The Next New Thing

My hope for the near future is for increasing the usage of New Media technologies in the field of medical treatment and counseling. People who are ill, either physically or mentally, often find it very difficult to make it to doctor's appointments in offices and wait for hours at clinics. A lot of times a physical inspection is required, and in these cases the patient will have to be seen in person, but there are many cases in which a mere description of the physical symptoms by the patient is needed or that the patient needs to ask the doctor a few questions. I suggest online internet clinics, not as an alternative but as an addition to conventional clinics. These online medical communities of professionals will allow patients to make online appointments in which the patient will communicate with the doctor through a video chat window (such as Skype, but with a much better sound/visual quality than Skype so that the doctor could clearly see the patient's body parts.). This will also enable the doctors to quickly communicate among themselves if they need advice, or want to start a discussion about a specific case. Any qualified doctor could join an internet clinic and see the patient from the convenience of their own home. Every internet clinic as such should be government approved and have an official website so that patients could just call the clinic to make an appointment without having to wonder if the people they see are really doctors.
 I think this could be beneficial especially in the field of mental health or chronic illnesses such as diabetes where patients' bodies don't usually need to be inspected and all that required is verbal counseling. As someone with a disability which makes it very difficult for me to travel, I could find this development very useful.

Our Class Wiki - So Far

I added a few terms to the Glossary and defined them. I started the P2P page, edited the skeleton (list of "contents") and wrote the introduction as well as History section. 
I edited the Entertainment page and added the New Media in Video section (it had previously included only New Media in Music) which includes video streaming websites and video downloading on the web (I filled in the content) as well as added references for the page.

P2P File Sharing

File sharing is the practice of distributing digital data, such as audio, images and video, electronic books and computer software.
Peer-to-peer file sharing is the distribution and sharing of digital data using the technology of peer-to-peer (P2P) networking which utilizes a specialized P2P software program that searches for other connected computers on a P2P network and locates the desired content. The peers of such networks are interconnected via the Internet.
Some examples of P2P file sharing networks are Napster and BitTorrent.
As mentioned in the article The BitTorrent Effect in Wired magazine, BitTorrent lets users quickly upload and download enormous amounts of data, files that are hundreds or thousands of times bigger than a single MP3.
Bram Cohen, the creator of Torrent, realized that chopping up a file and handing out the pieces to several uploaders would really speed things up. He sketched out a protocol: To download that copy of Meet the Fokkers, a user's computer sniffs around for others online who have pieces of the movie. Then it downloads a chunk from several of them simultaneously. Many hands make light work, so the file arrives dozens of times faster than normal.

Privacy

A piece of information on the internet, such as a personal photograph, will, in the words of Daniel Reed, "remain in the electronic ether forever". I.e., we cannot put boundaries on the amount of time during which the photo will be accessible to anyone.
Also, social network privacy settings make it very hard to put boundaries on the network of people who would have access to one's personal information.
Third, it's difficult or impossible to control the ways in which the persons who access one's personal information might use it in the future. E.g., one cannot grant the right to look at a photograph but not sell it, alter it or combine it with other media.

Advice

I would like to suggest a better accommodation for students with disabilities (either mental or physical) or a difficult work schedule who would like to enroll in classes at Baruch College. My suggestion is to have every class digitally recorded (video and audio) and uploaded to the college web site. Every course lecture series will have its own password and every student will have his/her own username, so that only students enrolled in a specific class could have access to the online recording of that class. Another alternative is uploading the lectures to youtube while making them "hidden" to the public and only available for viewing to specific users, i.e. the students of the specific class.

Creativity and New Media

For this assignment, I chose a Youtube music video that I made, dedicated to my dearest beloved. I edited this video by downloading many Youtube video clips of episodes from the show Queer as Folk, and using Final Cut Pro I chopped them up and glued pieces of them together so that the rhythm of movement and atmosphere will match the audio - a track I chose by famous Dutch DJ Armin Van Buuren called In and Out of Love. A slight waning - this video includes chosen moments from what I believe to be the greatest love story ever portrayed in a TV series and it contains nudity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIrKlPsuLCg

Creativity

New media nurtures creativity in various and endless ways because it enables the DIY attitude to flourish.The internet is making boundless information on any given topic available to any person with access, and therefore all that is needed to gain the knowledge necessary for new interesting ideas is the power of will, and a limited amount of talent. In the field of digital music, for example, a lot of vocal and instrumental samples that may be used for mixing appear on the internet, leaked by people who work in the recording studio or even by the artist herself, free and ready to use by anyone. In addition, easy-to-use software enable one to create or mash audio tracks. Acid Pro for example, is a software that enables mashups by putting loops of different songs both in time and in tune with each other. Other benefits of digital technology include the fact that you don't need a distributor, because, to quote Mark Vidler from the article The New Math of Mashups, known professionally as Go Home Productions, “your distribution is the Internet, and you don’t need a record label, because it’s your bedroom, and you don’t need a recording studio, because that’s your computer. You do it all yourself.”

Users of new media can also use their power of innovation to come up with ideas which would make social networking sites easier and more interesting to use, etc. An example would be Chris Messina, an early Twitter user, who came up with the idea, inspired by a convention used on other Web sites, to mark conversations about a certain topic with the # symbol. This way, many conferences, for example, can announce the so-called hash tag at the start of the event so attendees can mark all their posts the same way and people can search Twitter for everything written on the conference.

Modeling Reality With Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds can be used creatively to recreate lost but not forgotten pieces of the past in the form of places of historical importance or in which historical events took place. An example is a recreation of the Chelsea hotel where Mr.Brown constructed a version of the Chelsea Hotel in Second Life to bring alive the hotel's long gone old spirit.
" At Mr. Brown’s Chelsea, Mr. Hamilton happily reported, it was as if the upheaval of the past few years had never taken place."
Even evidence of the infamous incident of Sid and Nancy shows in this virtual world in Room 1000 where a visitor can find " a bloodstain on the bed, and a bass guitar leaned against a wall."
 Another idea for virtual worlds is to create a safe, relaxing environment for social interaction. Naughty Auties is a virtual space within Second Life dedicated to people on the Autism spectrum.
according to David Savill, who created this space, the benefit is "that visitors can practice social interaction and find information about the condition. The graphical representations of real people create a "comfort zone" that can coax users out of their shells and get them communicating with others".
Another advantage of the virtual reality space is that it creates opportunities for communication between individuals that would be otherwise unthinkable in the real world.  To quote the multimedia artist Annie Ok “There’s no way that you’re going to go onto a flat Web site or message board and instantly strike up a conversation with somebody who works for MTV or I.B.M. or the president of Harvard. But these things are possible in virtual worlds.”
In the world of business meetings, virtual environments such as Second Life can help by recreating the water-cooler experience(impromptu "water cooler" conversations that occur in a real workplace, where colleagues can share information they may have forgotten to communicate in meetings.) The virtual environments can also give a sense of place.
The cons are that it still doesn't compare to real life, and there are things you just can't do in virtual reality, like enjoying a drink. However, you can have a chat with the bartender. 
As more and more people become conversant with computers, I expect to to see this technology getting more popular amongst both explorers such as those who would enjoy the virtual lower east side and big businesses that might utilize the technology to their advantage when long-distance conferences are concerned.

Blog About Twitter

How does a twitter discussion compare to a blackboard discussion?
First, a blackboard post is not as limited in length as twitter posts (no more than 140 symbols).
In sense, this would make the twitter discussion faster and more erratic. Second, the blackboard discussion is easier to follow in terms of comment and response, because the replies are distinguished from the main posts.  Therefore, Blackboard doesn't have the news feed appearance of Twitter.
How does a twitter discussion compare to an in-class discussion?
In a sense a twitter discussion is similar to an in-class discussion because there are many quick replies/posts rather than long, well-thought ones. And as in in-class discussion, often there is no order of post and reply. The replier has to indicate who's comment they refer to, and if it's too far away in time they may have to repeat some of the comment in their reply.

Social Networking Sites

Twitter can be viewed as having multiple facets. One can register and selectively "follow" others. In this case, the messages from followed profiles are streamed like an RSS news feed. if the user wants to narrow down their news feed, they can create lists that include parts of thier followed by users. so the social medium is a  personalized news service about topics of your choosing. With twitter one can also attend conferences virtually or following group discussions by searching for the right term following a "#". witter is working on ways to deliver news nearby, like alerts about an earthquake or the closing of a bridge. Twitter’s list of trending topics can now be searched by city. Finally, twitter can be used to get quick answers to questions.
   Myspace seems to me like a platform that assists mostly unknown or up-and-coming bands and musicians, as each profile on myspace has its own very unique style, and in the center of it all is the playlist that the artist created. So it's an easy platform for artists to display samples of their work. Unlike facebook or twitter, it's not very useful for constant status updates or news feeds.
   As twitter, Facebook can be used for quick status updates or new feeds, but only within the social network of your friends. What you see is limited to who you're Facebook friends with. A new application, Graph Search, will make it possible to search for friends by keywords, such as their interests or what their plans are, making it easy to find common grounds between people and make plans together. Like Myspace and Twitter, Facebook also allows the sharing of videos and pictures.
   Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, and effectively an online community, the service is widely used by photo researchers and by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media. Photos and videos can be accessed from Flickr without the need to register an account but an account must be made in order to upload content onto the website. Registering an account also allows users to create a profile page containing photos and videos that the user has uploaded and also grants the ability to add another Flickr user as a contact.

Social Networking

The advantages of social networking to society are both career-related/corporate and social.
The business networking site Linkedin, which started in 2003, makes it much easier for employers to find employees, and vice versa. To quote Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting, by "Typing keywords into a search engine", an employer could "scrape the entire network to dig out high-quality candidates that she can't find elsewhere." Such sites also help job hunters market themselves online by setting up profiles, listing work history and specific skills.
Another advantage mentioned in the same article, is that "With social networking, I don't need to go to Bob directly to find out who Bob's friends are. Or Bob's friends' friends. So, effectively, I have a thousand contacts that could potentially lead me to 100,000, now I have 8,500 contacts that could potentially lead me to 4.5 million."
From a social  perspective, it is much easier to keep updated on friends' lives via social networking sites such as facebook if they live relatively far from each other or don't have much time or the means to socialize. On the downside, facebook privacy settings can be very unclear or confusing to the avarage user, resulting in embarrassing or unwanted consequences. An example of this situation was presented in the article Facebook Privacy Is So Confusing Even the Zuckerberg Family Photo Isn't Private, in which a photo posted by Mark Zukerberg's sister, Randi, was published on twitter in a way that she felt violated her privacy.
From the article: "Randi has indicated that she only wants her friends to see photos that she has posted. But the way Facebook works, friends of your friends tagged in a photo album also see the entire roll, unless you choose otherwise in the settings of the album posted. (It's not a universal setting.) The term "friends" in this album at right indicates my friends and all the friends of people tagged in the post. Changing that involves clicking "custom" and unchecking a box that reads "friends of those tagged.""
Another downside to having  a social networking site such as facebook in such widespread use is that spammers might take advantage of the data. these spammers might send you an email addressed to you by name, containing a link to a website that might result in downloading malware unto your computer. these scammers are exploiting the fact that  you're more likely to click on a link if it was sent by a friend.
From BBB: New Wave of Phishing Scams Uses Facebook Info for Personalized Spam:
"Scammers find your information through Facebook or other social media accounts. Some set up fake accounts and send out friend requests. When you accept the request, they can view your friends and personal and contact information. Other scammers rely on social media users not locking down their privacy settings, so basic information, such as your name, email address and friends' names, is publicly available."
 As I've read in the article Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network's Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out, it seems Facebook's makers have a vision for the future of the internet as "Facebook - centered" rather than Google-centered, as it now is. To quote, "Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query this "social graph" to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search."
I personally think social networking have great potential in terms of advertising and key word search algorithm because of the amount of users in those networks, especially facebook. I don't think they could be a good replacement to vocal or visual interaction, but a very useful addition indeed.

Blogs and wikis both enable the sharing of information by groups of people and provide a platform for feedback. The difference is that blogs do it in the form of comments, where the identity of the commenter/s is known,  while with wikis the users directly edit the content of the given pages.
While a wiki is a type of content management system, it differs from a blog or most other such systems in that the content is created without any defined owner or leader, and wikis have little implicit structure, allowing structure to emerge according to the needs of the users.
 To quote John D. Sutter in Wikipedia: No longer the Wild West? , the idea is that "crowds of people can create the news, share information and collaborate on online projects." According to Sutter, Wikis operate under the  belief that "crowds of people are able to produce a usable and accurate body of information." However, recently the popular encyclopedia, wikipedia, which has drawn criticism for inaccuracies, says it will try assigning editors to some of its entries. These trusted volunteers likely would have to approve public edits before they're published to English-language stories about living people. Some see the move as a shift away from Wikipedia's core values and a sign that the public isn't able to produce accurate online content. Others see it as an unavoidable need to put some order into the chaos of information as online wikis become more complex.
 As for blogs, as mentioned in How can we measure the influence of the blogosphere, they are characterized by regular, date-stamped entries (timeliness)in reverse chronological order, and as wikis, may also include links to related news articles, documents, and links to related blogs(blogrolling) an archived entries (old content remains accessible).
The article Wal-Mart Tastemakers Write Unfiltered Blog tells of how the little-known merchants of Wal-Mart regularly blog about the products the store purchases. Their blogs are very candid and personal, and therefore useful to the store's customers. "Wal-Mart says the Web site helps buyers solicit quick feedback from consumers on the merchandise — and shows a softer side of the giant company."
Blogs are collaborative in the sense that they can be used as platform for online discussions. Each post has a time on it, and the posts are arranged in reversed chronological order, just like conversations.

What is the social "search efficiency" that the current publicly available filtration technology allows in social networking sites? 

The general aim behind my proposed research project is to attempt to  measure and address the level of social "search efficiency" that the current publicly available "search filtration" technology allows - in other words, how feasible is it for a given person to quickly locate specific types of persons based on the common criteria such as in terests, personality or physical appearance. Furthermore, this study could serve as the basis for future research with more advanced and detailed analysis that could hopefully be used by software and web developers to improve the publicly available search tools.