About Someone Else's Project

The project I would like to talk about is Dorfan's ebay:Community or Bazaar? In his presentation, he mentioned ebay is found in 1995 and it allows anyone to sell almost anything. Ebay is also a community in which it has dicussion boards, forums, chatrooms,blogs,and guides. There is also ebay live that helps sellers with their online businesses as well as feedback option to allow buyers to write feedback to the sellers. He also mentioned that ebay can be a flea market with shady sellers, where shill bidding often occurs, and people have to aware about fake auctions. There are also buyers posted real items, but that item was not as described. Overall, ebay is a great online community. It gives people a virtual marketplace larger than can be possible in real life. I often used ebay as a way to buy something cheaper and also sell my used or unused items. I has experienced one of the situation Dorfan mentioned and that is fake auctions. The item I bought is a fake memory card for PSP in which the seller mentioned it is authentic. Except fake auctions, overall, I feel ebay is a great place for people to discovering cheaper items.

About My Term Project

My project topic is an analysis of blogs. Blog originally was a website meant to be like a diary or journal, and people usually created a blog as way to talk about their experiences or news, express their opinions or feelings,etc. The primary characteristics of a blog are: in a reverse chronological journaling format, blogrolling, links to related news and articles, different voices can be heard, etc. There are many different types of blogs, such as political blogs that talks about political issues or news, personal blogs that talks about personal experiences or lives, and as well as celebrity blogs that talks about celebrity gossip. The most popular celebrity blogs are Perez Hilton and Gawker, in which the news and celebrity photos are updated faster than any magazines or newspaper. In addition, people can earn money with blogs, especially those blogs that has many visitors. People can money from blogging through various ways, either from direct monetization or indirect monetization, Direct monetization is earn money directly from your blog, like advertising programs, affiliate programs, or paid reviews. Indirect monetization is earn money because of your blog, like book deals or have your book published because of your blog.

Our Class Wiki-So Far

In the contribution to our class wiki, I added new contents into corporate blog page. I created a new page in corporate blogs and that is: different types of corporate blogs. In this page, I talked about two types of corporate blogs: Internet blogs and external blogs. I also provided some examples for them and benefits of these blogs. In addition, I edited the other page created by previous semester classmate: The rise of corporate blogging. In this page, I added new contents into the benefits of corporate blogging.

The Next New Thing

The next new thing in terms of new media is to adopt virtual world into social networking sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn. If Facebook adds second life application, users can easily interacting with their friends or even someone they don't know through virtual world, similar to the way they are interacting with each other in real life. For instance, someone can have a afternoon tea with their friends in England and then shopping with some one else in France. They can also going to the club and meeting some new Facebook friends. On the other hand, LinkedIn can adopt second life into their site by providing a virtual interview room for the job applicants and recruiters.

Privacy & Confidentiality

What is privacy and confidentiality? According to Accurate & Reliable Dictionary, privacy means "the the quality of being secluded from the presence or view of others" and according to Wikipedia, confidentiality can be defined as "ensuring that information is accessible only to those authorized to have access". In the new media era, sometimes it is hard to protect one's privacy and remain confidentially. For instance, most of the people have shopped online before, and those data or information collected from us are stored in the database in which they are long term accessible by others. Those companies who has our information might sell our information to companies who sends advertisements, such as email spams. There are many websites, like facebook claims to protect our privacy and circulation confidentiality. we can find "privacy" and "term of use" underneath facebook's homepage where it lists the protection over user's information. In facebook, there is a privacy management, in which users can easily controlling on what portions of information can being access and who can accessing to their information. However, there is one thing facebook can't protecting our privacy or information confidentiality, that is the tag feature. Friends can easily tag you on a photo that you don't want to show to anyone. However, you have no control over it unless you ask your friend to remove that photo. In order for a person to have their privacy and confidentiality in the information age, they must have freedom to share and connect, ownership and control over the information. However, I feel it is impossible in the information age.

Advice to Baruch College

If I was hired by Baruch to use new media to improve college, I would make the following suggestions:
First, Baruch should add more online courses by adopting virtual classrooms, like second life. Instead of coming to the college, we can have a regular class through virtual world. The benefits of virtual classrooms are: it will increase the attendance rate. For instance, those who couldn't come to the regular class because they were sick can still be able to present in the virtual world. Virtual classroom will also promote class participation. It will encourages those students who are shy or afraid to speak up in front of the classmates to have more participation in virtual classroom. Second, I would suggest Baruch to adopt twitter or social networking sites for every class. It will promote collaboration. Students or professors can pose assignments on these sites in case someone missed the class. It also provides a platform for students
to discussing class materials.

My New Media Class-So Far

Technologies that are part of the new media are: social networking sites such as Facebook, my Space, and twitter, online publications like blogs and wikis, YouTube, online broadcast, online news, virtual world, etc. Among all these new media technologies, we can find one common ground between them, and that is the Internet. Internet is extremely important to the developement of new media, because every new media technologies are relying on the internet. Without the Internet, there is no way for us to access to these new media technologies. The innovation of new media technologies are to replace the old ones. For instance, YouTube or Hulu.com is the replacement of traditional television. According to the article, "Who needs a TV, I'm watching on a Laptop" by Laura M. Holson, instead of watching TV shows via traditional television, we can choose to watch any shows at any time on Hulu.com. Blogs or wikis are the replacement of newspaper. Now, everyone can become the publishers by using blogs and wikis. According to the article "celebrity Blogs: The Impact of New Media" by Melissa Gerry, more people are choosing to read news online, especially those news about celebrity. The celebrity blogs updates faster than traditional magazines, and most of the photos are uploaded within a few hours after they were taken.