The Next New Thing

The next new thing I have in mind is a new media network website called “Know your neighbors.com.” Most of us live in big buildings in NYC not knowing who our next door neighbor is because we all came from different backgrounds, ethnicities, etc… but we may share same interests and ideas. In a big city like NYC we all rather not bother with neighbors because would think they may not be interested to become a part of community activities.    This networking website I am thinking about could help connect individuals who live in the same apartment buildings. In this website individuals can be able to exchange ideas, things, neighborhood events etc… they can even exchange services such as cooking, cleaning, babysitting to name a few. The management offices in these big building can give an access to  register in this website and individuals can start sharing new information, updating new information in the area such as heavy traffic, shopping deals of the day, events, announcement to name a few.

One of the major reasons that I propose this idea is that when I first had my baby I really want to get to know all mothers in my building who had babies around the same time. But the only way you can connect to these parents is only if you start going to the park or wait in the lobby a day after you have your baby :-) But a network like this could help individuals in this type of situations. Also individuals can be able to customize the website based on their needs.

Our Class Wiki - So Far

I have not started contributing to our class Wiki beside my bio; however I have started working on researching for information to the topic I picked to contribute.  So far I have been researching on information that are related to  marketing and advertising using social networking sites especially I focused on Facebook. I found some interesting information the way advertising on Facebook become more popular in the past few years and why advertisers become more interested in advertising on this network than any other networks.

P2P File Sharing

File sharing is a way of allocating digital information via internet by using different types of digital file sharing programs.  According to Wikipedia “File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images, & video), documents, or electronic books.” One way of file sharing is by using P2P file sharing software over the internet by accessing others peers computer to download or share files, computer programs, etc… There are many types of P2P programs that allow users easily download computer programs, music, and digital files for free. Some examples of P2P file sharing programs are BitTorrent, LimeWire, eMule, Soluseek to name a few.  P2P file sharing can be used both legally and illegally. In the past few years illegal downloading of music on MP3and films have become a big problem for entitlement industries.  The article “Digital Pirates Winning Battle With Studios” explains how easy it is to illegally download and watch new films in this case “The Dark knight” that was made available by “anonymous pirates who put the film online and enabled millions of Internet users to view it.” This shows that since P2P sharing program does not depend on using the central server to file sharing, it would be hard to track the origination of the file that made it available for everyone to download and share.

Privacy & Confidentiality

Social networking sites are considered part of the new media technology. Since the introduction of these sites, user’s privacy and confidentiality have been constantly under great threat at an alarming rate.  As users many of us give out our real personal information in order to use these sites.  In turn some of the social networking sites share our personal information with other third party service providers. Some of these sites such as Facebook and MySpace have admitted that they share some user’s personal information with third party companies.

Advice to Baruch College

If I am hired at Baruch to use new media to improve the college I would probably propose more online classes for most of CIS classes. By taking this class this semester I have learned a lot about the available tools of the new media such as virtual world, wiki, blogger to name a few. In my opinion Blackboard is a good tool to have but need to be enhanced with more new media technologies.

 I would probably propose for some discussion based classes to be held by utilizing virtual world especially designed second life software where everyone in that class member can create an avatar to participate in the discussion. The reason I said this is that in many classes that require class participation such as Ethic or Low classes usually only few student participate. Some of the reasons are that some students are shy or extremely cautious when speaking in class fearing they may sound unintelligent.    But if the discussion is held on virtual world where the identity is secured more students would participate and improve their communication skill. I admit that this could be quite expensive.

About My Term Research Paper

I have always wondered how long it will take for the new media to reach the developing world.  After following recent events in the Middle East through the mainstream media attributing the organization of the protests that toppled an authoritarian regime in Egypt directly to the social network namely Facebook, I became interested to learn more and explore further. I was able to read some books and articles that were written several years ago. These writings identified and pointed out the importance of the need to bridge the stark digital divide between the developed and that of the developing world. Through this research I was able to see how important it is for the developing countries to close this digital divide if they are to survive economically, socially and politically in the global community.  

Creativity and New Media

This is my first time to visit and create an avatar of myself on secondlife.com. I picked one of the characters on the website. The avatar I picked originally was wearing a party dress and I just changed her top to student red sweeter since I thought it would be more appropriate for this assignment :-)

This is where I took some instruction how to walk, fly etc….

I visited Egypt and chatted with other avatar

Finally I fly…..

I thought it was kind of interesting how the virtual world used to create 3-D images of avatars’ that are capable of walking, flying as well as communicating with other avatars.  I have to admit that before this class I had no idea this type of websites even exist.