Open Source Software.

I am a proponent of free and open source software. I enjoy not having to pay Microsoft several hundred dollars for my own copy of office when I can get comparable software for free. I had to make a decision when I bought my new computer if I wanted to get the windows software for Word, Excel, Power point. I decided that I didn't want to put down the money and I would just Open Office. This program is pretty much Identical to the older versions of Microsoft office except that it is open source and free to use. It works remarkably well and is compatible with the windows version of office. It is updated regularly and has better features then the windows version because the design team is diverse and keeps it up to date. I recommend this for anyone looking to save a few hundred dollars on their next office software purchase.

The other open source piece of software that I recommend people try out is Ubuntu, which is an open source operating system that is built of off Linux. My computer originally came with Windows Vista but I found vista to be synonymous with fail. I didn't want to get completely rid of my windows though because it still has it's entertainment uses as a game platform. So I decided to dual-boot vista with Ubuntu. I used this guide to help me do it because it was my first time. I feel that the Internet connection application is more stable then vista. I felt like it was more intuitive and faster over all. The way that it updates is also more efficient then windows. You just click the updater and it shows a list of all the updates and you can install them with out restarting. Updates are also released with a greater frequency then vistas.

Overall I find that when ever I can find free software to use it is worth it. It saves me money and helps me keep an efficient computer. One must always be wary of what you download though because there are fake programs that contain viruses and malicious code.

Contribution Model.

I have recently seen a rise in the type of websites on-line where you can contribute your own stories and videos too. The Internet is different from others types of media because anyone who has access to it can contribute to it. For example this blog post that I writing is an example of how the Internet is truly the masses media. I have with only access to the Internet created several posts on various topics for free and anyone on-line can also read what I have said. No other form of media has ever had this ability before everyone can share and their own stories and point of views. There are many websites out there that take this principle of letting the user tell their story and they have become quite popular because of it.

One of the most popular is a website called F My Life. This is a website where people can submit stories about the bad things that have happened in their life. Many of these stories are very humorous and ironic. Readers can then agree with the poster and say that there life is indeed F'd or they can rate it down and say they deserved it. I find this site to be pretty addicting and a great time waster. It's good for reducing my productivity, it should however be R rated though haha.

Another website where users can submit there own pieces is Texts from last night. This is a website where users submit their texts from the night before or just funny texts that they have sent or received. A lot of these texts are pretty raunchy but are still funny never the less. The website is very popular among college students.

Post Secret is another website but this one is slightly older and more recognized then the two previous ones. People send in anonymous post cards of their deepest secrets and then these post cards are displayed on a website and the best of them have been published in a book.

These three websites are just an example of how media driven by anonymous submittal is widely popular on the Internet. They are just for entertainment but I know there are other ways in which this sort of public work can be used for good, such as in message boards and such.

Internet Productivity.

The Internet is a great tool for increasing productivity but it is also very good at causing a decrease in productivity. It speeds up peoples ability to communicate, to collaborate and to complete simple tasks. It however is also a very powerful entertainment system. I know that myself and many of my friends find it difficult to focus when we are working on various projects on the computer. We easily get distracted by the ability to just go on the Internet and have a good time. There have been many articles and studies done on whether or not the Internet has led to an increase in productivity. There has not been a conclusive finding yet though. There are many variables to consider in such a study and this is what makes the question of is the Internet conducive to productivity a difficult question.

I looked for an article on measuring productivity on-line and found this one that examines the ways in which it is hard to study the effects of Information Technology. The main problems with trying to measure productivity concerning the Internet is that you cannot use the traditional methods of measuring productivity. The improvements brought on by Information Technology are often hard to calculate. Since productivity is difficult to measure and there are many variables concerning it, it is often difficult to tell when results are relevant. There may also be a time difference between when the technology is actually implemented and when productivity begins to improve making it difficult to calculate the improvement. The systems can also be improperly implemented or not used at all and this will lead to a lack of improvement in productivity.

In my opinion I feel that the Internet has improved productivity in many regards but we need to be careful about how we spend our time on the web because it is so easy to get distracted.

The Future of The Music Industry

The future of the music industry has been and still is in a battle for it's rights. Since the dawn of file sharing programs the record industries have been losing increasing amounts of money due to the file sharing of copyrighted works With the rise of Napster in the 90's each time the record companies score a victory they lose more ground to an increase in music file sharing. I know friends who have never purchased a CD in their entire life. They have thousands of songs and if each song is worth roughly a dollar by today's standards then the money that the music industry has lost is truly astounding.


Legal alternatives exist to this file sharing problem. Itunes is a great example of how music has gone on-line and is providing a legal way for people to obtain it. The music industry however is not pleased with itrunes and is unhappy with the fact that itunes demands that each song be sold for ninety nine cents. They have tried to persuade itunes into increasing the price but are unable to because itunes is so adamant that they keep the ninety nine cent price tag on all songs because it sounds good to consumers.

As the sale of MP3 players booms and digital music is more popular then ever the music industry needs to get with the Internet program. CD sales have been falling for years although there has been a revitalise interest in records and vinyl. This is because some people enjoy the feeling of owning records and playing them the old school way. I feel that if the music industry wants to continue making a profit that they need to get more aggressive with file sharing services and copy right violations. They also need to produce more on-line options for customers and not allow apple itunes to have a monopoly on the on-line music industry. I feel that if it becomes more difficult to file share high quality versions of songs for free then people will start to turn the legitimate options on-line. It is apparent from current trends that the future of the music industry is obviously going to be heavily rooted in the Internet.

Google Applications

I did my final web project on Google and in this project I partially went into some of the good things that Google has done concerning applications. These applications are the way of the future in terms of computing. The way things are right now is that you will have programs installed on individual computers. This leads to problems when you can not access these programs from any computer or access the documents that you have on this particular computer. Google is leading the way with Internet applications and this has Microsoft running scared because they are weaker in Internet based computing. Whats going to happen as these applications keep improving is that you will have basically an on-line computer profile that you can log into from any computer and load your applications. Google has already started doing this with Google documents which allow you to type up papers and do basic spreadsheet work using an on-line application. A few years ago in 2007 Microsoft was considering buying yahoo in order to bolster this weak area of their company. The deal did not go through I believe because Google opposed it and others opposed it because of monopolistic reasons. As applications are the future and Google is leading the way with 'free' ones let me tell you in my opinion about the more useful ones that they offer.

First off one of my personal favorites is Google translator. This small but powerful tool is free and accessible by clicking the more page on google.com and selecting translator. It works in many different languages and can translate to and from English. The translations are not always perfect but I definitely recommend this a quick and easy solution when you need to translate something.

Google Documents is a free and mobile word processing application that Google offers and is accessible by choosing the more button on google.com. This is a basic word processor/spreadsheet application. One of the most powerful uses of it though is that you can have other people come in and edit the on-line document directly with out having to send them a copy. This helps speed up projects that need to be a collaborative effort.

These were only a couple of examples of the many great applications that Google offers. Web based applications are the way of the future and Google already has a nice head start on the competition.

Virtual Addictions

Today in class Second Life was briefly mentioned again and it was brought up that perhaps for some people Second Life might start becoming more important to them than their real life. I believe that this is true and it is already happening.



I do not have any first hand experience with Second Life but i used to play World Of Warcraft and had several friends who played. I can say for certain that their are definitely people who play the game are addicted. I played the game mostly to hang out with my friends and I wasn't a heavy player until before i quit. I can say with all honesty that the game is quite addictive. It's built to make you spend as much time doing things as possible. When i finally realized this i just became so uninterested in the game and quit. For other players though it is often a much harder addiction to break. They think about it all the time and play it for most of the day. It destroys their real world relationships because all they care about is the game.

I found a website that was made to help people get support for their addiction to World Of Warcraft. WoWDetox is a place where people can post their opinions on the game and how it has effected them as inspiration for other people to quit. There was recently a posting on this site about the wife of a player who was ignoring her and only cared about the game. This women expressed suicidal intentions and the Webmaster of WoWDetox contacted the persons internet provider with their IP address and the individual was found by law enforcement before anything bad happened.

I have run into some funny examples of WoW addiction and game addiction on the internet. For example in this video two brothers have a bet for one to play WoW for 24 hours straight. The person successfully does it and then when asked what he wants to do now he replies "play some more." The better is astonished that there could be more to do in the game. It just goes to show that the game is truely endless and that people care about it more then anything in real life.

The Stupidest Generation? Eh, Probably Not.

In SPC 260 class on Wednesday we discussed the views of Mark Bauerlins article entitled Online Literacy A “Lesser” Kind. I found this article to be very true and interesting at the same time. Even though I am a fan and supporter of the Internet I feel that Bauerlins brings up some shocking points. Mark Bauerlin is very anti-internet. He feels that the Internet has made this generation the dumbest one ever. I don't agree with that of course but he does have his reasons for this statement and the reasons are not completely unfounded. He has several points but his main argument is that when people read things off of a screen from the Internet they do not actually read the whole article. Readers get lazy and just skim or scan the article often in an F like pattern.

I am guilty of this and so is everyone who has been told about this issue. I didn't realize it at first, I just noticed that I had a really hard time paying attention to articles that I had to read on my computer through the Internet. After learning about the F scanning pattern that we use when reading on-line articles I believe that learning and reading on a screen are not the best way to do things. I find it much easier to just print articles out and read them. That is if I am not too lazy and just don't get around to it. I know this is true for many other students out there. They find it much easier to read long texts when they are printed out.

Although I feel this puts a damper on the whole Internet as a learning tool I don't believe that it completely removes all education benefits of it or makes us the stupidest generation yet. The Internet is still a very important tool for researching. I think that our generations solution to the problem of reading on the computer could be fixed if we printed out things that were important to read and we would be doing better already.

Growing Up With the Internet.

I have often wondered what life before the Internet was like. What it would have been like to grow up with this amazing source of information, communication and entertainment existed. As a generation that has grown up with the Internet I have often heard people comment on the effects it has had on us. Some people say that the Internet is making us lazy. Some have said we are lucky to have grown up with the Internet because it is such an integral part of todays modern world and it is a huge advantage to be computer literate. Still another viewpoint on the subject might point out that we are hopelessly distracted and immensely less productive then we could be with the Internet right there in front of us well we work.

The Internet has certainly made some tasks easier but it is also making us lazier. For example I grew up with a dial up connection since I was around the age of six. My dad was the one who mostly used it but from an early age I realized that I could use the Internet to save me time. I would sometimes have to us a dictionary in my homework and I would try to get my mom to sign me on the Internet so that I could look words up. She wouldn't do it on the grounds that she thought I was just being lazy and that I should use the dictionary. I still used the dictionary on-line whenever I could and I think that looking words up in a book will soon be obsolete thanks to on-line dictionaries and peoples inclinations to take the faster easier route.

My parents and grandparents always say that I am lucky to have grown up with the Internet and computers because it gives me such an advantage over people who don't have those skills. I am inclined to agree with them on this one because the world around us is becoming more and more Internet centered. Although I consider myself lucky to have grown up with the Internet I also feel that it is detrimental to our work habits. Students now more then ever before are amazing procrastinators. I don't want to write my paper so I am just going to hop on youtube and watch a few videos instead. It will be interesting to see how growing up with the Internet will affect my generation in the future and how it will affect future generations also.

Exploring My Roots

Being relatively new to blogging I found this interview conducted by Rebecca's Pocket to be particularly informing as to how blogging started and why people blog. I had originally thought that blogging was a relatively new practice. How wrong I am it has been around for a good 8+ years so far. I did not know that blogging was started very early when the internet was first starting up. It didn't occur to me that computer experts had been publishing their own blogs and really having their own internet communities. Like the interviewee I had often wondered what the point of blogging is. Why would anyone want to read what some random person has to say about anything? I found out that it is often experts in the field publishing widely acclaimed blogs. People often publish blogs related to subjects on which they have a particular interest or specialty in. This interview also gave me some very general guidelines for being a good blogger.

Trine-Maria the interviewee stresses that you should be yourself and have a natural way of writing in order, to attract and keep readers. Blogging can make you money too but not in the traditional web-based way with advertisements. It basically gets your name out there and if you are writing a blog on something that you are an expert on people will contact you because they want you to work for them. I found this particularly interesting because it hadn’t occurred to me that a blog could be a type of online resume. She finds that humanization is a very important aspect of blogging. You can turn a very robotic company that only has press-releases and boring professional web-pages into a very human company by having a company blog in which people are allowed to discuss naturally about their work.

Reading this interview has been very helpful for increasing my understanding and awareness as to the reasons why people blog. I learned that although blogging can be a very successful practice one has to go about it in the correct way. You have to put in the time to make you blog well written as well as giving it personality and a human voice.