lecture and tutorial week seven

tutorial: ireport (load a fake news report after filming it on a mobile phone onto ireport)

lecture: Jason's lecture on freeware

This lecture is really simple to explain, we learnt what freeware is, where to find it, what to look for and how to use it. Freeware is pretty much free computer software which can be downloaded (not to be confused with openware which is software that can be edited). You can find fareware many ways. One way of finding freeware is by googleing it, this shows various freeware programs but it also may show software that needs to be brought or freeware that doesnt do what you want it to do. A better way to find freeware in to go onto one of the many sites that shows freeware and search through that. What to look for is obvious, just search for the particular thing that you want your software to do for you. lastly using this software is a bit more complicated. sometimes the site where you downloaded this from shows instructions, sometimes you look for a forum to show you how, sometimes you find a tutorial and sometimes you figure it out by playing around with it.

censorship and democracy

in last week's lecture for news and politics we were shown a scale. on the left side of this political scale was left wing beliefs such as communism etc and on the right side was beliefs such as nazism (or whatever that is) etc. Australia (as a labour democracy) sat close to the center but swinging to the right side. censorship is purely a right wing belief so how can Australia be both a democracy and way over near being nazi's (do we even want to be associated with that?). so i believe no, there is no place for censorship in a democracy (well at least not a good one).

essay topics

ok, after looking over all of the topics for the online essay i chose:

3. Digital media put the tools of production into the hands of the everyday computer user making it incredibly easy to produce content. These creative skills used to be something that people worked to develop. Now it appears that amateurs can produce content of a fair standard within a relatively short period of time. Where does this leave 'professionals' and highly-skilled artists? Choose one area of creativity and discuss some of the challenges facing practitioners vs amateurs in producing digitalcontent.

the reason i chose this is because i plan to go into film (film critic) and i was brought up on moving images (even though im only 17 and havent really grown up yet). and for this topic and don't know what my opinion is. i admire people like m.night shamalon and quentin tarentino but at the same time i think its good that poor people can reach that goal as well through new communication technologies. i think i will enjoy deciding which side im on...or jsut writing the essay from no point of view but an equal one.

downloading freeware

ok i recently brought a multimedia iriver (because they are way cooler than ipods :), although i can't wait til i get a mac computer) so i decided to download a program that will convert my downloaded flv youtube videos to avi which can then be added to the iriver. this was easy because i just googled 'convert flv to imc' and it came up with a list of downloadable programs. the hard part was finding the free ones. i eventually found one that was free but i put a watermark on the videos so i kept looking til i found one that worked. i found it really easy to use and it didnt suck up the internet as some downloads do (my mum is really concious of that) so i belive it was worthwhile (ive now got a whole bunch of youtube videos on my iriver whooo). i also think i will use freeware more often now.

third video embed

ahhahaha, ok well i chose this clip of the numa numa man for my third video. I chose this one because this random guy, obviously kinda geeky, was unknown (by anyone but friends and family) but after this clip he became slightly famous. He realesed this clip of him doing a rendetion of the song by European 'o-zone' and suddenly became the famous numa numa guy and he got quite a bit of money out of it all. Not only is it funny i think it summarises what technology has become, people becoming famous for no reason and using new communication technologies to do it...watch it its funny....

Second video embed

ok for my second video i chose 'star' which is apart of the hire series. We were shown this is class and i thought it was helarious so i watched all of them, of course i found this one the funniest. The reason i have chosen to embed this video is because it is an add, filmed by a professional movie director with professional actors, but it is only an add. I think this shows new communicaiton technologies, as we have learnt this year, and shows what technologies we have had for decades can become, eg, television adds becoming online short films.

1st video embed

This is my first chosen video. This video is titled 'gossip girl cast come to the rescue'. It was created and posted by Kristen Bell and a not-for-profit organisation called Invisible Children. This organisation is run by young adults, most of whom are celebrities such as Ryan and Amy Hanson and Kristen Bell. And because they are young and famous the use of youtube (where it was posted) is extremly useful. Many young people watched their celebrities as they supported of this organisation and the effect was proven by the huge increase in public support. I think it is youtube and the internet that made it possible and without this use of technology, well the child soilders in Africa would not have the support Invisible Children can now offer. Some might think that consumers shouldn't become ametur producers but this is one reason why it would be good.
xoxo (hehehehehe)

clean feed

i recently wrote a news article for my news and politics class about a d-notice. a d-notice is like a clean feed only more offical. national security can actually ban mainstream media from publishing stories or they can delay them. the government can do this because we are in a state of war (really!). The government should not have this power, as a 1984 novel 'big brother' points out. This new communication technology is a step of advancing knowledge and developing new technologies. Censoring the internet (and the d-notice) will only create a feeling of resentment towards the government and people will put all their efforts into hacking past the censor. This course has taught me the importance and the advantages of new communication technologies and i know that the government should not do this.

Peter Young in parliament? try Steven Ciobo

ok my local member is Peter Young and he is a counsellor and doesn't actually go to parliament for speeches but Steven Ciobo does speeches there all of the time so i looked up his most recent.
This is a blog on his website which shows his most recent speech in parliament (also his maiden speech):
http://www.stevenciobo.com/mediahub/default.aspx?p=2&pa=6

i told him that i agree with the speech. He is a liberal (as am I) and from what i've heard he is a pretty decent guy...
http://www.stevenciobo.com/contact/default.aspx

political representatives

local: division 5, Peter Young
state: Gaven, Dr. Douglass
federal: Moncrieff, Steven Ciobo
(all answers courtesy of my 2nd yr law sister, thank God for them)

what's Prez Obama up to 2day?

http://wonkette.com/411119/barack-obama-was-doing-this-today

haha Barack Obama is planning a new olympic sport of light saber fighting hehehehehehe (not really but he is playing with one today according to this website)

reply to professional news site blogger

my comment under my nickname 'salami'. to this site......
http://blackpoliticalthought.blogspot.com/2009/09/vladimir-putin-scores-major-victory-as.html?dsq=17085283#comment-17085283

E-petition

I signed a e-petition about electricty over wires:

this is info about the petition i signed: http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/view/EPetitions_QLD/Accept.aspx?PetNum=1290&ID=p%2f1G4rxTymA%3d&lIndex=-1

this is a thankyou for signing the e-petition: https://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/view/EPetitions_QLD/Confirmation.aspx?PetNum=1290&lIndex=-1

lecture number 6

lecture number 6,

Consumption and Production,

Consumption (Big screen)

• Cinema (shared experience)
• P.C. (private/ shared)
• T.V. (shared/ private)

(small screen)

• Personal media player (IPOD)(consumer on-the-go but have to fill)
• Mobile phones (IPOD touch, smart phones, consume on-the-fly, don’t have to fill)
  

Production

• Mobile production (www.ireport.com) send in videos taken from mobile phones.
• Film (consumers (star wars fans) – producers (troops). Fan edits/ phantom edits. www.fanfilms.net
• Mashup – re genre (www.thetrailermash.com)- re cut

(Shared experience refers to that form of technology being a group activity whereas private experience refers to that form of technology being a solo activity).

P.S. in next weeks tutorial we will be uploading fake news stories after we record them on our phones.

tute week 5 savenger hunt

ok three qs from the nct blog (anwers not from google and all cant be from wiki)

1. longest giraffe tongue is what length? the longest is recorded at 53cm....wow
(using http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question107669.html which was found through yahoo hehehe)

2. why do phone numbers in hollywood start with 555? because the keys kjl cant make up any land word
(a girl in my pr class mentioned it today after doing it herself whoot)

3. for what band does Stephen Stockwell do keyboards and vocals? Stilerites
(his blog http://stilgherrian.com/film/finally-the-shave/)

Five sites from last weeks lecture

number one is: http://www.archive.org/index.php is the first one. now this one is actually pretty cool. you can put in any site and it not only tells you how long the site has been about but it shows you snap shots of the site through out the years. its pretty awesome to look at the changes from when html were hand written to now when programs do them, lol. check out yahoo http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://yahoo.com

number two is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites this one was so funny in the lecture. there is one site that this mentions 'elf world' and it is full of some weird people. This site is cool for that reason (the fact that it has elf world) and because you can look at all of the social networking sites (nd choose which you'll join)

number 3 is: http://blog.compete.com/2009/02/09/facebook-myspace-twitter-social-network/ this one isnt cool as much as its just interesting. it just ranks the social networking sites. facebook is number 1, myspace is 2 and twitter is 3. Jason (in the lecture) predicted that twitter will go 2 number 2 and then drop. he also mentioned that specialised sites (elf world) will start taking over.

number 4: http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index2.php ok im really into this one. it is a link to a map which shows all emergency and disaster sites around the world. It is so awesome cause it acts at the news (telling you what is happening at the exact instant it happens) without the annoying news editing (which cuts the good bits and isnt as raw, even tho i want to be a journalist). wow! right now a 4.5 earthquake hit China, far out :)

number 5: http://www.speedtest.net/index.php?nojs=1 this one is kinda weird (as in it seems useless but thats mainly because a. it goes a bit over my head and b. i dont much care). this link takes you to a site which allows you to ping other countries (cities or continents or something) and it times how long it takes for the data to be sent to the other computer. its kinda funny cause it says that we're in Sydney and because we're pinging real computers across the world.

View United States of Dreaming in a larger map

tutorial week 6

In this week's tutorial we did a lot of stuff, mainly things such as going onto the sites that Jason showed us during the week 5 lecture. The first thing we did was look up our names on some website. It scans all of the internet for traces of the names. This is a snap shot of the end traces of what the site found of my name. Next we made our own google maps. I decided to mark the main travel path i would like to take if i ever save up enough money to travel to the USA (and MEXICO). I added a picture to the New York marking of central park. After posting it (there is a copy of the map in the post under this). After this i drew a really dodgey anime girl on sketch cast (under this post there is a video of the drawing and the process that it took). Then lastly i spent the rest of the tutorial looking up separate websites and writing (in the post) about the usefulness of those sites. out of the list (displayed on the new com tech blog) i chose my five faourites.