Week 10 - Response to Content

Week 9 - Tutorial Task

Internet and political participation
In this weeks tutorial task we were to find opportunities for political participation via the internet.
1) The first task was to sign an e-petition of your choise, and I signed the Amnesty's e-petition "Not In My Name" against death penalty as regards to the Troy Davis case.

Picture reference: Amnesty International, "Not in my name", 21 Sept 11. Located at:
 http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/site/c.6oJCLQPAJiJUG/b.7741827/k.62FF/Not_in_my_Name_Pledge/apps/ka/ct/contactus.asp?c=6oJCLQPAJiJUG&b=7741827&en=dmIPI6PPJcIYLgOSLbKULiM9LvL9KmN4LtI9LqNaIAK




2) To respond to a professional blogger at a major news site, I found a celebrity blogger for CNN that I chose to give a comment.

Picture reference: CNN Blogs, "Arrested development cast reunion in NYC", 21 Sept 2011. Located at:  http://marquee.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/21/arrested-development-cast-reuniting-in-nyc/#comment-639682

3) To find out what Barack Obama was up to today, I went on his Twitter acount and found out that he is speaking at the United Nations General Assembly.

Picture reference: Twitter, Barack Obamas News Feed 09 Sept 2011. Located at: http://twitter.com/#!/BARACKOBAMA

4) The Australian Government plan to censor the internet (the so-called "Clean Feed"), and they are pushing forward with a plan to censor the Internet for all Australians. This is so that they can filter out a prescribed list of websites deemed prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority with the apparent aim of ensuring children are ‘protected from harmful and inappropriate online material.
Karina Travaglione, 2009. Mannkal Essay Competition, "Internet Censorship in Australia - A ‘clean-feed’?", 21 Sept 2011. Located at: http://www.mannkal.org/downloads/scholars/internet-censorship-in-australia.pdf.


5) When will the NBN get to your place?
The NBN will come to Brisbane on the second release.
NBN, 2011, "Our Network". Viewed 21 Sept 2011, located at: http://www.nbnco.com.au/our-network/maps/qld.html.


- What are the benefits?
It provides better business solutions, better education for a brighter future, it assists the medical community and provides endless entertainment.
Chesher, C., 2010, " Benefits of the NBN go beyond the individual". Viewed 21 Sept 2011, located at http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/benefits-of-the-nbn-go-beyond-the-individual-20100812-120zv.html.

6) Find out who your local, state and federal representatives are and look up the Queensland or Australian hansard to find the last time your local member spoke in parliament.
I live in Surfers Paradise and the local representative in the Queensland Parliament is John-Paul Langbroek.The last time he spoke in the parliament was Thursday, 8 September 2011.
Parlament QLD, "Explore your parlament" viewed 21 Sept 2011, located at http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/en/explore.

Week 7 - Response to Content

Where is the profit to be made in produsage?

The therm produsers refer to a participatory environment where the customers works as both producer and consumer constantly contributing and extending the by re purposing the existing content to achieve further improvement. This way of working promotes immediacy and breaks down the boundaries between producers and users (Produsage: A Worikng Definition, 2007).

Picture reference: Produsage.Org, "Produsage - A working definition" 2007. Located at http://produsage.org/node/9.

An example of produsage is Youtube, where millions of users contributes every day, and where 24 houres of video is uploaded every single minute (Press Timeline, 2011). The key distinction between producers and produsers, is that producers have an end date, while produsers don't.

To make money of produsage it is common to display advertising on the program/sites platform. Continuing with the Youtube example, they have at least two advertisement on every page, whether it's under, before or above the video.  They invite all types of advertisers whether they are local or multinational to broadcast their content on to the largest online video community in the world (Advertising overview, 2011). The original producers to the produsage-pages also gain a strong reputation due to the public participation, as well as continuing improvements on their platformswhich can lead to profit for the companies in the long run (Produsage: A Worikng Definition, 2007).


References:
Produsage.Org, "Produsage : A working definition" 2007. Located at http://produsage.org/node/9.

Youtube, 2011, "Advertising Overview". Viewed 16 Sept 2011. Located at: http://www.youtube.com/t/advertising_overview .

Youtube, 2011, "Press Timeline". Viewed 16 Sept 2011. Located at: http://www.youtube.com/t/press_timeline

Week 6 - Response to Content

Is crowdsourcing diminishing the gap between professionals and amateurs?


The term crowdsourcing is a mixture of the word crowd and outsourcing. As the word indicates, this is a method that can be used to outsource tasks that are usually dedicated to agents or similar sources, over to a large crowd of people or a community through an open call (Alsever, 2007). One example of crowdsourcing is Wikipedia. This is a user generated site based on ordinary people’s contribution through intellectual sharing, and it invites you to create encyclopedic articles for the page. This gives Wikipedia access to millions of people’s free labor. This shows that cheap labor does not need to come from outsourcing to other countries or agencies. With crowdsourcing, the labor could just as easily come from someone in your neighborhood as a professional (Howe, 2006). To do crowdsourcing successfully you will need a proper safety net to exclude illegitimate contributions. Wikipedia has a long and comprehensive qualification control to ensure that all the articles are appropriate before being published (Wikipedia, 2011).
  Howe explains that because technological advances have allowed for cheap consumer electronics, the difference between professionals and amateurs has been diminished (Howe, 2006). Almost everybody in our society has access to a computer, and can therefore respond to the open call from businesses. Companies are consequently able to take advantage of the talents within the public, and Howe states that "It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing" (Howe, 2006).  

Howe, J., 2006, The Rise of Crowdsourcing – Clickadviser, retrieved 15.sept 2011 at  http://www.clickadvisor.com/downloads/Howe_The_Rise_of_Crowdsourcing.pdf

Alsever, J., 2007, What is Crowdsourcing? – Bnet, retrieved 15.sept 2011 at  http://www.bnet.com/article/what-is-crowdsourcing/52961

Wikipedia, 2011, Editing Wikipedia Pages - About Wikipedia retrieved 15.sept 2011 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Editing_Wikipedia_page

Week 6 - Tutorial Task

Audio-Visual project, Part 1
For the next three weeks we have an audio-visual project where the aim is to produce a short length movie with new communication as a theme.
After throwing out a few different ideas, we came up with a plot about the issues around identity theft and the problem that anybody can pretend to be whoever they want on the internet. We are planning to shoot video clips from our own video recorder to ensure that we use footage that is not copyrighted, and we are editing the film in Sony Vegas Pro.

Concerning copyright there is some subjects we need to be careful with.
One problem could be that we intend to use music that is ripped from Youtube in the film. We are not sure yet of this is a possibility, but if not, we intend to use music from Creative Commons that is free from both cost and strict copyright rules.

We are planning to use Facebooks logo in the end of the movie that could possibly cause some copyright problems. Here we reasoned with that anybody could make a replica that resembles the logo, so that if we get any problems we’ll claim it’s our own.

Another danger with our concept is that it evolves around Facebook, and  may  present their business in an unflattering manner. We concluded that this would not be a too big concern for us, because the movie is to be used in a scholarly setting, and it's also thought to be ironic and comical without offending anyone.

Week 9 - Response to content

Essay Skeleton

My topic for the essay is "Is extensive gaming leading to undesirable health issues?".

I plan to start with an intro with background information that will stand for about 20% of the essay. This section will include basic information about extensive use of computer and video games that I will find from journal articles and other relevant readings.

Afterwards, I will give a more detailed overview of the subject. This part will be about 55 % of the essay and it will contain elements such as arguments from both sides of the issue, followed my reasoned opinion. I will address the adverse impacts on younger people’s health by using the most recent papers on the subject, then see if I can find established facts about the positive effects one can get from extensive use of computer and video games. I plan to divide the research into two sections concerning physical and psychical effects of gaming.

Lastly I will give my conclusions containing key findings on the subject and the answer to the introduction question. This will be about 25 % of the essay.

Picture reference:
Kido - "Human Skeleton" Located at http://www.kidopo.com/coloring-pages/learning/body-parts/human-skeleton/, 23 Sept 2011.

Week 8 - Tutorial Task

Audio-Visual Project, Part 3

This week we learned that we weren’t allowed to use any form of the Facebook logo in our film due to copyright. This was a major problem for us, seeing that all of our film is based around Facebooks pages. If we were to do this process more thoroughly we would have to apply to Facebook and get a permit to use the logo to do this in a legal way. As Facebook states; "You will not use our copyrights or trademarks (including Facebook, the Facebook and F Logos, FB, Face, Poke, Wall and 32665), or any confusingly similar marks, without our written permission (Facebook, Terms, 2011)". 

Another thing we did wrong was having cartoon characters from Warner Brothers Inc. as profile pictures for the two roles. We could have avoided this by using a picture taken ourselves or with a permit from someone else.

The copyright rules on these points are very important for us because Facebook or Warner Brothers Inc. could possibly sue us for using their property in our film. The likeliness of this happening is actually higher for us that the regular individual, as we, students from Griffith University are representing this big and well known institution.

As a result of this we weren’t able to put our film up on the internet, and had to send the movie to the teacher via E-mail instead.