this course i would had said they were not credible, actually before this course i had never looked twice at blogs as i associated them only with people spilling out what i deemed to be useless info of their day to day lives.
To some extent i still feel a little sceptical over whether i would fully trust a blog as a credible source of information as they are still highly personalised (e.g me metioning my cough) but on the other hand i have found this blog helpful and while doing recent research on miliblogs (blogs of soldiers in combat) if found they allow you to explore avenues of issues they are for the most part left out of mainstream media.

I wish i could then go on to say that this meant I now had the ability to open my eyes to all aspects of an issue but i have to admit that I only really look at these alternative outlets that are either reccomended by a lecturer or share the same views as i do on that topic. There is little to no chance I would read a blog written by Bush on the success of their presense in Iraq nor one that tries to explain that the whalers really are doing it for important scientific research.

It just isnt really in our nature to sit on the fence on every issue and the beauty of blogs and other online platforms is that if we dont like what we are reading we can simply click out and move on to the next one.

could this be the one downside to blogging; that it lowers our tolerance of other peoples opinions?

Wikipedia and Web 2.0 ??

Ok so this weeks subject of Social Networks and User generated content has been a mixed bag for me. I understand the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 with the shift in the nature of authority and how Wikipedia is an example of this shift. That is going from something like Encyclopedia Britanncia in which we are told by the author what to think to Wikipedia where it is opened up into a public discourse where we can challenge that information and author. The problem here is that because we are students of the wikipedia age and have had it drilled into us about how its not a scholorly source we know that some of the information posted is questionable, people who arnt subject to this enlightenment however can fall victim to its deceptive suffix.

"pedia" those five simple letters are what I beleive gives Wikipedia the chance at unchallenged authority.. I know that when i was at high school i read pedia on the end of it and automatically associated it with its older sibling Encyclopedia and thought it to be the best source ever ( the wiki part.. well i thought it was just there to give it a modern- cyper kind of twist).

Thats not to say I a strong anti wikipedi person, im definatly not i still use it as most of us discussed in class as a starting point from which we then compare other sights against, Im yet to have started and essay without using it!

The part of the seminar i really still am a little stuck on is whether wikipedia is challenging the notion of authors and authorities. I know we said that it is the gatekeepers that create authority and that wiki without gatekeepers should thus challenge it.. Im still not entirely sure .. even without the internet publications were always being updated and changed and scholorly journals often debate over someone elsse theory.. the internet has simply sped this process up and taken it to a larger audience... maybe thats exactly the point im supposed to get... :s think i will patrol through the rest of your blogs and see what i can nut out

thats my rant for today