Parody and Remix production

Few days ago I posted my practicum post on remix production and online comedy. I wanted to build up on that and explore various parodies produced through remix production. I'm sure that all of you are already familiar with the term, but just to reiterate, parody refers to an imitative work, involving satire and comedy, created to comment on an original work.
Parodies are one of the major subjects of remix productions, involving various media texts such as films, music, and TV series. These parodies often involve more than two contexts. For example, I saw a parody poster of Matrix with the characters from Harry Potter titled as "the Patronux". Thus remix production not only involves just one context, but it can also bring numerous different sources and create one piece of work.
One interesting fact about parodies is that it is not only limited within the hands of the amateur producers online, but it is also greatly used in official texts. For example, Scary Movie series is famous for mixing numerous parodies of the well-known horror movies. Parody is also widely used in advertisement, such as the Dark Knight parody of the McDonald advertisement.

             

As I have mentioned earlier, remix production does not only require creativity and technical skills, but it also asks for the producer's wit and awareness of the popular trends. 

Online Interest Group Practicum 7

It took a little while to find the right wikipedia page to add additional information or create. After much research and looking, it seemed the best Wikipedia that fit my "Online Interest Group" topic was the "Internet Forum" wikipedia. I chose this for a few reasons. Posting about interest groups under the game itself didn't fit at all, as the whole page talked about the game mechanics. Making an "Online Interest Group" Wiki page seemed too broad and specific at the same time (broad in the sense that it can include forums, chatrooms, websites, etc; specific in the sense that it doesn't encapsulate the topic well enough). Therefore, since most of my posts and interactions were within internet forums, I decided I would contribute to that.

However, before I go on, I must explain, that the Wikipedia page I wanted to edit was a partially protected page, therefore, I, as a regular user with no credentials on Wikipedia, could not edit the page. I had a few things I wanted to add on to it too, so I am going to explain them here:

Under the "Other Forum Features" section, I want to add that along with the inclusion of social media connectivity, there has been things borrowed and taken from social media sites and integrated into these forums. Likes and shares have been added to individual posts and threads. Sometimes, more prominently liked items gets talked about more, similar to many social networking sites. Along with this, I want to add that now it is accepted and not frowned upon to add images, videos, and other media outlets directly in posts. No longer do you have to PM people the videos, you can directly embed these videos directly in your public post.

I want to add a section specifically to talk about the culture of gaming forums, and the prominence of these forums. Not only are they useful, it helps developers connect and communicate with the community of players. This interaction is crucial for a well established game. They have a picture of a game forum and how it says internet forums are used in conjunction, but it really wasn't elaborated at all.

Overall, I think the internet forum article is very detailed already and not much needs to be added. It seemed to be pretty up to date.

Practicum 5: Final Cut Pro

As a step further in video remix, I learned about the program Final Cut Pro. As I have mentioned in the class presentation, Final Cut Pro is a video editing software developed by Apple Inc. Luckily my friend had the software in her computer, so she taught me basic skills of video editing in Final Cut Pro. Compared to Windows Live Movie Maker the program had more features and made the editing process easier.

One thing I really liked about the Final Cut Pro compared to Windows Movie Maker was that I had much more freedom in mixing sound with video. In Windows Movie Maker there was only one track that I could edit videos and sound, but you can add any number of tracks into the timeline and mix numerous video and sound clips. Also, as seen in the bottom right, FCP has different types of transitions for videos and make video editing easy and simple.
For video editing I used the clips that my friend had in her computer, which were the video clips of her friend working on printmaking. I explored through various transitions in video and sound to make the video editing as smooth as possible. I haven't uploaded the final production yet, since the file is in my friend's computer. Overall, I enjoyed using the program for video editing and preferred it to Windows Movie Maker.

Wikipedia edit: Yelp

So I read through the Wikipedia page for Yelp, and it seemed pretty thorough. I spent a little while trying to figure out what to add, and I decided a little edit should be made to a section called "criticism of reviews." In this section, it stated that Yelp was criticized because of the ease with which people can post overly negative reviews of a place (sometimes for suspicious reasons! Ooh, intrigue!). However, through my experience on Yelp, I have found that it definitely goes both ways: People will write, for sometimes-nefarious reasons (e.g. bias), both negative and positive reviews of businesses. Therefore, I made a small change reflecting this. I feel I have done a service to the internets.

It'll probably get taken down right away because of some technicality though. Bleh.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp,_Inc.#Criticism_of_reviews

Yelp's Main Problem

Okay, here it is: The problem with Yelp. Edges of your seats people. The problem with Yelp is that people don't like to write reviews. There, I said it. People mostly use the site to read reviews and tips. I found a study somewhere that said something like 97% of people who visit Yelp don't write reviews. Due to this, there is a comparatively low volume of reviews on the site. In addition, the people who write the reviews tend to be those who have a strong opinion - either very good or very bad usually.

To address this, it seems to me that Yelp has attempted to incentivize reviewing. This is why they instituted things like checking in - in all honesty, it seems like a really lame thing to do to me. However, if you get points and deals for doing these things, you're motivated to make an account. And if you get more points for writing reviews, you'll be motivated to do that. Yelp is doing a decent job at incentivizing reviews it seems, but the problem still exists: People don't like writing reviews.

better late than never

So I just realized I never did participation post number 6. Whoopsies. Anyways, I Hulu vs. YouTube. I decided to watch some Colbert Report. Here are my findings:

Hulu: You get to watch whole episodes, but with a few commercials placed at strategic intervals. Good quality. This is official stuff.

YouTube: Unofficial, varying quality. Not whole episodes, just clips. Popup ad in front of video that you have to click away.

Overall, I would go to these sites for different reasons. Hulu if I wanted to watch a good-quality stream of an entire episode, YouTube if I wanted a quick clip. Huzzah!

Yelp Friends

So here I'll write a little about having friends on Yelp. For me, it's a little bit of a lonely experience. I only have two friends, as I searched around and not many people I know actively use Yelp. However, I shall make due with my two. I shall henceforth refer to my friends as "Friend 1" and "Friend 2."

Friend 1 is a pretty inactive user. He has a profile, a picture, and seven friends, so he must have some purpose in using Yelp, but he has written zero reviews, tips, or anything. It fairly boggles the mind.

Friend 2, on the other hand, is more active. She has 38 friends, nine reviews, and several tips. Reading her reviews, she seems to have put a lot of thought into them, and they're pretty well-written. Maybe she's doing a project on Yelp for a class? Also, looking at her friends list, it seems like she might just be adding random people with lots of reviews, as she has numerous friends with "elite reviewer" status.

I've commented on items on my friends' profiles, but neither has responded. Not much interaction going on here. Oh well, I'll just talk to my offline friends I guess.

Soundcloud's remix capabilities

Although the media sharing service Soundcloud is primarily used by a wide variety of both professional musicians and "bedroom producer" hobbyists to post original material, it is worth noting the wide degree of remix opportunities Soundcloud makes available for users to participate in. As we've explained in class, the concept of the remix has far reaching implications for the media objects that define our popular culture. This concept of taking the old and transforming it into something new is very explicitly used in music productions. As I explained during my presentation, the dance/electronic community has emerged as the popular genre that can be found on Soundcloud because of the ease at which electric music is produced and shared. This genre characteristic opens the door for easy manipulation by others to create remixes of original work. Both artists and media companies utilize the marketing power of hosting remix contests and often use the platform of Soundcloud to engage with participants. Through the download function, artists can post the separate multitrack "stems" that make up a particular song such as "vocals" or "drums" which can be downloaded and manipulated by other artists, then re-uploaded and posted to a group for judging.

Practicum 7 - Caitlin Lundquist

For my final practicum post I couldn't really find any site that was super relevant to specifically internet political activism, or anything that was particular to just political activism, so I settled with Internet Activism and attempted to make an argument about collective intelligence and participatory culture.  I knew I couldn't get too specific so I tried to make a vague argument about how communication was important in online communities and how this communication helped redefine the word community.  Here is my post that I kinda just stuck on the end of a paragraph so that when someone wondered what I was talking about they could easily delete it.

Senior Citizen Internet Use- Seven

For my Wikipedia post, the only relevant page I could find to edit was the AARP page. There was almost no information about the website on the page for the organization as a whole, so I put some of the basics about the site as well as some of its more commonly used features.
In my time using the message boards, the most active ones were for entertainment and food and online games, so I mentioned those in my edit.

I also wrote about the games section of the AARP site, which gets used quite often from what I can tell. I mentioned the leaderboard where users can see how they compare to others, and also said that the two most popular games are solitaire and mahjong, which kind of shows that they play the same games online that they probably did offline.

Online Interest Group Practicum 6

A few weeks ago, I realized, that of all this semester, I have yet to post a video in my online interest group. I have been so enveloped in just replying to people and making my own threads that I never posted any media; no photos, videos, external links of any sort. Therefore, a few days ago, I posted a video on some problems I was having, and boy did I have a response. It seems that videos and other various types of media more easily grabs others' attention in these forums and interest groups than just plain text. I instantly got 10+ replies to my video post alone within the next couple days. It's very satisfying when the content you post gets talked about so much by other members of the forum. It really makes me feel the community aspect of the online interest groups.

I do wonder though, if I posted more videos, if it would be an overload of video links, and the response might become negative because of too much media. After all, it is a forum for messaging. If I had realized this earlier in the year, I might have gotten the chance to try out my hypothesis. However, just from the past few days, the overwhelming love for my video was enough to make me a happy camper.

The Final Practicum Blog and Wikipedia Entry

This semester, my practicum project was to build a personal website and a attempt to promote it. Mission accomplished! What I learned new was that the tools to build personal websites are becoming easier to use. I used Bandzoogle and will continue to do so. I also learned that it has become easier to link to social networking sites. What I re-learned is that promoting a website with music has become even more difficult than it was before. In my paper I am going to talk about this from two different aspects that we covered this.

All in all I invested way more than 15 hours per week into this project. Content generation alone passed this mark and I am sure that building the actually website was pretty close. For the past few weeks I have been making a point to promote the website 1-2 hours per day with some time updating parts of the website. As of yet, the promotion is not what I would call effective. However, when people do listen to the disc I often get unsolicited praise. The problem seems to be just getting people to the website and to listen.

I did a Wikipedia entry on the "Personal web page" site at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_web_page. Whether it sticks or not, I do not know. The stuff below is the entry and my addition is highlighted.
------------------------------------------------------------
WIKIPEDIA ENTRY:
While blogging remains popular, today many casual internet users tend to rely on free social networking services such as Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace that serve the same purpose as a personal webpage, without the prerequisite foundation in web design. Their predetermined structures are much simpler to begin using and navigating, but impose limitations to formatting, amount of content, etc. Users who want full control of all aspects of the page must create their own. Adobe DreamWeaver and similar programs provide the means. Additionally, sites such as Bandzoogle.com are making personal website design easier without having a lot of knowledge of building websites.

Practicum 4

I visited Migente.com again. I only really got the urge to go on after I got on Facebook. Sometimes it feels strange when I think about how a social networking site targets certain demographics, I think I feel this way because I've become so accustomed to Facebook. However, in hindsight the first social networking site I used was Myspace, and the only people I interacted with were Black and Latino, and sure you can go searching for people, but I didn't, and my social circle online was usually constant and quite small.

I haven't been on Brownplanet or Brownpride in awhile, and I'm not sure I'll be going back. Migente is just much more comprehensive when it comes to interacting with self-identifying Latinos(a). There are more options for communication in Migente then there are in the Brownplanet and Brownpride. The only real ways of interacting with members on the two previous sites is through forums, which when compared with Migentes chat services, seems as efficient as the postal service. Regardless I still don't feel comfortable saying that I know how Latino(a)s use the internet. How do I know that all the people I've interacted with have been Latino(a)? Identity can be easily manipulated online, and there was never a surefire way to determine if the person I was talking to (sometimes they had a profile picture) was Latino.

Here is a link to all three sites I mentioned earlier

http://www.migente.com/home/index.html
http://www.brownplanet.com/
http://www.brownpride.com/

Media Fandom 7

Throughout the semester I have spent my time going through many IMDb message boards and interacting with fellow television and film lovers.  I have posted a total of 54posts and have spent nearly 15 hours on IMDb.  Through IMDb I have experienced and not experienced what one might classify as an online community.  For my last several posts I have made an even greater attempt to make and feel a community while interacting with others on the message boards.  I have done so by being more responsive to replies to my original posts or by continuing conversation on other posts.  In some ways I think I have succeeded with the intuitive structure of the message boards in creating an online community. 

            According to the Wikipedia Online Community page, an online community is, “a virtual community that exists online and whose members enable its existence through taking part in membership ritual”.  Although IMDb message boards and it members fit the classification of an online community. But I would have to have some disagreement with this.  I think an instrumental part of feeling like a community is formed is the interaction in which an individual applies to the membership ritual.  So I decided to edit part of the Wikipedia Online Community page.  Unfortunately I had trouble being able to edit the actual webpage but the following is what I would add to the page.  “Building a successful online community can be achieved through the input of individual membership to an online community.  An online community can be classified as such among individuals with continual discussion on specific tropes”.  I suggest that it must be a continual discussion as it promotes a sense of a physical community thus traversing to online. 

            The addition that I make to the Wikipedia Online Community page is one in which I formulated from my own experience with the IMDb message boards.  I think that I have been successful in certain aspects of feeling an online community.             

Practicum 6

After exploring through Pro Clubs, I started to notice how serious and time consuming some of the parts of FIFA 12 Online can be. Head to Head Seasons and Pro Clubs are definitely where you can find the most hardcore gamers that FIFA 12 has to offer, so if any of you guys are up for a challenge I would definitely recommend check these modes out. Head to Head Season are a single player mode where you enter in a league, but this time you play by yourself. Records and statistics are kept, which means that players who enter this type of gameplay are serious about the game. Also, like Pro Clubs, Head to Head Seasons are a serious time commitment. The game times are set in advance, and all members of the league are told when the matches will be played so that there are no conflicts.

The picture above is a screenshot of the main screen of a person that is in a Head to Head Season. At the top you can see the users handle, along with the stars representing his/her skill level. Below that is shown this persons record in the league. The large red bar represents how many points GarrethBro currently has in the league, and if you look to the right you see a gold thinner bar that represents how many points 1st place in the league has. At the bottom of the screen is shown how many times this user has been promoted or regulated, which means how many top 4 finishes and also how many bottom 4 finishes this person has had. Next to that is how many league trophies he has, which are awarded to the winner of the league.

As you can see there are many components that go into these Head to Head Seasons. These leagues can get very intense, and like this person did you can see that its possible to play in many leagues (but only one at a time).

Social Networking Sites - Post 7

          For my last post, I decided take a more creative approach at pushing people to really understand how much social networking sites are affecting our lives. Since starting my practicum project and my experiences with 43Things, Google+, and LinkedIn, I have realized really how much SNS are running my life. 4 out of 5 internet users are visiting social networking or blogging sites. 76% of American social networking users are passive users - they're "spectators", making "creators" just a fourth of all the social network users. With these statistics, and many more that you can find at http://thesocialskinny.com/100-more-social-media-statistics-for-2012/, it becomes evident that these numbers are constantly increasing and that the majority of internet users are now using social networking sites. What started out as solely a college-student phenomenon, has shifted to more of a free-for-all type of experience. People are seeing friends, younger siblings, older siblings, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, professors, and much more on these sites. The important thing to realize when pertaining to these issues is the idea of online identity formation. 
          We must be careful in how we present ourselves, especially when we take a second to realize how is following us or who is friends with us. This is something I learned with the three sites I looked at. Not only could my identity shift between these sites, but also I was able to be more flexible in more informal situations (43Things) and less flexible on the formal sites (LinkedIn). To close my experience, I wanted to present a little game to you all - a play on the famous sporcle.com - if you haven't been on there, don't, especially during finals weeks because you'll never get off. But here it is.. take a look at the image presented below and see how many of these social networking sites you can identify - I think you'll be surprised.

          So the SNS take home message? These sites are controlling or lives. They're consuming our online time. They're running our professional and personal connections. It's is important to understand these sites and constantly be aware of the changes that are occurring. Be aware what is happening and be conscious of your personal presentation. Well, that's all folks - If there is anything I want you to take from my personal experience with social networking sites you just heard it! Feel free to ask any questions regarding my experience. I'd love to share more!

Soundcloud as an internet community

Soundcloud's role as a media sharing service and platform for artists and labels to upload, present, and spread their work is central to their role among the greater Web community. Looking within the site itself at the interactions people have with one other exemplifies a sort of "micro" community that has emerged out of the system of sharing and discussion tools the service provides to people for free. Along with making personal connections with other artists on a one-to-one level through private messages, groups can also be created. These groups are purposely kept as broad as possible to invite a diverse array of subjects to manifest themselves as communities within the thousands of separate users that converge on a global level to this relativel simple site. After exploring the seemingly infinite number of different groups users have started in an attempt to find new music and foster collaborative connections with one another, it became interestingly apparent that over 90% of the groups I explored were created around the subject of musical genre. Inside each group is a public list of music that members can add their own music to which is akin to a facebook wall. This tool provides people with the ability to gain visibility to their content within a relevant, interested audience. It was not uncommon to read past dialogs occurring on someone's music that involve some kind of record label introducing themselves to an unsigned artist and then expressing interest adding their music to their catalog.

Senior Citizen Internet Use- Six

Here is one last update of my experiences on the two websites I explored, senior.com and aarp.org.
Still not much action on senior.com. The forums are mostly empty and there are rarely any comments on any of the articles, which are posted pretty often. There is a chat function on the site that will occasionally show that someone is online, but every time I try to talk to them, there is no response. Whether it's a glitch with the site or the person is cautious about chatting with me, it's just another example of how little senior.com is used for social interaction. It's a website outside of any formal organization that the users are familiar with and exists only online. Even for me, the site is kind of confusing to use, and I think these are the reasons why it doesn't have much active participation.
Over on the AARP website, I've been exploring the extensive games section. There are all types of games (minus shooter games), but the most popular seem to be classics like solitaire and mahjongg. There is also a section on the page with "brain games" that promises to help "memory, problem-solving, and language skills." The ability of games, puzzles, etc. to help with brain function is a big topic of articles and discussions on all the senior websites I've visited, and I think internet use, in general, might be increasing among senior citizens because of the hope of maintaining brain health into old age.
With my membership to aarp.org, which I set up through my Facebook account, I get an email once a week that's basically a digital newsletter with articles of interest to seniors. I'm sure before the internet, AARP sent out actual newsletters in the mail along with loads of other information that they now primarily distribute online. As this large organization pushes more of its services online, I would expect its members to use the internet more and more, and become more comfortable with all it has to offer.

Practicum 7- Chambers

For my 7th and final practicum post I took a look at the Wikipedia page for Second Life to see what I could add or edit. Since Second Life is very popular and has been around for nearly a decade there is already a lot of information on Wiki. I did notice that I could add a brief section on how avatars travel about the virtual world. There was already sections on the avatars appearance and the communication in Second Life so I though giving the readers some more insight into the actual gameplay might be helpful/useful. For those who don't even know what Second Life is they might be able to gain a better understanding of the game by reading up on the appearances, communication and now the transportation. I have already touched on transportation in a previous post so I don't think it is necessary to be repetitive but hopefully my Wikipedia post, although brief, will be helpful . Maybe it will be taken down as well but it was worth a shot. I will probably keep checking back to see how long it stays up.

Post 7 - Online Support Groups and Wikipedia

I contemplated adding information to one of the Wikipedia pages for the specific online support groups I visited throughout the semester, however, in looking at the Wikipedia page for support groups in general, I thought my time would be better spent there. There is an "online support groups" subheading on the Support Groups page and this is where I decided to focus my efforts. This page had some beneficial information but most of the information pertains to medical ailments and the support for people like cancer sufferers. Although many of the online support groups are focused on issues like this, there is nothing on the page that mentions the benefits of online support groups for someone with another type of issue going on, like addiction. I decided to add that there are support groups for a variety of different types of people and issues, including addiction. The Wikipedia page also talked about the benefits of the online support groups being asynchronous when the users are using personal profiles or forums, however it did not mention the 24 hour chat rooms like I found on websites like AA online or SMART recovery. From the knowledge I gained this semester, the chat rooms were the outlets that were most frequently used and from which the users seem to gain the most out of. I thought this was important to add to the page so I talked about the ability of the online support groups to be accessible 24 hours a day while the users are still able to remain anonymous and comfortable in their own homes, despite the time of day in which they need support.

Social MOO: Final Post

For my final post, I took to Wikipedia to see what they had to say about LambdaMOO. I found information about history, layout, demographics and such, but nothing about just what it's like within the MOO. Thus, I added a section about the general atmosphere within the MOO. I only recently discovered and was able to experience the interactions of players within LambdaMOO, but what I found from firsthand experience agreed with what I had read of outside blogs about the game. Here is what I wrote in the section I added:

"Even as the population of active players on "LambdaMOO" has decreased greatly, the players still remaining are part of a tight community that have known each other for years. This makes it difficult for new players to integrate themselves into the community without putting in much time and effort, making addition of new players even less likely. Along with this tight-knit community comes special jargon and inside jokes that an outsider would have difficulty understanding. There is also a sexual overtone that contributes to much of the community, players might sometimes "greet" each other with some sort of sexual act. Apart from sexually laced conversation, much seems to revolve around coding and building within the world, which requires knowledge of that skill in order to understand."

Overall, I did find it very hard to immerse myself in the kind of community that I found in the MOO, though it likely didn't help that I discovered other players so late in the project. Along with the community there not necessarily wanting to talk to me, I found it hard to even find things to say because I didn't understand or wasn't comfortable with most conversations that I found.

It was kind of fun to add my experience to Wiki, although it's somewhat tainted with the fact that my entry will likely be taken down pretty soon. However, just knowing that I have the power to get information out to so many people, even for a short time, is a pretty cool feeling.

Over and out.

Practicum 5

Pro Clubs were the next section of the game that I explored, and I can easily say that this was the most interesting feature that FIFA 12 Online has to offer. Users are placed on teams based on their rankings, and teams are composed of 10 members per squad (nobody is assigned the goalkeeper position). The alternative to random selection is you and 9 friends can come in as an already assembled team, which I thought was pretty cool and thats definitely the way I would go. I tried to join a team but I then realized how much of a time commitment this would become, not to mention how serious the users on Pro Clubs take their play. Teams usually play full length seasons, just like the actual professional soccer leagues do, and have 1 or 2 matches a week. Obviously all games are ranked, and not only is a team's wins and losses record kept, but also teams leading scorers, most effective defenders, and best assist men as well.

Although Pro Clubs are only available to North American users (there are 11 regional divisions that are offered), there is an overall leaderboard that includes all users throughout the globe. This way, there is a connection between users regionally, domestically, and even globally leaving no doubt about who is the supreme soccer squad in the world. Another thing this mode allows for is for you to meet and play against different teams from all over the world, each bringing their own style and unique gameplay to the table. This is what makes Pro Clubs the most interactive feature on FIFA 12 Online by far.

Practicum 4

The next part of FIFA 12 that I explored was the Custom Games section. In In this mode, you are able to invite any player online to a match with custom rules and game settings. The first option you choose is whether you want your match to be ranked or un-ranked. If you desire a ranked match, you are forced to play with the official FIFA 12 Online gameplay settings. This means random weather, 6 min halves, and you must play on the most advanced level of difficulty. 


Customs matches may contain different number of gamers. In this multiplayer mode, there are 4 types of matches. First are Match Lobbies, which are randomly selected. Here you can play versus 1-3 other player per match. Statistics aren't kept here and in general these matches tend to be un-ranked, and less intense than other gameplay modes. Contrastingly, Online Leagues are definitely the most serious of all the gameplay types. These matches are very intense, as each league is made up of 30 individual gamers. Each member selects a team at the beginning of the season and must play all matches for that league with that same team. Teams usually play between 2-4 matches per week, and seasons last around 3-4 months. Wins and losses are recorded, and at the end of the league the best 16 teams are seeded for playoffs and the tournament bracket begins. The other two modes of the multiplayer section are Team Play, which is 2 vs 2, and Head to Head Matches which is the classic and most common of all gameplay. These two modes are also ranked matches, and in Team Play both teammates must be playing for the same console. 


In the picture below, you can see a screenshot of actual gameplay from an Online League match. The white names above the player are the handles of the various users that are playing the game. The red circles surrounding the players feet help designate which teammate will be selected if you press the switch player button.

Practicum 3

I've been searching around for more websites where I can engage with fellow latinos. All that really requires is typing into Google, "Latinos",  "Hispanics", "Puerto Rican", etc. Obviously if you want to get more specific you can, but I've found it more conducive and efficient to just type in the broadest term possible then go and sift through the results. One thing I have been noticing is that all of the social networking sites look relatively similar to one another. A part of me think that these are all generic, and more specialized forms of facebook, and while this may be true for some of them it can't be said for all. For instance, Migente.com has structural similarities to Facebook, i.e. add a friend, message a friend, chat, photos, tagging, likes, and status updates, but although there may be some similarities between many of these social networking sites with Facebook, that doesn't necessarily mean they were products of Facebook. Migente.com has been around since I was in Elementary school, which was give or take 12 years ago. This would mean that Migente.com has been around longer than Facebook, and is not a product of Mark Zuckerberg's brainchild. Migente.com probably copied some of their structural ideas from Facebook, but then again I feel like most social networking sites just borrow from whatever social networking site is the most popular at the time, just like the Facebook creators probably got some of there ideas or inspirations from Myspace.

Today I found a social networking site, Latinopeoplemeet.com. Talk about a web address that's to the point. I'm so used to the aesthetics and structural set up of Facebook that a lot of these other SNS's are just unappealing, boring, and hard to navigate. Not to mention that in order for you to use the services of Latinopeoplemeet.com like chat you have to pay! I didn't stay on for too long and felt that my money could be better spent on something else.

Here's a screen shot of the screen that asks you to pay a fee to use their services.

Microblogging: Sammy Luterbach

Throughout the course of the semester, I have spent a lot of time on Twitter and Tumblr thinking about my actions as I went along. I think both microblogging sites are enormously interesting, but I find Twitter to be the most fascinating. The site is simultaneously fun and informative, but it has allowed me to make professional connections. I have been able to be a part of different communities and contribute to the content on the internet in my own way. It has been really cool to experience Twitter from a personal perspective and from a professional perspective. My personal account is fun because I can be my full self and express my personality while still participating in the communities I am a part of: the CollegeFashionista community, the fashion community in general, the UW-Madison and Madison communities, and observing the celebrity community. On my professional @CFUWisconsin, my goal is to create a community of our own. It's a lot of hard work that I need to think about creatively and professionally. My most recent goal has been to inject a specific personality into the brand, and I feel like I've been a bit more successful at that in the past work. I used more "I's" and "me's" and injected more opinions and fun photos into my tweets.

Since I really enjoyed working with Twitter, I decided to contribute to their Wikipedia page. Their page was protected so I just had to submit a request to edit, but I talked about the value of using Twitter for a business by saying, "Twitter is a great place for businesses to communicate with their customers in real-time and gain valuable insight from them. It's an easy way to be a part of a community and start your own community. It's also a great place to build relationships with customers, partners, and influencers online." I learned this information myself, but also found that Twitter.com/about said that same thing and used that as my reference.

 

Tumblr has been quite interesting as well. I found Tumblr to be most rewarding from a professional perspective because I had a clear goal: to gain the most reblogs, followers, and ultimately, direct attention to CollegeFashionista.com. I spent time testing which photos were the most accepted and loved ones by the community that follows us and hopes that it would allow us to gain for followers. I think I was fairly successful in doing so, since we have gained around 800 followers this semester and get way more reblogs than we ever have in the past. It has been like trying to develop a good formula for us, so it was fun experimenting. I tried finding a formula for my personal Tumblr, but I never really gained followers that weren't my friends. I think in order to do so, I would have to really advertise my blog on other social media outlets. I kind of enjoy keeping Tumblr to myself though. I feel like if I were to gain more followers, I would have more of a responsibility to follow a strict schedule everyday and maintain it. Right now, my Tumblr is an outlet for expression and creativity and a place to store inspirational photos I find online.