Noah Miller

Final Blog Post

2006-05-28T08:50:00.000-07:00

1) The most important thing i learned was about Rss feads and the changing face of news because it is an emerging field and knew nothing about it brfore and there is much fear over loseing the readers

2) I would have lliked to spend more time on the technology of Rss because i think i only got a small sampling.

3) The least interesting was probabally the human computer interaction because i had allready spent time looking into that at a previous time

Week 9

2006-05-22T14:54:00.000-07:00

Voip is an interesting technology because of how long it has taken for it to become public. The article talked about how phone companies were allready using this technology in long distance calls. The fact that it can be a free service makes it desireable, but the lack of reliability will keep it from widespread adaption.
I saw this article from one of the aspects of my project. I will be talking about an online tool that allows for verbal instant communitcation between several people, used mostly in conjuction with online games. the program is Ventrilo and its free version allows for 10 people to communicate in a chat room together. This is using the same technology as was described in the article and i think that it is a key component in the creation of online communities.
as far as the article was concerened i left with the impression that Voip Technology is inevitable and allready in use and that its adaptation will be quick, but not complete. The offering of these services by coorporate companies mirrors this conclusion

Quesions
1)since this technology is based in the packet world of online information will its lack of reliability ever be overcome?
2)Will people pay for a service that can be made and used freely?
3)There is complications between Voip and traditoinal phones that limits thier interusability, will this be overcome or will the void between the two technologies drive one to be outdated?

Week 8

2006-05-12T13:59:00.000-07:00

I found the article to be very interesting. I really have liked how the article should the different ways that different people can access wi fi connections. The most interesting aspect is the different ways of creating such connections in remote areas. This technology would bring Internet and wi fi I access to countries in places where otherwise do not have access to the Internet or the rest of the world. There was a lot of technical information that I wasn’t interested but I focused mainly on the benefits of being able to use wi fi connection and not needing underground static cables in order to connect the rest of the world.

Questions:

1) Will wi-fi internet overtake the landlocked net that Americans have come to trust? It will create a network that cannot be destroyed by cutting the physical lines.

2) What good is a connection in a remote area without the tools to use it. Will countries donate the computers and tools to use the connections, or will the people using them have to come up with them?

3) how supseptable to attack is a network of completely wi-fi connections?

Seattle race in class assignment

2006-05-11T11:47:00.000-07:00

First feelings

Cantwell
Sleak, nice fading header. Personal note on the main page, link to clinton helps to connect her to his sucess in almost eliminating the national deficit, something that is a big problem at the moment.

McGavick
Lots of red and blue, exclamtion marks to make him seem exiting, something he is going to need to defeat an encombant!

i like mike's better because of the background color, they both have grey, but his is more astetically appealing because it is not as bright, but has contrast that makes me look at what he wants me to look at.

Maria's site is easier to contact because she has an email cliant set up so i dont have to copy and paste her address to my email browser. It also feels more like a blog comment which makes me feel like my comments are more accepted. Both have the email updates options on thier main pages. One of the options mike has is that you can send an email to a seperate address to invite him to an envent. I like this option because it makes me feel like he is willing to come out to my nieghborhood to chat with the people that he needs voting for him.

TOPIC: WAR in Iraq
Maria had nothing but a petition on "roadless area convention act" on her site to talk about the issues she has opinions on, my topic was nowhere to be found. Mike has a hover-over menu at the top "ISSUES" and the second on the list is war on terror. he has his stance laid out in bullet points and is very easy to understand, there is no confusion. Mike also has links to the VIDEO of him giving speaches about the issues. Nice touch!

HOWEVER....
Maria has a sweet pictures section that shows her with Kerry, and also some nice black and white photos of her at a coffee shop :)

Mike is my man as far as the website goes. It's much better because there are links that take you to his views and he actually has some info online that helps. As far as political stance, i dont agree with most of what Mike says about the war on terror or his other opinions, but his site sure is sweet, oh, and on his header he is on the phone, which means he dosent need a secratary because he handles all his affairs himself. I bet he dropped a big portion of his campaign budget on this site, at least more than the "simplesite" layout and content of Maria.

N.B. Mike has some pictures of himself loseing a foot race with some kid. Way to think positively :P

Week 7

2006-05-08T14:48:00.000-07:00

Week 7
The Role of the Internet in National and Local News Media Use

This article spurred my interest in how much news is really consumed online. Now that I have been introduced to RSS readers I can see how news can be easily watched. Also the new technologies that recommend news stories seem to go against the ideas contained in this argument. They end up making the claim that people go online to ultimately find more information about national and international issues because there is more in-depth coverage and because of the system of hyperlinks that they can follow to find out information they desire.
The article also interested me in that it showed how people believe that they get most of their news from TV, but that, at the time of the article, many were using both TV and the net together to find information. The belief that an older system is the one that we use most is reasonable because we often do not want to admit to ourselves that we are using new systems or have new ways of doing old things.
The immediacy is also another thing that I believe is absolutely critical to online news. The information can be updated immediately and thanks to RSS readers and such the consumer can know that they have been updated immediately. With printed or tv news there is a wait time between when the thing happens and when the company can get it to the readers.
The conjunction of internet and print media I mentioned earlier is also interesting, because the article made the argument that in the future the online news will greatly surpass the printed news as the primary place to find news. I think that the news companies see this and that is why they are providing the online services for free.

Questions:
1) This is the very process that EPIC predicted, now that we have seen the process and reality of the prediction, will it come true? Will it hurt news to have it mostly online? Will the accessibility become a problem for those people who do not have access to online news? (The movement is based on the assumption that everyone has access)
2) Can the immediacy of online news lead to more and more stories being published without complete verification?
3) What impact did the website design of the Republicans and Democrats have on the 2000 elections? John Karry’s site was in many ways better and more easily read, why did it not have more of an impact?

part 2 rss technology

2006-05-07T09:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.playnoevil.com/serendipity/
http://www.apogeevr.com/
http://www.gamermom.com/
http://www.mmofun.com/

Blogcritics.org
15 post in the last 5 hours

playnoevil.com-
None

http://www.apogeevr.com/
None

http://www.gamermom.com/
None

http://www.mmofun.com/
None

My blogs are not credible engough to have been looked at critically.

Google has one link to blogcritics.org, the main site only
Google is looking for the site and the references to the site not the individual updated posts inside the site like Technorati did.

Blogrolls help because the give you the hyperlink ability to go from one idea or keyword and to see the way other people make connections to simmilar topics or other ways of approaching a topic (be it word choice or angle)

Class Assignment on RSS technology

2006-05-07T09:11:00.000-07:00

BBC.com

19 news feeds
Frontpage, Wolrd, UK, England, North Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Buisness, Politics, Health, Eduction, Science/Nature, Technology, Entertainment, Have Your Say, Magazine, Week At A Glance, Programmes, Latest Published Stories.

8 video news feeds
Headlines, UK, World, Buisness, Sci-Tech, Health, Entertainment, Scotland.

No Sponsored Blogs.

PBS.org

21 feeds
3 FRONTLINE
Public affairs documentaries that don't shy away from complex stories or controversial issues]
2 FRONTLINE/World
First-person news stories from around the globe
1 I, Cringley
Insider technology analysis and news from tech guru Robert X. Cringely.
1 MediaShift
Your guide to the digital media revolution, with host Mark Glaser.
1 NerdTV
A weekly online series from PBS.org technology columnist Robert X. Cringely, interviewing guests from the world of technology.
1 NOVA
Science documentaries that show the human story behind the science story
1 NOVA scienceNOW
A science and technology newsmagazine.
1 NOW
Analysis and perspective on current events, issues and ideas
2 Online NewsHour
Daily, in-depth news and analysis from the Web site of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
1PBS Ombudsman
PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler's analysis of issues related to PBS content and journalistic standards
1 Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly
News coverage and analysis of religion and ethics.
6 Tavis Smiley
Nightly interviews with newsmakers, entertainers, politicians and others

Several of these are blog like. I, Cringely is one.

Both of the sources have rss feeds, but use them in different ways. bbc uses them for news stories and news video stories, while pbs uses them for programs, blogs of people who often do shows on pbs and for general news. pbs is not a news program, so it is reasonable to assume that they will not give as much attention to strict news stories. bbc was very helpful and had extensive inforation about rss readers and explanations about what rss was. bbc has accepted rss as a new and important way to access news. They did have warningas about using the feeds on other websites and asked that the tiel was either BBC or From BBC. Both of the sites were free to get rss feeds from.

Blogs and Podcasts (Week 6)

2006-05-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

From Tom Paine to Blogs
and Beyond

I found that the freedom of speech is where the whole argument was founded. The comments about the history of personal publishing was interesting. The political pamphlets sprung from the same desire to be heard and treated as important as blogging is. Also the comments about the several information revolutions reinforce the idea that there is a desire to be heard and treated as important. When I think about media I often think about big media or mass media. I can see how there is a growing reaction against this kind of media because we are being told the news, now experiencing it, we have no say in how the stories are skewed or which ones are important. With hen new web news sites that recommend, this desire for individualized information is accessible. Computers are without a doubt the gateway to moving to open source news.
As far as the second article, I think that pod casting is a great new idea, but I also understand that there is going to be increasing problems. Bandwidth is costly, advertising is difficult because you have to decide when and where to put in ads and who will be listening is also difficult to predict. While this may be a new and emerging popular form of media, I don’t think that it has moved past the point of being more than just a new fad. Give a while and see who else adopts it, how the problems that commercial pod casting must faced are resolved.

Questions
-pod casting, has it moved past the early innovators?
-is big media going to turn out the way EPIC predicts?
-What are we going to do when our news becomes so specific that we don’t even know about general issues in society?

Second Superpower (Week 5)

2006-04-24T15:55:00.000-07:00

The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head
his seemed like a highly biased piece. It felt like a reactionary piece that was calling for civic action against our current administration and our current form of democracy. While I understand that there are problems with our administration and their decision making processes as well as problems with our governmental process in general, I don’t think that this author is appealing to them. He seems to be obviously appealing to people who are on the border of being in the political activist group he call the second superpower. One of the most important things he talks about is that the second superpower needs to align itself with other nations, especially the ones that are already trying to reform the global government. I think that we are either going to move to a one government world or begin to separate again based on ideological differences. If we do the latter then our mass communication systems of the internet will probably be targeted and censored. Is we do the former then I think that it will either come about from one country taking over or from many coming together and agreeing to adhere to a common rule. I doubt that one country will ever try again to rule the world outright. Though the U.S. may try to do so through presence, both military and economic. I don’t think that we as a collective people will ever accept separation, judging from the absolute overtaking that the mass communication tools are having. We want to be connected and collaborative.

The GNU Manifesto
The most striking argument made by the GNU article was that we should share things, especially software. It follows the ideas of Wikipedia and of the short EPIC 2025. I like the idea that software is free, but it is a difficult task given the capitalist society we live in. some of his arguments were very socialist, but rightly so. He went out of his way to show hoe programmers have to face the pressures put on their craft by companies that are worried about profit and not the collaborative perfection of an operating system or program. Surely a program can be created better if many people work on it together, but the companies forbid that. Another thing that was very interesting to me was that these free programs would be open source and could be integrated by anyone into any purpose. The application of free open source operating systems or programs is enormous when we think about he needs of different groups, organizations or individuals.
Another idea that I often share is the problem of property rites. I find it hard to believe that any one person or organization can prevent anyone else from producing or using the things they create. I many have these feelings about the copyright of literature and writing. I don’t believe that anyone can claim rites to a turn of phrase and we are limiting our potential if we limit the use of the generations of the past. The last thing that the author leaves with is the idea of a post-scarcity world “where nobody will have work very hard just to make a living.” This reminds me of the socialist societies and ideologies that I studied in some of my classes. Traditional hunter gatherer societies only have to work a few hours a day, two to three days a week to provide the bare necessities for survival.

Questions
- I wonder how the global government will come about, how it will be organized, and how long it will take to appear.
- Will the second superpower ever be officially recognized, and what will that do to the people involved? Empowerment?
- I also wonder how the big companies will confront the growing sector of sharing information such as programs, bittorent, open source.

Chapter 7 with Norman (Week 4)

2006-04-17T15:37:00.000-07:00

Donald Norman’s chapter about the relationships between humans and machines was very interesting. It made me think about the ways that we view machines and how we can fall into a trap of thinking of them as superior because of their logic and preciseness. I also liked the attention he gave to the resilience of humans, our ability to adapt to small changes in environment and even within our own bodies. Machines cannot deal with errors at all inside their programming/bodies. We sure are two different types of beings and there arises problems when we try to qualify machines and computers along side humans because the standards that each category are meant to fulfill are different. Humans are not preplanned like computers, designed to be perfect because the world in which we operate is changing and unpredictable. The computer world is much more predictable, and error in programming will produce a predictable result. Also the programming and operating errors are such a problem because the two systems of mathematical precision of computers and vague adaptability of humans are combined. Humans will err and err often and computers can not handle that. And so we fear the blue screen of death that appears when we input information into a computer and the computer just gives up. (A few years ago I was into computer animation using light wave and the blue screen of death world pop up when the computer could not handle the amount of processing I was trying to make it do). One thing that stood out to me was that some people do not thing computers will be intelligent until the are able to deceive. I understand that that is one of the characteristics of humans, but I do no think that deception will be the one defining hurdle that AI will have to overcome. It is one aspect but without the decision making skills to decide when and how much deception is needed there could be serious problems.

Questions:
-Will AI deception become a serious problem, depending on the application of AI technology? Robots are specific to their needs now, like that robot that rolls around cleaning your floor, but will more universal robots become more sci-fi like and more and more human?
-The gap in the systems of humans and computers is huge. Will computers become more human like, will humans have to adapt to become more computer like, or will the gap remain and attention be given to the input operations that humans have over computers?
-Will the system of the Navy, bringing in new people who question old ways of doing things and find problems, be adapted to different areas of culture?

Information Overload (Week 3)

2006-04-10T15:10:00.000-07:00

Nelson article
I often wonder if it is too easy to find things on the internet. It is one of the reasons I tend to stay away when doing research. The unpredictability of the reliability of the information that can be found is what I fear the most. Nelson also discusses the problem of the anxiety of not being able to distinguish the reliability of information found on the net. Part of it is that I do my best to search with words and phrases in the right search engines and the rite databases to get credible information. I also worry when I use mass search engines like Google of yahoo because they have such a spectrum of sources of information. The literacy of online information is one of the main aspects of Nelson’s argument that I think is key. People need to be able to search for information, they need to know how to search and what to search for and how to distinguish false information. The other thing is the amount of information. It is ridiculous how much crap there is online. Most of it is posted and reposted from a single source, lots of duplication out there. Amazing that “more new information has been produced within the last three decades, than in the last five millennia”

Carlson
Carlson expands by talking about the growingly less relevant information. While we put so much more info up online, it is more crap than not. Online publishing is also another reason there is so much information. We may search for terrorist bobbing for last week but find 10,000 results links to blog entries that people have posted about their “feelings” about the bombings. While this would give a good indication to how people are confronting and feeling about the bombings, they are not sites of reliable statistical information of new like coverage of the bombings. He also introduced spam email, which is a humongous problem. It feels like email was the new and best form of instant communication, but now it is exploited so much that I fear it will need to be revised completely. There is so much freedom online, and I think that is what gives rise to all these problems. People can post whatever they want, however much they want, and when more and more people have the ability to do this our information gets to the point that it may no longer be worth looking through. Research would be come so frustrating that the internet might not even be a good place to look.

Questions
1` how will we deal with research if the prediction of EPIC 2025 come true, that all we find are blog entries and wikipedia-like collaborative sites that are impossible to verify? The internet is a huge resource, but almost too huge.
2` Will we come up with a more integrated searching system in the future that eliminates the anxiety about which search service to use? Not all information is on all search engines. Will we over come the need to search them all to find one single, specific piece of reliable information on our topic?
3` Will more traditional forms of research, libraries for example, become superfluous or will they become more necessary as the information online becomes more and more questionable because of self publishing?

Memex Questions

2006-04-03T20:26:00.000-07:00

i wonder if the new technologies of microchips and the gowing smallness needed to store complex information alone can lead to the proposed file access sytem that Bush proposed.

Also i wonder why traditional file searching, saving and browsing has remained when web based searches are more linked with keywords, included in the page itself.

Finally, why do the web based searches only search spacific words, instead of related words. The mind searches with related words that are related because of common experiance, the individuality of the process makes online searching unable to breach because many peiople use the same search engine and the related words should be individual.

Memex (Week 2)

2006-04-03T13:23:00.000-07:00

As far as the Networks of Remediation atricle:

I had not thought about the detailed work that would have needed to be done to invent the internet. I know it is complicated, but I also did not know the first group was a group of fresh graduate students. I would have thought the group to be experienced professionals, just as they thought as well, assuming that some group of professionals would come to solve their problems before they realized it was just them.

The Memex article really was interesting. Taking into account the fluidity of the human process fo recalling and storing data would be a good idea in information management, but i think it would be very hard to make the jump from file placement storage. it seems like the chain system would still rely on one file in one place, but would just have a different way of connecting them. Being able to show your chaim of thoughts to another person or even yourself at another point in time would be great for scientists and could be used by everyone. Bush has a very eloquent way of explaining how this sysptem will be implimented and give nice futuristic visuals, though he relys on microfilm (which is reasonable given it was written in 1945). Most of his ideas are ones that are being improved upon now. I over heard in the den the other day a few students talking about making a search engine that also worked more like the human brain, seaching through related ideas and words. Over all, it will have to be an illusion, simply a different way of tieing files together. But then, maybe thats all that the human mind is doing.

First day of class

2006-03-28T12:59:00.000-08:00

first day is nice