Blog Prompt

Fans are not fringe extremists with an unhealthy and unrealistic interest in a particular media text, but savvy consumers who are able to use popular culture to fulfill their desires and needs, often explicitly rearticulating that culture in unique and empowering ways. (82)

Fans are efficient in the aspect that they know exactly what they want and most of the time they know exactly how and where to get it.They are indeed savvy consumers who use everything they can to their advantage and incorporate anything and everything they can into what they are interested in. Their daily lives, their friends and family, all of their other interests.

This leads to places like fanfiction and fanvideo websites in which the fans most likely spend a good portion of their time reading/watching and creating ideas and stories about their ‘fandom’. I have it on good authority that fans do this to be more involved, to know more about what they like and to also express their feelings on it as well.

Homepage

This is something I haven’t actually given that much thought to in the past. However, now that I sort of take a step back and look at the whole function and idea of a ‘homepage’ the concept is very intriguing. As far as I can gather, a homepage is the place you are primarily represented online. It is the ‘address’ at which everything that you are online should be represented in some ways. The identity of one single individual is represented through both design and content.

The identity that I want others to know and see involves a great many things. Namely things that I am interested in, things I like to do. My hobbies: collecting books, finding random poems that inspire me, writing songs and short stories, photography. My passions: tea, film, music, tv shows, witty conversation. I also wish to allow others my opinions on a various array of matters on all subjects ranging from weather to politics.

Not only do I want others to know what I like, I want them to know who I am. Why I like the things I like and what drives me to like these things. If not through the content part of my homepage, I feel that this could be portrayed through the design section. I do know that I will be including music lyrics and photos somewhere in the design..

I definitely know that the following will be included on my personal website:

The McDaniel Free Press

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Google

digitalqueen44’s Profile – Users at Last.fm

MuggleNet

OneTreeHillFans.com

LiveJournal

NHL.com

Book Options..

The first book I choose mainly for the title. After I saw the cover of the book I was even more intrigued. “The Transparent Society” by David Brin looks to be a book about computer chips and software at first glance. However, further scrutiny of the book reveals that the book is actually about the idea of “technology forcing us to choose between privacy and freedom”. This is misleading. From a further look at both the back cover of the book and the table of contents, it would seem that Brin supports the growing level of technology. His view that it is better to be watched and know who else is watching, that this would be safer and more beneficial to all involved. Some general topics that the book touches on include: secrecy (obviously), the price of information, and credibility.

“The Google Story” by David A. Wise and Mark Malseed is predictably about … Google. Sometimes referred to as ‘The Largest American Company’, this book covers everything from the beginning developmental stage of Google to the obstacles faced in the middle of everything. “A Legal Showdown” and “Attacking Microsoft” are just two examples of chapters included in this story. This is a good book to read or even take a in depth glance at if you are interested in the company that made information easily accessible to the general public in a most efficent way. Wise and Malseed touch base on everything from what it means to ‘google’ to why the company itself has been so successful and how they continue to be successful.

Assignment 1 – 1/30/2008

The topic I choose to focus my search of three sites on is that of ’social bookmarking’. I choose the following sites based on how popular they were, if I had or had not used them before, and after taking a good look of what the actual purposes of the site were. The three sites are:

http://www.rawsugar.com/

The first the that one notices when looking at this website is its layout. The site is very appealing to the eyes, it is in a sense eyecatching. The purpose of the site is to find, save, and share content with others in a manageable and versatile manner. However, even though the site functions very well in some aspects, it lacks in the search department. When performing a search at this site, you must be very general..broad even with the keywords you use in your search. This could very well be a disadvantage to the site for several reasons. One, visitors to the site do not want to sift through page after page of links to a general broad topic, they want what they are looking for ASAP. That said, this site may have its uses, but being used to discover new interests and specific information about something is definitely not one of them.

http://www.digg.com/

Digg is a place where anyone online can share various content found on the web. Content can range anywhere from the most popular websites online like Myspace and Facebook to some random obscure photo site based in Thailand. The layout of the site is pleasing to the eyes. It is the search function that really makes the site though. If you type in the word ‘antartica’ for instance you will get a response of 2 separate folders based on what they include. In either of those folders could and probably will be hundreds, perhaps even thousands of ‘diggs’ to links about your search item. All in all, Digg is a great place to go if your looking for newstories, rumors, or if your just looking to find some new interests.

http://del.icio.us/

Delicious is perhaps the most popular of the social bookmarking websites out there. It is highly functional and even has a toolbar you can use in your preferred browser. The goal and purpose of the site is to allow users to collect their favorite content in one place and share it with others at the same time. You can even upload bookmarks you currently have on your browser to your Delicious account too.

To me, out of theses three sites, Delicious is the most useful and the most flexible. It has some advantages over the others in the fact that you can upload old bookmarks, and you can even tag the bookmarks you save to Delicious. On top of that, Delicious really looks and feels to be a step above the rest of the social bookmarking sites when it comes to searching for specific content.