Practicum 7 - Edits & Reflections

Well I've finally managed to edit the reddit Wikipedia page, despite it still being semi-protected. I'll put a before and after screenshot in below to show what I added. It was a rather quick note about user karma, as I felt this was something that should be noted in the overview, considering I myself wondered what it even was when I started this project.

Anyway, so some final notes on this practicum project. I've actually learned a lot about the two sites I've been using. I guess I've come a long way from someone who read about reddit and "redditors" on memes, wondering what it was all about, and seeing the Digg logo at the bottom of some web pages, wondering what the heck it was. At least now I know what the sites are about and how they are alike/different. One thing I should mention is that I really found the Digg app to be quite cool. At first I didn't think I would like it because I thought you HAD to sign in using either facebook or twitter but once I figured out you could just use your Digg login I was on board. I kind of like the app better than the site actually...it looks cleaner in presentation and is simpler. But anyway, that was one feature I really enjoyed from Digg. Right up until the end (or I guess, right up until now), I can still definitely tell that one thing is for sure: Digg is for news, reddit is for...stuff...and sometimes news. I would say Digg fits the bill for "social news site" more than reddit simply based on content; if anything, I would want to call reddit a "social everything site," based on the fact that you never know what you're going to find on the front page. After doing this project, I'm pretty sure it won't be news that's there...

But a general comparison of the two would reveal a few things I've already mentioned: First, that Digg = news, reddit = social outlet with some scattered news stories. Digg users are more passive, not as active, and generally seem less interesting (a little harsh, I know). Reddit users, however, are very active, vocal, and are a pretty serious bunch when it comes to the internet. Neither site really has a "community" feel, but I would say Digg does better in that category based on the ability to have a limited profile and to follow other users (speaking of which I've gained two more - up to 32!). After all semester of using the sites though, I would have to say "social news sites" don't really work for me. I'll hit up reddit or Digg when I want to see what sort of news or things are popular, but if I want straight news or happenings, I'll probably just use MSN or something. I think that about wraps it up for this final post...think I've covered everything. For the paper I'm thinking of discussing community (or lack thereof), participatory culture, and something else, not positive yet. I am now a noob redditor - AMA!

Practicum - Post 6

Well to be honest I had been planning to make this my post where I edited the Wikipedia page, because I knew exactly what I wanted to add to the page. However I have run into a problem with that, as the reddit Wikipedia page is on what you might call a lock-down. The article on Wikipedia says it is semi-protected until May 20th, 2012 because of vandalism. This presents a problem, considering the semester is over by then. SO to bypass this I have made an account and done a bunch of editing on other articles that are open to modification. Apparently, the semi-protected pages can be edited by users who are 'autoconfirmed', which means that they have had an account for 4 days and made 10 edits on Wikipedia. So far I have completed the 10 edits part of those requirements, now I'll just need to wait a few days. I guess that may work out considering I can just make my final blog post about the edit I made to the Wikipedia page. Phew. So hopefully everything goes smoothly on that front.

On to the actual practicum here, reddit is ablaze tonight with posts about CISPA, considering it has just been passed by the US House. There are several posts on the front page about this already, even though it has only been a few hours. This is something I have noticed over the course of the semester in this project. Any sort of threat to the internet, or modification of its freedom/privacy/security/info sharing is going to be front page on reddit. The top post right now is "Insanity: CISPA Just Got Way Worse, And Then Passed On Rushed Vote." The second-most top post is "US House Passes CISPA!! 248 to 168" and has 1147 comments. If there are concerns about the internet, reddit will be showcasing them and people will be voicing their concern and opinion. I am in no way suggesting this is a bad thing, but it shows that the userbase of reddit is ready to fight for internet rights, and that those who are on reddit are active and aware of internet politics, etc. This of course was seen with the SOPA/PIPA debacle, where reddit was one of the sites to blackout that day. The userbase is serious about this stuff.

Digg, on the other hand, does not have any top postings about CISPA tonight like reddit. I checked top news and most recent and did not see anything, even under politics/business/technology. I feel like this definitely shows that Digg traffic is much lower, and people aren't on there 24/7 to post the most recent happenings like this. I do have 26 followers now, so I'm up from last time. However this still does not give me any sense of community, really. I mean, more so than reddit because at least you can interact a little bit in the following action, but at the same time, I haven't seen many people engage. I'm sure these sites weren't created with a "community-building" goal, but I did come to expect some sort of community or chivalry of some sort.

In the time I wrote this, the comments on the reddit post I mentioned rose from 1147 to 1504, so reddit is definitely seeing some extra traffic tonight.

EDIT: I went ahead and at least edited the Digg Wikipedia page. My final post will hopefully just sum up and show what I added to the reddit one. Pics show what I added.

Participation 7 - Computerized Stuff

When I first thought about this blog post assignment, I for some reason thought it might be kind of tricky. Not that it's hard to just log the things you use, but I use computerized devices so much that I don't even think about it when I do. Needless to say I kept tabs on the things I used last night, and I guess I wasn't surprised by how much computers/electronics have become a part of my life without my knowing it. The first thing I used (and the computerized thing I use the most) was my laptop. My laptop goes with me pretty much anywhere on campus, but in the case of last night, it went to the library with me.

While I was on my way to the library and during my stay, the next device I used was my iPhone. This probably gets used as much as my laptop, but for different purposes of course. I don't really have any games on there anymore so it's mostly just used for texting and internet now.

At the library I needed to print a document so I ended up using one of their computers and printers. Yet another device (or two?).

I had sort of forgotten about it, but I also listened to my iPod most of the time, which I guess is a computerized device. So I'm up to 4 things.

For just one night, using 4 different computerized devices didn't seem like much, but compared with the 0 computerized items I used in my childhood, I can definitely see times have changed and computing seems to be a central part of life, at least for a student/young adult.

Practicum Update - Post 5

Hallelujah! Today I finally saw some news articles on the front page of reddit! Well, two articles anyway, one from CNN and the other from usnews. As I mentioned in my presentation, reddit is not exactly a site I go directly for to get news. In this case however it seems some relevant news made the front page. At this point I still feel like I am not part of the community though, and it seems like the community is a little tough to get into. Actually now that I think about it, I don't really detect a sense of community on this site...I don't feel like anyone really knows each other or continuously interact with each other. After observing the comments for so long, I don't really see any true connection or people sharing a sense of community. Sure, people will share sympathy or discuss similar situations, but it's only a temporary thing I believe, not any sort of lasting community bond. Recently I read a front page post by someone who had just lost their daughter and in the comments there was an outpouring of sympathy and offers to meet up, buy drinks, etc. You can get a sense of safety or support, but never really community.

Digg is very much the same from the last time I posted, though I don't think I mentioned it too much then. However, I did download the Digg app for iPhone so I'll look into how that changes any perspectives I have on the site. I don't think it will really do much, but I couldn't find a legit or official reddit app so I feel Digg wins out in the mobility/access/functionality category, unless I just couldn't find the one for reddit. I mean you could access reddit through a normal browser on a phone, but I feel like an app is a little more convenient. Again, Digg shows more connection with outside websites like facebook, etc, in that you can log in both on the Digg website and through the app using your facebook login or just Digg login. At this point I feel Digg might be a little more user-friendly, and a less intimidating experience in terms of posting, based on userbase and atmosphere.

Practicum - Post 4

This update comes the day before my presentation, and after putting together all the information into the powerpoint, I can definitely see the differences in my two sites. The comfort level and professionality of the sites differ quite a lot. I have posted some comments on both reddit and digg, but have never gotten any comments in response. I think, for reddit at least, comments have to either be super witty, or display some very opinionated statements to get a response. Since my comments have mostly just been rehashing personal experiences or stating a general opinion, no one has really found the need to interact with me. I guess maybe it's about high time I start trolling or something and see how people respond. I did try posting a link recently, but I got the captcha wrong twice so it wouldn't let me do anything for 7 minutes. Then when the 7 minutes were up, it still wouldn't post the stupid thing so I gave up. Surprisingly, I don't see a ton of overlap in content between the two sites, even though they do have some of the same categories. Of course most of the front pages of reddit are just filled with cats, awesome pictures, and memes, whereas Digg usually has breaking news stories and eccentric articles. I think I talk about that in my presentation a little bit too.

Having done a little research into the userbases of the sites, I wasn't all that surprised to discover most users were male, from 25-34, and educated. Although usernames sometimes indicate whether the user is male or female, it seems to me that the postings alone indicate a pretty strong male presence. There are a lot of tech posts, posts about video games, etc. I'm not saying girls aren't techy or don't like video games, but the posts and comments just give off a strong masculine vibe if you ask me. Anyway, not too much new has happened since my last post. I have discovered some new features of the sites like the Digg Bar and the cake day on reddit, and have been observing the comments more closely to see how people interact. I've also taken a liking to /r/AskReddit.

My questions before my presentation are: What do you use most to get news and information online? Do you prefer using sites like reddit or Digg, or more traditional news sites like New York Times or Fox News? What are the advantages of social news sites in comparison to traditional sites?

YouTube V. Hulu

I wasn't sure what videos to watch to do this post, so I just went to Hulu and checked out the front page. There was a trailer for The Cabin in the Woods that was featured, and since I was mildly interested in seeing the movie I decided to check out the trailer on Hulu and YouTube. I don't frequent Hulu that much, except to watch some TV shows like Family Guy, so I'm not as fond of the layout as I am of YouTube's. The quality might be better but I found that it tended to buffer more than the YouTube one, which really irritates me. It seems like a simple difference, but Hulu has the video title under the clip, while YouTube has it above...I really prefer it being above, but maybe that's because I'm conditioned on the YouTube layout.

I'm not a fan of playlists or autoplay when it comes to videos, so the fact that both sites have it (even if you can just simply turn it off), sometimes bothers me. At least with Hulu it gives you like 7 seconds to decide whether to play the next one or click something else. With YouTube it just goes on as soon as the video is done. In terms of comments and ratings, I like that YouTube just has comments displayed automatically under the video, whereas Hulu has various tabs you can click with Discussion, reviews, etc. Overall even though it's the same content, I definitely prefer using YouTube, at least when it comes to short clips like trailers, home videos, or music videos.

Practicum - Post 3

Well...since my last update on this, I have actually gained some followers on Digg. I'm not sure how or why or who they are...for all I know, they're bots but I gathered 18 of them somehow! I checked out their pages and some had diggs similar to mine, but others seemed totally random. Still, it feels more interactive when you have people following you. Guess it's about time I start following some others, rather than just viewing stories and digging/burying articles.

One thing I've really noticed on this site is how many different other sites the stories come from. I get news and random things from pretty mainstream stuff like MSN or local news or whatever, but I have never even heard of most of the sites where the stories posted are from. This makes it interesting as it kind of shows how much diversity there is on the site of who visits and the other sites they look at. The discussion section on this site is still not that great, not too many comments, and if there are, usually it will be people sort of bickering back and forth. But, at least people are being active.

In terms of my progress on reddit, I've posted a couple things, but am always a little hesitant to do so in case it should be a re-post and people will freak out. I'm getting more into commenting on things though. It's actually awesome and sometimes hilarious to read the things people write on there, whether in comments or as a post seeking advice. There are some crazy things going on out in the world apparently... I gotta say that the various memes and other images posted there are my favorite things to look at though. Maybe I'm more of a visual person, who knows. But a general difference between the two sites is that one (Digg) is actually more focused on news/random stories, where as reddit has the news aspect portion, but is more so involved with popular hot topics and viral stuff. It's not the first place I would look for breaking news anyway.

Copyrights

Personally, copyrights have affected and still do affect my experience of content online. The first thing I think of in terms of copyright and how it affects content I'm looking for is Youtube. Sometimes I like to look up old TV shows to watch on Youtube, even though I know it is considered copyright infringement to upload these episodes, etc, without the consent of whoever produced it. So I try looking anyway just to see if someone has managed to work around the copyright by altering the videos slightly, in an effort to keep the video online. Usually they're unsuccessful.

Now for me I find this slightly annoying because I'm willing to assume the people who uploaded the content are not using it for financial gain in any way, but rather just for entertainment purposes. I understand the perspective of businesses and companies that produce the content in that they think it is stealing and distributing their property without consent, however I don't agree 100%. I know they want me to buy the DVD of whatever show I'm trying to watch online, and I understand that's how they make money but obviously it's more convenient to me to just look it up online and have it right there.

Basically, I think copyrights sometimes are a little overbearing, but then again I've never really had original content that I did not want redistributed without receiving compensation, so I feel my opinion might be sort of selfish. I do actually have first hand experience with some copyright things through Youtube in that in some videos I have uploaded, songs are copyrighted and either cannot be used, or just get tagged below the video with the song name and artist. I've never had any videos removed yet though. So that's my experience with copyrights.

Google Search of Myself

Well to be honest I googled my name once before for the heck of it, and I got pretty much the same results today as I did back then. Nothing related to me even shows up; there are a bunch of links to facebooks, linkedins, and other sites with my name, and even people with my middle initial, but none of them are me. I have all my online things set to be pretty private so I guess this doesn't surprise me. I knew my facebook wouldn't show up, and assumed my twitter wouldn't either since I use my youtube name, not my real name, on that site. Overall this is what I expected considering I don't have extensive networking and don't actively participate in things online that would put my name out there. In middle school and high school I think there may have been times where, through the newspaper or school, my name would be on the web, but those days are over. I'll be interested to see how much stuff about other people shows up.

After failing to appear in the website search, I checked under images as well to see if anything might come up even remotely related to myself, but nothing there either. According to google, I don't really exist, or am extremely hard to find! Which personally I think I like because I don't want too much info out there (not that anyone would be looking me up anyway...).

Practicum Update - Post 2

So for the past few weeks I've been stalking out reddit and digg trying to get a good feel for what kind of people were the most frequent posters, how people react to other posts, and how credible I feel the sites are for any sort of news updates. As it says right on reddit, "reddit is a source for what's new and popular online. vote on links that you like or dislike and help decide what's popular, or submit your own!" As such, I quickly found out that it's not so much about news, but rather just cute/funny/strange pictures, random quips, questions, and a greater collection of memes and tidbits from all over the internet. This is probably common knowledge to most people of course. I, however, am a newbie to reddit so it takes some investigation on my part to understand what the site is really all about.

As I've discovered, it is harder to track the demographics of this site than I originally thought. I am used to having sites containing profiles with basic user information like age (perhaps I was just naive enough to believe this site would be the same). With reddit, your user page just contains an overview of your activity, and how long you have been a member. Despite this though, based on the content of posts and the language a lot of users use, I'm going with my initial opinion that the site's users are most likely young people (college students and the like). However I will still continue to investigate this as time goes on.

In terms of my other site, Digg, information on users is a little easier to get since user pages sometimes contain short bios and a location. In addition, some even link their twitter, which makes finding out about users and their demographics a bit easier. To be honest, the layout of this site (though very similar to reddit), looks cleaner to me and I prefer it. BUT, I also find that Digg does not have the user base that reddit does - most articles on the front page all have less than 30 comments on them, whereas on reddit I've seen a picture of a dog with literally hundreds of replies, and replies to replies. I must say that the lower level of other comments actually discourages me from commenting, be it because I'm afraid for someone to see my comment or just because I don't think it's worth it. What's more is that this site seems actually geared toward news and articles. Yes there are tabs for Gaming, Entertainment, etc, but the front page has mostly new articles and politics. Thus those are the main differences I'm noting between the two sites.

Further investigation will be needed on the demographic front, but now that I have accounts on both sites and have begun to engage them, I'm hoping that becomes less difficult and more interesting.

Hopefully this won't get any TL;DR comments.

Memory Lane on Myspace

Well seeing as how I've always had a bad experience with Chatroulette, I decided to go the nostalgic route and check out 15 random Myspace pages instead. Well, first off I can say that not a lot seems to have changed since I stopped using it a long time ago. Of all the profiles I looked at, both male and female, all users were around 20 years old. I think the oldest I saw was 30 years old. What shocked me the most was that half of the profiles I looked at were of people who were online at that time, but to be honest I thought no one used it anymore...What's more is that under the search I changed the preferences to bring up only those new to myspace, and there were actually a lot...

After having gotten used to facebook in the past few years, looking at the myspace pages reminded me of how much different the site was in terms of customization and what-not. Almost all of the pages were blinged-out with banners, glittery gifs, and the like. Some also sported the new (not sure how new since I haven't been on in forever) layout, which I personally am not fond of (though it seems to have a sort of facebook-ish look...hmm). Even though facebook seems to have taken over, it appears that myspace is still alive and kicking.

Practicum Intro - Social News Site

I believe this option was my second choice for practicum, so I'm excited to get started and explore a bit! My practicum assignment is working with social news sites like Reddit, Digg, and Delicious, and sort of investigating them in terms of their usage, demographics, etc. I am somewhat familiar with all of the sites, but am choosing to work with reddit and Digg for this assignment. Like I said I don't have a super extensive knowledge of these sites and what they're all about, so that should make things more interesting. For reddit, users post various articles, images, and links to the site, and other users can vote them up or down, determining how popular the item is and where it fits in on the front page. Digg is similar, except voting on which items are good or bad (up or down) is termed "digging" or "burying" (hence the name, I imagine).

I'm sure many of you already know the basics of these sites, if not all the ins and outs! Anyway, though the sites are similar in that they operate in a somewhat similar way, I am going to investigate their demographics and what makes each of them unique. Hopefully through this practicum I can become better acquainted with these sites and understand/use them to their full potential.

Response to Video

Having been taught a little bit in another class about how the internet came to be, ARPANET was fairly familiar to me but this video filled in a lot of what I hadn't known about the development of the internet. Watching this really put into perspective how much the internet has changed in terms of its power, usage, and availability. However the one thing the video seemed to ignore (like someone else has mentioned in their response) was the growth of the internet after ARPANET hardware was removed...it said the internet was up and running but what I would have liked to know was where it was spreading, how it was doing so, and who was using the technology the most in terms of country (was it only in France, England, and the US at that time?...How did other countries get it?). Maybe these questions have simple or obvious answers but I'm not the most technical person when it comes to understanding networking and hosting. Overall the video filled in the basics of how the internet came to be, something I think people maybe tend to ignore since the internet is everywhere nowadays.

Introduction

Hi everyone, I'm Danielle and I'm what they call a "super senior" on campus, double majoring in Bio and International Studies. I'm really excited for this course and have been since I saw it on the list of courses that could be taken to fulfill an Int'l Studies requirement! I will be finishing that degree this semester then finishing Bio next year.

I hope to learn a lot in this class about the growth of the internet and maybe about how other people use it in comparison to myself. Like most people, I spend a lot of time on the internet so getting to know more about it just seemed like a cool thing to do. Personally I spend most time on the internet on youtube where I upload videos. Like I said in discussion, the thing I hate most about the internet is trolls. Although I hate ads too...Anyway, I look forward to reading other introductions. :)