The Tradeoff

Michael has spoken about a trade off that comes from this mass connectivity that exists in the world. The price of Metcalfe's law, so to speak. As an example he spoke about cutting out the middlemen, disintermediation. The newspapers lose money because they no longer are the place to go to sell your junk. We've got ebay now for that. But then the newspapers can't afford to employ journalists and we're deprived of quality journalism.
I very strongly disagree with this line of thought, and believe that the tradeoff occurs far away from the pros and cons of the death of old Media. For one this, Old Media is losing for a reason. There is next to nothing New Media can't do that Old Media can. Quality journalism comes from quality journalists, not from newspapers. If the newspapers won't employ them then the internet will be their new best friend. Blogs, as has been pointed out in lectures, can be seen as a journalism. Sell advertising space on your blog and if you're good enough you're getting paid again. If Twitter wants to make money, they should have people pay to subscribe to quality journalist news feeds, after all its not only about reporting the truth but reporting it the fastest. What we lose in the newspapers, the Internet gives back in abundance. And saves trees.

So where do I think the tradeoff happens? Well after today's (wait, time check... yesterday's) lecture I had a thought... Global citizens are fucking stupid.
This Networked Media Class might be able to guess Michael's weight using the power of averages, but big fucking deal. Crowds aren't wise. There is some lovely maths that means educated guesses are excellent things to group and draw graphs from and can help in lots of lovely ways. Key Word here; EDUCATED! In terms of chance, it doesn't work that way. That magician who claims to have used a group of people to predict the lottery numbers (he was on sunrise, so was the guy who proved he was a fraud. It was a simple technological trick using some camera magic, not crowd psychicness) So people in large groups are not smart, unless they are all educated a little on the subject at hand.
So here is is. The Tradeoff. Collective Intelligence gives us YouTube, wikipedia and other wonderful things which i adore and wish i could go back in time and invent.
And it gives us people who will buy tulips for ridiculous amounts of money. It gives us the collective intelligence mob mentality that will drive the price of stock to ridiculous lows just because one person has lots of shares. It robs us of real world material in many ways. The GFC GEC Sub prime mortgage whatever left a lot of people in a very bad situation. That poor dutch schmuck who sold all his land for a fucking flower is another example. It makes the value of things wrong. Good and services should be simple, supply and demand should be simple. i.e Just because something is rare doesn't mean it should be valuable. Just because something is rare and useful, doesn't mean it should be valuable. Bu when something is rare, useful, and everybody wants one, it should be valuable.


Collective intelligence warps value to the point of idiocy. And gives such a pool of human thought that there is nothing we can't achieve.

Its almost paradoxical, but i think its a fair tradeoff.

week 9 ends...

So. I'm back. Yay for me, and for anyone who reads my awesomeness. I'm actually severely pissed at NMP lately because I've lost my black folder that contains all my everything so far for uni. So I've been incredible stressed about that...

I think I lost it in our tute on wednesday, or the lecture. Either way I'm not happy Jan. But the tute was otherwise interesting, we had to do a high school style report on some major internet players but Pirate Guy thought we'd learn more or whatever if we did it on a company that was not very well known. EG: Instead of youtube, maybe hulu or something. Or askjeeves vs google. That sort of thing.

Speaking of google, everyone in this unit should really watch the Hungry Beast google video. I don't have much internet left so I wont be posting a link to it but if you've got internet (and you're reading this so i assume you do) then google "hungry beast google" or "the beast file google" and watch the video. It'll make you scared of google.

(also did you know that Google's company moto is "Dont be evil"? Fair enough but HAHAHAHA Irony....)

So enough outbursts and back to the blogging and crap.

Funnily enough I didn't get Google, i got some never before heard of thing called Reddit, which is similiar to delicious but a bit different. So we just did Delicious, although i did have fun with google trends for the first time so yay me.

I've got a plan actually of what I'm going to do with google trends, so stay tuned and wait for some conspiracy theory driven madness.

So that's my blog for now, see ya next time if the government doesn't use their satellite to turn my RFID chip into a microwave emitter and cooks me while i walk my dog that i don't have...

Project A Rationale

My project was a satirical exhibition of photographs of spiders in the wikipedia commons. Its a website that can be found at www.arsekickx8.freewebpages.com. I didn't use any design software (ie: dreamweaver) and as such i wrote the whole thing from the ground up. And it sort of looks like it. I embedded items from flickr to create the banner and the background and just used HTML and CSS for the rest.

I chose to exhibit photographs of spiders because i truly believe that they are beautiful and have been taking photos of them for years now. I've gotten quite good, but the majority of spider photos in the wikipedia commons are of a considerable higher quality, and most are copyleft. The most one has to do to use one of the photos is contribute it to the wikipedia user or the photographer's actual name.

Similar websites include this site and this one. One thing that bugged me about these websites is that they are all so serious. Conveying information both true and useful, their photographs are amazing but their text is dull. So I thought a satire would be fun for both myself and visitors to the site.

I followed some fairly standard design patterns, using a banner at the top, a hyperlinked table of contents at the bottom (to encourage people to scroll over the entirety of the page before moving on). I also had links to some of the wikipedia users that i referenced and a link to my blog. I tried to find photos that were extremely big because it annoys me when I'm looking at thumbnail pictures and i find one thats interesting and i have to open a new tab or move on from where I'm at in order to see the full sized version of the photo, so the pictures don't link, they're there in their entirety already.

I divided the spiders into their native continent because i know when I'm looking for spiders the first two things i want to know are "is it venomous?" and "where is it from?" But I chose to divide them by continent because i wanted more than two sub heading "deadly/not deadly" and I thought the continent option provided me with the opportunity to make jokes about the continents.

I also included a twitter feed that hopefully gauges the general public's view of spiders. This adds a sort of live and happening feel to the site and for some reason twitter users only tweet about spiders in a funny and terrified way so it adds to the humour of the site.

I thoroughly enjoyed this project because it taught me a wonderful new skill (HTML) and how to use it, and I enjoyed writing the jokes about the individual pictures and i think the pictures themselves are stunning. I hope my work stands up against others in my group but I wont be too fusses if it doesn't look too stunning because it follows the basic layout of a lot of the websites i found that show off spiders.

Hmmm...?

This post is going to be a sort of catch up post, because i didn't do one last week and i really want to talk about this week's lecture so I'll do another one shortly about that. So my assignment... I'm doing a website type thing about pictures of spiders, its at www.arsekickx8.freewebpages.org if you're interested. I thought i was doing a pretty good job too. Michael said he didn't want us to use dreamweaver because it doesn't show that we've learnt about what he's teaching. So I didn't. I made the background thing myself in paint for mac and posted it flickr and linked to it with the CSS in such a way that it repeats over and over again. I think it looks great and i was very proud of it until my tute yesterday when pirate guy said "Well you've mastered HTML, now if you can just make it look good."

OUCH!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks a lot, pirate guy.

He said it looks liek the internet used to look ten years ago. So I looked around to see what everyone else was doing. Dreamweaver. I swear to god if i get marked down because everyone elses is flashy and special then I'm going to be very upset. I didn't even use a template or anything for my site, i just thought about what a site looked like and I used what i knew to make it look like a website. Sigh...

Pirate Guy reaaaly likes cats.

NMP Workshop

My tutor, Pirate Guy, has instructed us to blog about some of the topics up on Moodle. And that's exactly what I'm gonna do. I'll see if I can cover them all in the hour we've been allocated.

The First on the list is HTML and CSS: I get it. You don't. Semantic Mark up is that guy who debates particulars called Mark who has just taken an ecstasy pill.

But seriously, not only do i understand HTML I think its great. I see it as a brand new tool for my creative juice to swill around in. And my heart goes out to CFAR who has recently blogged about how frustrating he finds it. (PS: Thanks for commenting, CFAR. And you are possibly on the Autistic Spectrum and possibly have Asperger's Syndrome. You can't be on the Asbperger's Syndrome. Sorry to be pedantic but I'm an aspie and had to either tell you or have an anxiety attack) The dawning of realisation that i felt when i first started playing around with the medium only a few weeks ago was akin to the moment i realised that short stories and novels weren't the only way I could tell a story (this was when Doctor Who Confidential series one convinced me to write for TV and film). And to make it all the better is that i have recently become addicted to several websites. Namely a variety of entertainment and miscellanea related wiki's and video hosting pantheons such as TGTW. And now i can do it myself; so, as i have said before, SQUEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!

As for this non-semantic markup language, I imagine it is to semantic markup language what non ripe oranges are to ripe oranges.
To clarify; semantic markup language defines what an item *is* rather than what an item looks like. For example, I've got a menu on my website and I want it to be green. The semantic markup language will tell programs (mainly search engines, i would assume) that its a menu and the non semantic markup language will tell the programs (mainly browsers i would assume) that its green. I think that the semantic mark ups make it easier for programs to properly understand the structure of the site.
I would think that the majority of what most of us have written thus far has been non semantic. I know my assignment contains little or no semantics, which is something i will have to work on methinks...

And the beautiful big C in CSS is for cookie and that's damn well good enough for me.

Or, perhaps it stands for cascading. Lets assume it does and just go with it, yeah?

Well I'm not going to cheat and google what Cascading means in this context I'm just gonna use my (rather large, if i do say so myself (that's what she said)) Internal Dictionary.
Cascade; as in the action of a water after it breaches the brink and topples into free-fall and beautifully spills into chaotic opacity. Or when you piss.
Also a descending and repetitive sequence.
Also a descending and repetitive sequence.
Also a descending and repetitive sequence.
Also a descending and repetitive sequence.
Also a descending and repetitive sequence.

And in windows XP, you had the option to cascade files when you opened lots at once and they, well... cascaded.


I'm going to go out on a dangerous limb and say that t refers to the relationship the StyleSheet has with the HTML that is linked to it. In that the single CSS file will style all of them the same, the style does, in effect, cascade through all the linked HTML. Good answer? Good Answer. Yeah.

Proplems... um... a few. Just with the assignment, i want to include an API in some way and also i think I'll have to make my menu better and also include some semantic mark ups... But I've got some time to do that and its kind of fun so it shouldn't be too hard.
Also still don't quite get APIs... but i will! One Day! Soon! Possible Tomorrow After Creative Writing! Or Friday After Community Service! But Definitely By The End Of The Weekend!!!

Censorship! Yay!
I think the Truth is the thing i want the most (as far as abstracties go). So keeping info from stings like a bitch. But yeah, keeping kids safe and destroying the business appeal of child pornography are a big deal. But i can think of far better ways to do it than Censorship.
As for this Clean Feed. Well...
FUCK U! FUCK U! FUCK U!
Not yo personally, the Men In Black and their even deadlier cohorts the Women In Aprons. Its a borderline fascist idea that i have covered before so see below for my thoughts on the matter.

APIs. See above. I'm working on it.

Assignemnt 1. Well into it. Kinda proud of it so far, but pride comes before as spider gets squashed so I'll keep working on it...

So. I'm well into project one. I'm exhibiting spiders and misinformation about spiders. Its funny and cool to look at. Now if only i understood APIs i would do something pertaining to them...

On a related note i would strongly advise students to throw bricks , knives and molotov cocktails at JB HiFi. COS THEY SUCK!!! Admittedly they did sell me a very nice camera and have a legendary reputation as far as DVDs and TVs are concerned. But they sold me an External Hard drive that I time machine all my shit on to. And it died. Totally. In the arse. Dead. Wouldn't turn on. So i took it in an said "FIX IT!!!" They Said "GET UR RECEIPT!!!" So I went back home and looked for my receipt. Couldn't find it. So I printed off my bank statement because I paid for it through eftpos. And I walked back and said "here ya go, FIX IT!!!!"

They gave me a new hard drive. But it was just the hard drive, not a box or USB cable or power chord. And because it wouldn't turn on i thought it was the power chord, so i said, "What if its the power chord?" The bloke (Ashur, i think his name was) said in a slightly patronising tone, "I don't think the machine is gonna lock up like this and not be broken"(or word to that effect) so he sent me home with what i angrilly discovered was a broken fucking power chord. Like i said all along. Incompetent useless fuck. So i took it back and they made me wait for ages and ages before I got served and finally they revealed it was the power chord all along. I didn't get any compensation, i got a piss week apology "We're sorry, PS its not technically our fault" Fucking dogs!!!!!

This all might seem a bit harsh. Well it isn't. Fuckers. But if it were it it would be because I quit smoking the day before this happened. And was not happy. At all.

So yeah.

Its clean up australia day today and I don't know about Australia but Globo could do with a clean up.

PS: I know i said I'd write my next post in HTML, but i didn't cos I'm all HTMLed out.