I wonder what the blog would look like if it was less structured. Just kind of a free-for-all. Length of posts, amount of posts, content of posts, all completely open. Would that be better or worse?

I was browsing through some stuff and started reading a blog entry from this guy, David Pogue, who blogs for the NY Times. He starts off his post with this letter some 15-year-old wrote him, in which the indignant teenager criticizes another post of his. Anyway, the whole thing basically gets down to his point that a lot of people are not so civil on the internet. These are his theories why:

* "On the Internet, you’re anonymous. Since you don’t have to face the person you’re dumping on, you don’t see any reason to display courtesy.

I think Oz kind of touched on this topic earlier, but there are some things I've been thinking about lately in terms of the nature of this class. On this blog we use anonymous names, but of course we all know/could figure out who's who. We saw presentations of people's final projects and can also clink on links to see all of their content whenever we like. We can look at who's updating the wiki and who made what editorial changes. There's something about the way this class is set up that lets people get to know more about each other, and to make judgments, whether correct or not. Most classes you just sort of drift through without really getting a sense of who other people are or what they're interested in, but not this class--I feel like I've seen certain parts of people's personalities coming through their academic work. And what's interesting to me is that this new level of interaction (or at least it's new for me) is facilitated by the internet and the online communities we've created.

I was reading this article about how A&E is using an online/out in the real world hybrid game to get people interested in watching the Sopranos reruns that A&E is set to play starting early January. So again it's this strategy of game as marketing tool, and I'm still curious as to how successful these things are and what kind of people are the ones who participate in these game/ads.

The article has the requisite quote from some person who will sound educated, in this case a quote from a professor at USC (the cali one): "They want to express themselves in a community,” he said. “In this case the community is of people excited about ‘The Sopranos.’ I think it is a natural flowing from this sort of participation age." People wanting to express themselves in a community...this is something I've been thinking about a lot lately as people have been talking about identity online. The way in which games are serving as a way for people to express themselves within a community...this is something that I'm interested in but I don't really know where to go with it yet. And then when the game is also an advertisement, how does that factor in?

Has anyone been seeing the ads for Burger King video games? I ran across this post which sorta explains a lot about it, but basically Burger King's putting out three Xbox360 games that you can buy for $3.99 each with the purchase of a value meal. I'm wondering how much the game feels like a game and how much it feels like an ad...it seems so strange to pay someone money so you can watch their advertisements. Are there other brands out there doing the same kind of thing? I've seen silly little online games that are advertisements, but nothing this elaborate. Or maybe I've been missing stuff--is this becoming a common thing now?

I was reading this random review of The Onyx Project that I came across online, and in it the reviewer mentions that Colonel Henderson talks about and quotes from several bloggers, which I thought was an interesting choice for the writer/director (Larry Atlas) to make. This would definitely help the film to seem more realistic, but I wonder if it also reflects something about the intended audience. Does Atlas think that film needs a new format or a level of viewer interactivity the same way text has been given new formats and interactive qualities? Hmm where am I going with this...I guess I'm wondering how a comparison would work. Reading something in print versus reading something online that now gives you the options of choosing the order you view the text in, and watching a movie from start to finish versus choosing scenes of film pretty much randomly until you've watched them all or get bored... how do the two compare and should I even be thinking about all of this in terms of this comparison?

Something I keep coming back to when I'm thinking about my final project is a point that was made by Brian Kim Stefans in his essay on the electronic book review site we looked at a few weeks ago. His main point, although I'm sure I'm oversimplifying it here, was that "new media writers" are not thinking about how technology and the media they're using can increase the impact of words; language can get reduced to "a useful marker for the passing of time" or "a participant in a recombinant universe jointly occupied by sounds, images, videos and the user’s interactions." Language becomes just another element, equal to other elements like sounds and images. It gets used to make things more concrete or to help the reader/viewer to understand what the digital art is saying. However, electronic components like image, audio file, etc, are not solving problems with the language, not returning the favor so to speak.

I've been thinking about surveillance and censorship on the Internet, and I just read magoo's post on privacy, and it's crazy because I'm realizing I just don't know anything about all of this. I keep stumbling across articles related to these things, one of them from Wired that talks about the results of a world-wide survey that is looking at government censorship in different nations. One government claims to censor "sexually explicit" (whatever that means) materials, but what it actually censors are political and religious sites that don't quite agree with the ideas/policies of their regime. Governments use all kinds of tricks, making you think you're trying to reach a page that doesn't exist (when it actually does), and then there's the DoS attacks, which I definitely knew nothing about (and now only kinda understand). But, there are of course new browsers and products that allow individuals to get around all this censorship, and some individuals find other ways of fighting it-- this quote from the Wired article is crazy to me:

So I've been thinking a lot lately about Skin and the one-word tattoos and people's postings. Here's where I'm getting tripped up...ok she could have potentially asked that volunteers get sentences, paragraphs, pages, or even the whole text, I suppose, tattooed on their body. If someone copied one of the volunteer's tattoos, their tattoo would be seen as a copy, a reprinting of Jackson's work. But words are different...if someone copied someone's tattoo of a word you would not even necessarily assume that they were "copying" someone, and that word would not be seen as a reprinting of Jackson's work. Single words can't be claimed by single authors (although I guess you can make up a new word and take credit for it).

I'm going to mention this because right now it's soooooo frustrating and I simply can't not talk about it...but I just wrote a whole long blog post and then accidentally deleted it!! And for about 30-45 seconds, I kind of lost it. I hate that everything has to be recorded or it doesn't count. I know what you're thinking, probably that that's a stupid comment. It is kinda stupid because that's how everything works I guess but just know that right now I am struggling ....I could almost feel a tear slowly building... but then it went away. Obviously I am bad at dealing with life when my attempts to do something productive are thwarted. It's just, you know, when you did something you're supposed to do you almost feel proud, but now that's been destroyed... because you get that feeling and then you just know that whatever you type now is only going to be a crappier version of what you originally had...sigh ok enough with that.