Irregularmut’s Weblog

It was too late when I decided that this video is a disaster, but I got only this for this week;

Just an intro for this week’s blog;

           For sure the mobile technology still waits for its boom. To meet up with the “mobility of people”, now we got “mobility for the technology”. If you are lazy to use catch the technology, the technology will catch you in someway. When I read the “Shibuya epiphany” from the Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, I started to think about the differences of societies for technology usage. Every society has got its own tools and concepts for using technology, and also every tool creates different, unique usage area for each. And if you talking about the transmitting technology to each person in the world, you have to ask the question what do each people will do with that? This question will determine the answer of what does this new “tech-revolution” bring to our lives? In some way old ones had taken us to one more step forward but they also had made one step long distance between people. I hope we use efficiently our digital memories to learn from past.       

             The acceleration that the mobile technology will give to the change of world will be the speed of life. And the user-centered media will create a global demand for “individual rights”. Without the barriers that we created so far, people will start to act globally against the problems.Getting to the point that every user is able to save his/her moments, experiences, information and more…will give us a chance to make less mistakes for future and more than that we will have different views of looking each other’s life. Imagine that you will be able to watch your grandfather’s highlights of life or you will be able to see his friends from facebook account, check out what he did in an exact date. It totally strange but probably what we can do in 50 years. Like Jacques Attali said; “As we enter the age of networks people will have to care for others because everyone’s interests and happiness will be linked to that of others”.

            As a foreigner, I am interested in 2010J elections as much as it can be. No jokes, I try to follow what is going on for 2008 but I do not have any favorite. You can be sure in my country it is more fun. They fight for presidency but not with their ideas.      

As a person from outside world, Obama and Clinton seems to be the best technology friendly candidates to me and also I always catch Giuliani speaking with his cell phone. I know that Obama has got a facebook account. They all trying to do something on the web format, probably this is the “most” election for web usage. So every new media tool (websites, videos, blog…) get its part for 2008 elections. I believe there is no way to make a campaign without web video or web site but if you ask me the percentage of its effect. I would say %3-4, we still need time to learn how to use the tools for elections.

On the other hand; I haven’t seen any video better than “President Clinton Last Days in Office”.

        As you know, I always agree with the idea that the web 2.0 is the tool for global democracy. Now I see that Scoble and Israel agree with me and they named the blog boom as “the most democratized revolution in media ever”. And for the future of this “boom”, they are asking a question; is it going to be main-media and lose its nature or not? It is really hard to answer this question but I see both sides for the future. I think it started already, I myself as a blogger felt amateur when I read the Thompson’s “Blog to Riches”. I think it already got in the track of a way that takes blogging to main media when the first blogger worried about his/her number of readers. Declaring the top hundred or top ten blog, as an action itself, is a way that takes blogging to another level. But I believe; we are still in the period majority group that is; “idiosyncratic voice of the lone blogger”.

           When it comes to blogging for marketing or blogging for businesses, I find it a totally success. As Scoble and Isreal said ““ocial media are transforming how businesses communicate with customers, suppliers, and all their constituencies” and also this situation brings new rules to the system. I think I started this with forums, I remember the days forums did (not exactly) what blogs do right now. I believe my story fits for this week’s article.       

         It was like 2004 when we (as a friend group) started our form. I remember we did not start a forum to share our ideas or talk about life that we bored but we definitely wrote to compete with each other. As you can guess, we designed a website for us and we started a forum a forum about the softwares we use. As an example, those were the days we talked about Photoshop, Dreamweaver… We discussed about the softwares and leave comments to each other, so I can say it was like a net club that some teenagers do arrogance.After a month we started get questions and comments from strangers and adding to that other people from “outside world” started to write answers to these questions. It was like some aliens captured our website. This made us serious; we started to research before we write and censored some words that we use for each other?! We started to investigate the enemy, we focused on one guy. We noticed that he was the smartest one so we went after him. But it was a useless try, he answered everything about that software and he got professional answer for all of our questions. Then one day he said he has worked in the design of that software and he was writing many websites and forums as part of his job. I have to confess that we all scared because those were the days we believe in FBI stories. But of course nothing happened he already knew that we were using pirate software, he did not care about that and he also send us a discount coupon in order to buy the upgrade of that software.        

           It was an interesting experience for me, I did not start to use original software from that moment but the images about the company totally changed in my mind. And now when I read the article of Scoble and Isreal, I remembered what I got from that experience;

1. Businesses have to face with real facts
2. Good bye to old school marketing
3. No more local companies
4. No observations about consumer behaviors
5. It is time to make personal contacts with customers

 I think in web 2.0, for the businesses there is no place for estimations there is only place for facts.

     Game Culture

    While reading Andrew Hinton’s paper, I remember the days I spend for “Red Alert”. Red Alert is a strategy game that I spend my entire senior year. Now all that year seems like a lost to me but at that time, I remember there was nothing more enjoyable and I was not alone. It was 200, the times that me and my friends did not have our own notebook. We spent most of the times in cyber cafes, we eat there, we date and we play. I really can understand that he mentioned digital games are a significant cultural and also economic force  these days. For me things are changed, now I do not have any games to spend time, aside from time; I don’t find any games exciting to play but I know in the deep of my mind, I am still waiting for the games that he said “We don’t yet have these environments, either because they’re too expensive to create or the technology simply hasn’t quite reached the degree of refinement it will have five to ten years from now.”

Play

    I think J. Huizinga really takes the games seriously, especially in his last paragraph he mentioned about Plato’s conception of religion. I read many related articles about this. Huizinga’s article is from 1950 but it is easy to see many signs in our time about surrealism. I think matrix is one of them and it is also a phenomenon for our time. I believe people will always have curiosity for surrealism. This philosophical article touches like anything that we’re dealing right now.

Experience Economy

       What I understand from Pine and Gilmore’s article is; they are not trying to prove new look of economy but they are trying to update the information for the economy science. We all can see that “customization” taking its turn in the econmic relations. Otherwise it is going to be hard to explain the gain of 2nd life or youtube for our new economy. I think things have to be classified and Pine and Gilmore’s article is an effort for that.

             Umium Giano; is my name in second life, I have to say it is again failure for me. After one year I register again, I got the same feelings. Here are reasons; takes too much time in registration, what an upload, slow slow slow, and finally; “what am I doing here?”. Those were things that I can say as a reason for my disappointment.

On the other hand I should have to say these too; I am not a user but I read every news about 2nd life and I think positive for its future. For me it is a combination of facebook or myspace and playstation 2(not 3). Honestly I am not a big fan of these too but…Absolutely it is a part of the future but for now I just do not have patience. I am one of those, waiting for next one…

 Here is one that I found for facebook and one about itunes. Just wanna share…

After a long conversation, we decided to name our research; The Rise of iTunes: When music downloading and cell phones collide. Iam sure it will be exiciting. We are going to go through music downloading by focusing on itunes and of course including cellphones. I am a user but I have never been gotten that deep. I mostly will work on the “future” part of the research. Definitely, it will be easy and enjoyable to work with this team. You can check for more from Nick’s blog.

Even Democracy has got Survivors

     Nowadays, it is a common thing to force the every utopian term into “democracy”, but I agree. It would be really easy, if we could have that kind of a magic word. Just imagine; whenever you say it, it would define all the positive feelings about our society. But of course, there no easy solution in life…Democracy itself, is a problematic word. It has problems even with freedom or individualism. It is really hard for democracy to define itself in a world that this complicated.

     Without getting into this argument I want to write about “the power of news and democracy”. Absolutely, there is no way to mention the term democracy in a place where anyone can reach news easily. In others words, “independent media” is one of the keystones of democracy. Some will say that “independent media” is just a hypothetical thing.  Yes it is, I believe; if you look at it as an economical way. But if you think about its texture, you will see that it is changing day by day. I feel lucky as an eyewitness to this change. As we all know the way to make the news, or I can say the way we’re experiencing the media has changed in last twenty years.

      I remember the days I was excited to watch TV and waited hours in front of it. Until 1989, there were only one national channel and it broadcasted only from 12 to 7 pm. And it started with news and ended up with news. This was the only way I learned about “outside issues”. Than in one year everything had changed, in the beginning of 1990s we got so many channels, radios, newspapers that it was not exciting anymore to catch up with one of them.In my example, it was a political thing. Like most of the world my country has changed its lifestyle in 1990s. But now I know that it was not our policy, the technological developments have changed the way we learn about the “outside world”.

      I personally, can start a day without checking a newspaper. I check one newspaper at least since I was 15. Of course this habit had created an emotional connection between mw and hardcopy newspapers but like three years ago I started to read the news online. First, it was just a replacement but now I know that it is totally different than being a cyber version of a newspaper. The interactivity of web news absolutely destroys the mobility of a hard copy newspaper. TV news also has gone too far from their 1990s versions.

      As a summary, I refuse to talk about the advantages or disadvantages of this change. The new media has got new problems with its new texture and different relations with society. With the help of technology, users started to be their own entertainers or news sources. It does not mean that we will destroy the problems but for sure we’re one more step closer to “democracy”.

Viva web 2.0…