Second Life

1. How have you chosen to represent yourself?

In Second Life you can:

Go Abroad. Amsterdam is one of the leading destinations in Second Life, because it's extremely well-done. It's a beautiful re-creation of real-life Amsterdam. It is also one of the most popular sex businesses in Second Life. 

Talk to other people.

Dancing. There's music playing -- it's streaming audio that plays over your PC speakers. Everybody hears the same music. You click on a "dance ball," and away you go -- your avatar starts dancing, with all the other dancing avatars.  And while you're dancing, you're engaged in text chat with the other dancers around you.

Listen to live music and attend other live events. One of the most popular activities in Second Life. Real-life musicians and DJs use streaming audio to send their sounds into SL, and avatars gather to listen. You can find just about every genre and era of music, from jazz to hip-hop. 

Building and creating things. People spend huge amounts of time in Second Life building and scripting houses and furniture and especially clothing and avatars. Users write scripts to control haw the avatars move. They create vehicles to drive or fly around or through Second Life. They give a lot of this stuff away and sell a lot of it, too. 

Doing business. You can make real-world money in Second Life. Most of the people in business in Second Life aren't making any significant amounts of money at all. Business is a game in Second Life. Doing business in Second Life has many of the same benefits that it has in the real world. 

Shopping. With all those people building clothes and avatars and vehicles and things, Second Life has plenty of shops, and you can while away many pleasant hours committing SL retail. Shopping is cheap in Second Life. 

Role-playing games: The Second Life variety of RPG is half improvisational theater, and half re-enactment. Players behave and move in character, and interact with each other. 

Other kinds of games. WoW/Everquest-style fantasy games are all on SL, as well as shoot-em-ups, and even quidditch, from the Harry Potter novels. 

See the sights.  Explore and look at all the beautiful things users have built. The SL search tool, which is part of the software client, has a list of popular places, along with their coordinates. You can also search on keywords.

Sailing. The Nantucket Yacht Club and other in-game venues offer sailing in Second Life.

Surfing. You can get a virtual surfboard in Second Life

Linden Lab own Second Life and has the majority of its funding from Globespan Capital Partners. also with global brand owners such as Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor as well as companies such as  the Omidyar Network and Catamount Ventures helping with funding.

Although Second Life was produced by Linden Lab it enable its consumers to become the producers. It is a good example of online media being produced by the public.

Web 2.0

Wikis - a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser

Six Degrees - A Facebook platform application named “Six Degrees" was developed by Karl Bunyan, which calculates the degrees of separation between different people. The average separation for all users of the application is 5.73 degrees, whereas the maximum degree of separation is 12. The application has a "Search for Connections" window to input any name of a Facebook user, to which it then shows the chain of connections.

Perpetual Beta - a term used to describe software or a system which remains at the beta-development stage for an extended or even indefinite period of time

FOAF - an acronym of Friend of a friend is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe him or herself. FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralised database.

User Centered - an application that is specifically centered around the users needs

Joy of Use -

Usability - a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal.

Widgets -In computing a web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation.

Simplicity -

Browser - a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web.

AJAX - a group of techniques for creating interactive web applications, in which applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page.

Design -

CSS - Cascading Style Sheets  is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (that is, the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.

Pay Per Click - an Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. 

Social Software - encompasses a range of software systems that allow users to interact and share data. This computer-mediated communication has become very popular with social sites like Facebook, media sites like Flickr and YouTube as well as commercial sites like Amazon.com and eBay. Many of these applications share characteristics like  the ability to upload data and media.

Wikinomics

Peering is the free sharing of material on the internets. This is shown through software such as Limewire, which enable the public to download music for free.

Free creativity is a natural and positive outcome of free marketing.It enable the public to have the possibility to distribute their ideas freely without consequences.

Openess is the ability to let the public express themselves. It is argued that this is not always a good thing as it means there is less privacy online e.g Facebook & Twitter.

Prosumers is when consumers are also the producers, this creates the phenomenon: Prosumer. In Wikinomics it discusses the social video game Second Life as being created by its consumers.

Wiki enables the public to create and update topics online. This is done by using only a plain-vanilla Web browser without any extra add-ons. This is not always a good thing as it means that people can change something and it may not necessarily be true.

Ideagoras is the idea of linking experts with unsolved research and development problems. InnoCentive is a consulting group that summarises the idea of ideagoras.

Key Words

Convergence is the occurrence of two or more things coming together e.g. online news including information and videos

Web 2.0 is interactive information sharing and collaboration on the Web. A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with other users or to change website content e.g. Facebook, Twitter & YouTube

Public Sphere is a social activity where people can freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence actions. 

Online Journalism is the reporting of facts and information that is distributed on the Internet

Citizen Journalism is when members of the public engage in journalism e.g. Wikipedia & Perez Hiltons blog

Social Networking is the interaction between the public online e.g. Facebook

Interactivity is the idea of the public acting with each other & responding to users online

Accessibility is the ability to access certain topics more easily

Comparing newspapers and the Internet

News websites are able to broadcast news within different categories so that the audience are able to choose which topics they want to find more information on. Online news also keeps back-logs on past news so if an audience wanted to research previous news stories they would be able to do this online instantly

Different audiences would prefer online news and others would prefer to have a hard-copy of news depending on their lifestyle. A younger generation may prefer to look at news online as it is instant and free, compared to adults who may prefer reading newspapers on the way to work and when they have free time. However, more adults are learning how to access new online so they may feel that updates on news online would benefit them more than previous current events that would not appear in the newspaper till the next day.

The content in a newspaper is more likely to be condensed so that more information is able to be printed, whereas online journalist have more capacity to write more about particular topics and current events. This is obviously because newspapers cannot report everything with much detail than can be put online. Online there may also be smaller articles that do not seem relevant or important enough to put in the newspaper but what some audiences may be interested in.

Audiences are more likely to consume the news in different ways depending on how they receive it. If an audience reads a newspaper it is more likely that they will read a majority of the articles regardless of if that topic interests them because they have purchased it. However, online it is easier to go directly to specific topic so audiences will most likely avoid any articles they are not interested in. This is a positive and a negative because, if an audience is looking specifically for one topic then they can get to it quickly, however, it also means that they avoid current events and may not have any knowledge on topics that effect their lives.

The History of News

What was the first national newspaper in this country?

The Times was published in 1785 as The Daily Universal Register, and late changed to The Times in 1778

When was the first news broadcast?

• Radio broadcasting was experimented in 1906, however the first News broadcasting radio station was KFAX in San Francisco in 1959, firstly being dedicated to music, news and sports, however then changing to the first all-news radio station. In the UK was London News Radio began in 1993, whilst Radio 5 Live began in 1994.
• The first television news broadcast in the UK was BBC World News in 1991 and globally CNN was broadcast first in 1980

What was the first news company to have a website?

BBC News launched its website in November of 1997, becoming the first online news site in the UK

The Public Sphere

Jurgen Habermas was born in 1929 and attended the Frankfurt school while studying under Adorno and Horkheimer. In 1962 he wrote, “Structural Transformation in the Public Sphere”, his first book about the public sphere. This book expressed his thoughts on how democracy is achieved through opinions formed from public discussion – which is now often done on social networks and blogs via Web 2.0. Habermas believed that democracy developed in the 18th Century through men meeting together, for example in coffee houses to read books and journals, and discuss and form opinions on what they had read. According to Habermas, “Citizens act as a public when they deal with matters of general interest without being subject to coercion; thus with the guarantee that they may assemble and unite freely, and express and publicise their opinions freely”. For the public sphere to be successful the men must have had somewhere to meet, previous knowledge on the topic , willingness to revise opinions based on the discussions and equality during the discussions. The use of Web 2.0 makes global discussions easier as people are able to access blogs and publicise their views on current affairs.
During the 20th century most of our knowledge of politics and current events had come from the media, such as television and newspapers. Politicians have learnt to control the media to ensure that they receive positive media coverage; this is through use of Spin doctors. Newspapers are often bias to political parties which hinders the public from forming their own opinions on what they have read. The lack of discussion about politics or current events means that Habermas’ public sphere is near non-existent in modern society.
However, it is believed now that the Internet is potentially becoming a public sphere. The diversity of the internet means that people are able to communicate via different means online; emails, blogs, newsgroups, social networking and chat rooms. During the 18th century public spheres were just for local discussions, however, with the help of Web 2.0 discussions now involve people from all over the world. Different cultures in the world mean that the discussions will be broader than those in the 18th century as people from different countries and backgrounds will differ in terms of their opinions thus allowing educated opinions to be formed. The use of Web 2.0 also makes it easier for people to feel comfortable about expressing their opinions as there is no prejudice based on who they are, only by what they say.
Access to the internet makes it easier for more people to be involved in online discussions as they are able to research the topic to enhance their knowledge. However, there is some unreliability about what information can be found on the internet. This is due to the control that the public can have on what is written via both chat rooms and blogs, and also by websites such as Wikipedia whereby you can edit what is written about particular topics. If the public were misinformed on a topic it can stop the discussion from acting as a public sphere. Only if a method of verifying whether the information placed on websites was correct could this help the make the Internet a public sphere.
The use of webcams and microphones means that modern public spheres are able to mimic the public spheres that began in the 18th century as they are more personal due to the fact it is known who is voicing their opinions.
As generation X have not grown up with the Internet it means that many discussions have amateur opinions as many of the bloggers are younger and may not have a fully informed opinion. If more of the older generation were able to access blogs and chat rooms with ease it would mean that there would be a more diverse discussion thus creating a better public sphere.
Public spheres could also be hindered in the future by the controls of government bodies or large corporations. This could create restrictions on what is discussed or what opinions people are allowed to voice. Restrictions were made in the past of radio broadcasts and television broadcasts, and this could also happen to public spheres. If restrictions were put on public spheres it would mean that discussions would become bias due to the control the corporations or the government would have. If the same restrictions that were put on broadcasts in the past were applied to blogs and chat rooms it would make personal opinions and freedom of online speech near impossible. As the media is influential to society - through use of many mediums including the Internet – the owning of public spheres by corporations will disable the publication of much of the content that is attempted to be publicised online; “The way the number of owners of telecommunication channels is narrowing to a tiny elite, while the reach and power of the media they own expand, is a converging threat to citizens” – Rheingold.
Potentially the Internet could become a modern public sphere. However, it is dependent on the development of the internet and peoples knowledge on the use of chat rooms and blogs. It could also potentially become an area in which restrictions of content are put in place

to protect any companies that own particular sites, or by the government who may want to protect certain political parties.