Someone Else's Term Project Presentation

I'm going to be talking about the presentation about Webcomics. There are two types of webcomics, one being a comic strip and another being a full out story. However, webcomics in general are much more accessible than the traditional comic, strip or otherwise. Comic strips require you to buy a newspaper and comic books have to be bought.
Webcomics on the other hand are free and available online. Not only that, the artist usually occasionally updates it with new pages or content.

By being available to everyone online, online fan communities for them can be far larger than their physical counterparts.
The best thing about webcomics is that anyone can start one. The process of obtaining a publisher isn't a problem and there aren't any real costs to make one.

Overall, I found the presentation fun and entertaining. I even learned about a few webcomics that I've never heard of before. I used to read webcomics but I stopped a year or two ago.

Maybe this is a sign to start up again.

BARUCH NEW MEDIA - OUR CLASS WIKI - SO FAR

Create a new post on your blog with the above title. In your post, discuss the following.
...what you have been doing to contribute to our class wiki. Pages you have created and/or edited. Describe in general terms content you have added. If you have not added any content yet (besides your own bio, that is), then at least describe the research you have done and what you are working on towards this goal.

For our class wiki, the first thing I added was to my user page. I gave a brief description of myself and added a picture so my classmates could recognize my name with my appearance.
Also I added to the list of New Media available today. Tagged was a website that I signed up for in the past and I thought that it would be a good addition to the list.

Also, I added three more websites to the list of Online tv websites in the New Media in Entertainment page.

Summary of my Powerpoint Presentation

The Practice of Gold Farming in Online Games

Gold Farming consists of Third-worlders laboring in rural virtual sweatshops, plugged in as peasants in character-based games such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft. Their goal is to simply exist in the virtual world, and perform small tasks that will help them build up credit or "gold," or whatever currency is internal to the game.
Then this gold is sold by the company they work for for a big profit.

Contrary to the popularity of the new business venture of gold farming, the practice is illegial and companies detest it. However some embrace the idea by creating their own gold markets ingame.

A majority of gamers don't find gold farming an unfair practice, at least those that purchase it. However, there are some that dislike it due to the fact that it lets players "cheat" the system, bypassing the hard work and time required to reach a certain level.

The Next New Thing

BLOG POST: THE NEXT NEW THING Suggest a new type of "new media" that doesn't currently exist. Describe it.

A new media that allows users to chat with others in a 4d virtual simulation. It would be just like real life but with the capablity to chat with other people around the globe. You could be having teatime with someone from England in one second, and hunting for lions with a resident of Africa in a virtual Africa safari the next. However, the downside of the idea is, would the realism be too much that it eliminates the need for people to go outside their homes and converse in real life?

Advice to Baruch College

BLOG POST: ADVICE TO BARUCH COLLEGE You are hired by Baruch College to use new media to improve the College. What are some suggestions you would make?

One thing that Baruch College would definitely benefit from is a way to blast school closings (even though there never is any) to students in a more effective way. From personal experience, it took Baruch until 12 in the afternoon to post a banner on the front of their website saying that school was still open.

By that time, I had already relied on the word of mouth and my connection with other baruch students who went to school earlier in the morning than I do, to figure out whether the college was still open. But that is not to say that Baruch doesn't have measures set up. If you look on their website and several other places, they say that if there are school closings, then they would broadcast it on various radio stations. I had gone to the radio station websites to check but Baruch had not posted anything on there. So even with the backup plans they set up, Baruch in my opinon, failed to use the technology to it's potential.

I feel that Baruch could use a better networking system, such as AirBaruch, that is sort of a failure since it is underutilized as well. A network where the college could instantly blast school closing or important information to students regardless of whether they were on campus or not. Also, an important point for the new media to have is the ability for students to share information with others as well, in case Baruch is slow on updating students on the status. An existing new media that seems similiar to my idea would be Twitter. What I also like about Twitter is that even without signing up a cellphone, you can easily access Twitter and share information with others easily.

Old vs New

How do we distinguish “new media” from “old” media? List and explain several ways to do this.
-A pretty accurate way to define the difference to me, is that "new media" is new technology that has been created recently and vise versa.
-if the media contributes to increased social connectivity, then it is possibly "new media".
-look it up on the internet to see what society defines the media as. Also, there are organizations out there that declare different medias as "new" or "old".
-a media that is based off of an existing media that allows for users to connect and share with others instantly

My Second Life Experience

The past week, I have been exploring the virtual world of Second Life, and it has surprised me and brought about a new outlook on the functionality of Online worlds in my mind.
In the beginning, I found it strange and incredibly slow. I also had a big urge to close it and forget about it. However, my curiosity to figure out why people liked the game preserved.

I did research to learn more about Second Life and I chatted with the locals as well. Soon I found out that unlike other virtual worlds, in SL you can actually write code scripts, design objects and see your object come to life. Not only that, you can put it up for sale and watch with satisfaction as people buy up your designs and walk around with it. In Second Life, the sky's the limit in terms of imagination, as long as you can code it or design it, it's possible. As a CIS student learning C++ and other codes, the concept of it is just so amazing. And apparently, in Second Life, instead of C++ , they code in a madeup computer language called Linden language, where Linden is the name of the game company.

Also, there's no way that one can see all there is to see in SL in a lifetime. With users being able to code their own environments, there is so much to see. This is starting to sound like an advertisement for SL but the concept is revolutionary to me. But it isn't without it's shortcomings. Because content is user created, is isn't uncommon to come across Mature content or swindling. However, the problem I have the most with is that the SL, instead of doing the work on their servers, forces the user's computer to unpack and calculate all the physics of objects in the SL world. This makes loading incredibly slow, and often I have to wait 10 minutes for a few advertisements on a wall to finish loading. With so much to explore, it makes the waiting frustrating. Of course, a better computer with a better processor speed would help.

I still feel that it is worth the wait. And as of right now, since I have started writing this post, I am still patiently waiting for those advertisements to load.