MMORPG's and Augmented Reality

This will probably just be a short post this week, as I have just installed the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and for some reason my laptop is now stuffing up... the mouse cursor keeps clicking randomly when you are typing, so you will be typing in a text box and then next minute the cursor has clicked you somewhere else on the screen!! grr... Has this happened to anybody else by any chance?

MMORPG's remind me of my brothers back home up north.. When I went back in the holidays all they seemed to do all day was sit on the internet playing these kinds of games. It started off just liking the Diablo game, but after completing the game at a solo player level they now only play Diablo, and others, online against people from all over the world. The most interesting part is that when my brother has friends over they all sit there interacting in the virtual world rather than in the real world. Apart from Bebo, my brothers do not seem to participate in any other kinds of virtual worlds/online communities - only ones with a "game element".

I couldn't make it to the lectures this week so am a bit confused about the idea of "augmented reality" - this is different to virtual world's isn't it? Can it be kind of like an online community that instead of being confined to the internet it also involves 'work' in the real world - kind of like the geocaching example the Byron talks about in his blog. I thought that was a good example.

I just found something really interesting on the Harcourts website... They have a section selling property in the virtual world on the Second Life platform, advertising prices ranging "from $45,000-$55,000 linden dollars". They even have a real estate office in the Second Life world with "Second Life Property Consultant, Jason Takakura". Fascinating stuff.

Blogs Today

Do blogs challenge the role of traditional news media? Perhaps at one stage in the recent past they were beginning to draw small amounts of audiences completely away from newspapers and television news, however the people who control the traditional news media saw this new form of information gathering rising and instead of trying to oppose it they seem to have embraced it. When I type "political blogs" into Yahoo!Xtra Search the first page of results include blogs such as the Los Angeles Times political blog, the CNN 'politicalticker' blog, the ABC News politics blog, and 'The Caucus' - a political blog from the New York Times. Now these aren't C-list bloggers revealing their political thoughts from their living rooms, these are senior news correspondents writing for some of the most recognised examples of traditional news media in the world. Most news outlets have uploaded news stories online for a while, but they have now recognised blogging as a new form of writing and to continue appeal to all audiences on a broad scale we are beginning to see blogs encorporated into news services more and more frequently. The New Zealand Herald has just recently revealed an updated blog section of their website, and it also seems TVNZ and TV3 are slowly starting to introduce blogs to theirs as well.

However with blogging being recognised as a new style of writing, we certainly do have more access to new sides of political candidates that take part... TechPresident alerted me to a twitter update 14 hours ago from Hillary Clinton saying "It has been a hard fought race but I have a proposal for the Democratic Party – I challenge Senator Obama to a bowl-off, winner takes all." I thought this was odd, but in a few minutes after a trip over to the New York Times political blog I found that this was actually an April Fool's joke Hillary played to a news conference relating to Barack Obama's recent bowling trip (see below).

Wikipedia and Web 2.0

I found Erika's example of getting a previous class to change a page on Wikipedia to read that the University of Otago fully supports couch burning pretty interesting, and there was more on this form of credibility testing in the reading from Chesney, so I decided to give it a try for myself. I went to the wiki on Studholme College and entered the line "It was revealed in early 2008 that students of Studholme College have been the most likely to take part in the notorious Castle Street riots of 2006 and 2007, which were linked to a visit from University of Canterbury students." Now of course while this information could possibly be true, I have made up a random fact on the spot and entered it freely. It has only been about 10 minutes since I entered it, and it still hasn't been deleted, but think how many people in the world could have perhaps read the page in the window of time before that line gets removed? Imagine if that was a wiki about a particular part of communication studies that you are looking up for your essay, and you unluckily read a page within the half hour period that somebody has come along and deliberately (or even unintentionally) uploaded incorrect information to. The Chesney reading has a large highlighted question "So what then is the use of an encyclopaedia which might be unreliable? For some it is no use, for others, it's a good starting point." In the world of Web 2.0 and wikis where anybody can change the information, I agree that wikipedia should only be used as a starting point for gaining new information. Chesney says that some experts highly rated the credibility of wikipedia pages, however there is the fact that his study revealed that 13% of wikipedia pages have errors. It seems to me that you will never know if this error margin is applying to the page you are reading or not, so until you have backed it up with solid knowledge released by professionals (whether this is located in a textbook or a blog) I don't believe Wikipedia can ever be 100% trustworthy.

P.S. Let me know whether or not that line is still on the Studholme College page when you read my post!! :)

Trusting Virtual Communities

One of the biggest issues that stood out to me after the week 4 lectures on Virtual Communities & Social Networks was that of trust. One of our seminar questions from Erika was “Do you trust virtual associates differently to f2f associates?” – and I don’t know about the rest of you but my answer was a definite ‘yes’! It’s not so much of your parents’ idea that everybody you meet on the internet MUST be untrustworthy and weird, but just that you often don’t feel as comfortable with someone you haven’t encountered in the physical world. When you read a statement in text on the internet there isn’t that way of telling if it is false or not, like the way you could tell from the facial expressions or bodily signs from a person you are having a face to face conversation with. I have found in the past that there have been people I have talked to only online for several years and on some level consider a friend, however regardless of the kind of details I have already shared with these people I am still kind of hesitant to reveal to them high risk information such as my address.

One other thing that I thought about was the fact that can we trust the people who have made the website or chatroom our virtual community is forming within? A lot of the time we don’t know who is behind the website, what kind of information they store, or whether or not they are sitting silently in the background reading the conversations we are having within that network. The New Zealand Herald published an article last year claiming that some of the people that run the Facebook social networking site have links with the CIA. The article notes the interesting paragraph in Facebook’s privacy policy that states “Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg. photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalised experience. By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States.” Now how on earth would collecting information about me from newspapers and blogs help me to have a better Facebook experience?!? The other alarming thing the article pointed out to me was the term that when you upload any content to Facebook “you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, reformat, translate, excerpt and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorpoate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorise sublicenses of the foregoing.” So when you upload photos from your drinks on the weekend you are apparently giving Facebook a license to reformat and display this and also incorporate it into other works. A friend of mine was trying to delete her profile from Facebook the other weekend, and while watching her try it just seemed that Facebook was extremely reluctant to get rid of the information it has collected.

Even though Facebook would be the only means of keeping in contact with some people I know, it just seems to be one website that won’t be getting any trust from me.