Blog One

Hey everyone, today we are setting up our first blog on bloggers.com, this is so we can keep track of work that we have done through the semester in lectures, tutorials and readings.

In yesterdays lecture with Steven Stockwell the main discussion point was ‘Is Email Dead?’ We discussed spam and fishing over email, we looked over statistics of a survey that we completed a week ago and discussed if bloggers are journalists.

When we discussed spam Steven asked how many of us don’t receive spam through email. Only a few raised their hands. Everyone mentioned what kind of spam they receive such as fake bank statements, fake prizes, and many emails that just didn’t make sense.

When the class looked over statistics it was pretty much what kind of results to expect. It was good to see that about 70% of the class liked having so much new technology available and it was interesting to see how many people prefer being online than doing other things such as the beach etc. About 70% said they would rather be online than at church.

Adam showed us a clip where a TV host was talking to a Politian about blogging. They discussed whether bloggers are journalists as bloggers take a lot of information from newspapers and TV and post it on the web.

In the tutorial we summarized what we remember from the lecture and did the first steps of our blogs. I've never used blogs before and never really read any either. It’s interesting to see the difference of blogs from emails and networks such as MySpace and Face book. These blogs will be very helpful when it comes to writing assessments and they are good notes for studying.

The reading by Benjamin Walter was very hard to get grips on. I had to read it a few times to understand it, but what was easier to understand was the documentary we watched in lecture one called “You Only Live Twice.” It was about a virtual world created on the internet named Second Life. The documentary covered a lot of different points and showed the creators and big shots of the virtual world. It was interesting to see that people ran businesses in second life and were doing extremely well as there is money in second life that can be cashed in for real currency. There were also issues of rape and paedophilia, as there was no stopping who the characters could really sleep with.

Overall that is pretty much everything I have seen and learnt over the last two weeks I shall be writing more next week till then have fun :)