Youtube fame: web 2.0’s new brand of celebrities

Some videos on youtube are pretty sweet; some are not. Some vids are well-done, some are honestly a waste of time. The good ones can become mildly popular, as can bad ones–if there absolutely horrid–but the vids that reach viral status like spanish love song or the dancing one in this article become successful because they are just out there or ludicrous or a completely hilarious repackaging of some piece of pop culture. Here’s a local something I just heard of–it was so awkward to watch, it hurt.

All this web 2.0 is all about giving a chance to the unprofessional, the little guy, the odd ones. A whole cultural revolution (OMG, I sound like a political scientist. cue exaggerated arm movement), is occuring with these unprofessional streaming vid. It’s changing what we talk about, what we spend our time doing. I can’t begin to imagine how many times I’ve asked people what they’ve been up to all day, only to have them reply that they aren’t sure-they were youtubing random stuff and suddenly it was night, they were hungry, and they were ready to go to bed.

If you’ve read this entire post, here’s a little added treat. This guy was apparently some sort of famous jingle musician. You gotta love it when the celebrities of the past try to break out again on youtube.

Texting protected by 4th amendment privacy penumbra?

This is hilarious.  Some robbers used texting to communicate while they were stealing and then the cops pulled the records and busted them.  Just goes to show, nothing is perfectly safe.  I guess the ironic thing is these guys were smart enough to pull off these heists but not smart enough to realize the persistence of texting.

Of course, these guys are gonna try and pull the whole 4th amendment invasion of privacy BS to get the evidence against them stricken from the record (No one saw that one coming).  Whenever new technologies arise that can be searched by the po-po, we always get this same conflict: if the cops search it, does it count as illegal search and seizure.  When phones first began to be tapped, we got the katz decision, when we got thermal radar and other types of gadgets that can see behind the “expectation of privacy,” it had to be decided if if they qualified or not.  I guess it’s texting’s turn in this cycle of scapegoats.

Regardless of how this turns out, this is still pretty funny: a couple guys sitting back, all smug, betrayed by man’s new best friend–his cellular device.

Online games: freaky or fun?

So, a big craze in online gaming right now seems to focus on the growth or learning one could potentially gain from playing a video game.  With all the talk about how games ruin kids and keep them from being responsible citizens (Thank you Barrack Obama!) online game developers are out to prove that they can help people with their products too.

Take this one game: it’s supposed to give the player “inner peace.”  I swear, the game scared the hell out of me.  Looked like  some sort of stereotypical drug trip.  Random transparent doves fly in every once in a while, the environment bobs and is hazy, everything is gray and white: I couldn’t take more than 2 minutes before I was freaked out, afraid someone was trying to manipulate me subliminally.  This is probably gonna be one of those directions for web2.0 that fails.

On the other hand, this article seemed to present an idea that was a bit more plausible.  Using an old game engine, a developer is working on creating an online game to teach journalism students how to be good reporters.  By using the interactivity of web2.0, games will be used to prepare students for the professional world.  In order for such an idea to work, the game must be well done.  A half-baked attempt could likely kill such a possibility.  No one wants to play a crappy, disjointed game that is only educational–lacking any entertainment.

Facebook, Privacy, Commonsense

Ok, so it seems everyone’s whining about the lack of privacy afforded by facebook.  It’s the internet, they need to get over it.  If there’s one thing that everyone should understand, it’s that nothing is sovereign or sacred once it’s been posted on the web.  There are all manners of ways that anyone can find my information and postings once I have chosen to post said information (*SHOCK*).

In this youtube vid, which is quite humorous I must say, we have a guy who loses his facebook account and instead, walks around the street, holding a profile pic and his information.  Anyone could look at his information.  Though it may not have been intended as such, this is a good metaphor for how insecure any information is on the internet–anyone with the desire only has to do little more than turn their head to look up a person.

In response to this unbelievable outrage (information on the internet!??? *GASP*) some organization has put out this video to scare people away from facebook.   Though I found this vid educational for some background info on facebook, I couldn’t help but laugh at it’s serious tone, trying to make facebook out to be so evil.          

Mashups

Here we are-a nice little tutorial and description of mashups.  As my ranting thirst for the night was quenched by my other post from today, I’ll make this short and civil.  Nice article.  Helpful, brief, and easy to follow.   Gave some examples of mashups (always good) and in the spirit of true web2.0, didn’t get bogged down and lectury.  Nice colors too.  I like colors.  Wow it’s too late.

Ugh, More Facebook Apps

It doesn’t get much worse than some facebook apps.  Seriously, enough is enough.  O look at me, I’m gonna be a pirate!  And a ninja!  And a feudal lord!  And a student at Hogwarts!  And a person without a life!!!!!  NOT to mention the invasion of privacy and overall lack of decency that they have come to represent!!!!  huff, huff….  I needed to vent a bit.  This article understands me.  Anyways, Fapps (Facebook + Applications–yeah, I made that up.  I’m so clever) are a big problem today–certainly something worth looking into.  In class, it always seems like we’re singing the praises of every gold-wrapped piece of crap video or webapp that we lose the common sense to realize what is stupid and pointless and what isn’t.

Exhibit A: The Spongebob video.  Need I say more?

Fapps have made facebooking chaos; anarchy; free-range, chicken-hunting, panting, slobbering absurdity.  So much crap on everyone’s page makes it hard to use facebook for what it was meant for: communication.  Basically, it comes down to the fact that information overload always sucks.  There could be hope though.  This article claims that there might be a sort of “survival of the fittest” element to the Fapp race.  Maybe most of them will be gone in the near future–leaving the few useful ones behind.  This might even become a trend amongst all webapps and mashups on the net.  It might be interesting to look at how apps and such have died in the past–and if the webapp explosion is dying down yet or not. Don’t get me wrong–not all webapps are bad.  Some need to die though.

Here’s me crossing my fingers.

“Citizen Journalism Movement…” article

This article is a pretty mediocre stab at that effluence of the public, citizen journalism. I do like, however, how the author relates the movement to human rights and democracy. The example given, related to S. Korea, rings true as to the spirit behind citizen journalist efforts. The author them procedes to fail when she tries to tackle the “Journalism or not” issue. This little argument about what is journalism or not is about as old, torn, and worthless as the “art or not” question. Such a topic is the stuff of bored philosophers and jaded academics–people with nothing better to do than argue about identifying a media rather that experiencing it. Point of my little rant: the author should have left that little subtopic out of the article.

Finally, the last part encourages readers to join the movement. This is noble I guess. Wish the author would have given the readers sites to use or access more information from. Overall, not sure I’d recommend this article, now that I think about it.

Blog Article from WordPress

Who better to discuss the technicalities and uses of blogging than a site that hosts a ton of them? This article discusses blogging and how anyone can join in and start their own. The page remains light and easy to read while going into some pretty sophisticated specifics of blogging and managing a personal page. Though this page doesn’t hone in on big intangibles like (Now, let’s use our snobbish, official-sounding voice) “how blogging affects society,” it doesn’t something vital: it encourages a person to blog. How can a person appreciate the importance of blogging if they don’t try it themselves? The dark, scary world of blogging becomes a bit more accessible after reading an article like this.