Adding Video into Posts of We-Town.com

Adding video into the We-Town.com site is a relativly newthing. I have mapped out an easy way to do so.

There are two ways to add video to  posts in the site and my Gliffy visualization has diagramed this well.

Visualization of adding video

Please note, that although I mapped out how to add video, I myself had trouble actually adding video. Trying to imbedd video from youtube resulted in a blank flash video box in the post instead of my imbedded video. I was able to add a video file from the computer to the Vidavee film manager at the bottom of my post on We-town.com

How Do I Know What To Do?

Isnt that a wierd question. How do I know what to do?. How do I know how to take a shower correctly, put on a matching set of clothes and go to class?I think this concept we are discussing about mental models is really interesting.

 One example from Boxes And Arrows was really interesting. It had to do with being able to properly go to a restaraunt to eat food. What do you need to know before going into the restaurant. How do you get seated? can you just go in and sit down and wait to be served?

How we formulate the answers to these questions in our heads before having to make the decision is based on our personal experiences. Have we seen it happen on TV before? Have we actually been to a restaraunt before?Having information likes this is what makes a mental model. I tried surfing the net to answer the question, where do I go if I cant find what I am looking for?.

First I went to google.com, being the mothership in the galaxy of the internet. But with a question as basic as this, google was relatively useless. So I decided to try Ask.com, formerly Askjeeves.com, but sadly, Jeeves is no more. I digress, you would think ask.com would be the perfect place for me to find the answer. I would be asking the internet where to go if i cant find what im looking for on the internet. Ask.com was as helpful as google, and google wasnt helpful at all.

I think that if people cant find what they are looking for, they make their topic more basic, as to attract as many possible listings as possible, then they can dig deeper into their topic at those listings. 

Then I realized I had been using a site for years that answered any and all questions I had, but with a catch. The site only dealt with movies and television. Of course I am talking about www.imdb.com. Any question you have about an actor from an obscure early 90’s comedy? I almost guarantee that they imdb.com will have the answer.  The site is used by millions of people just as a site to provide answers that people had regarding movie trivia. The amount of knowledge this site holds is too far beyond the amount of time it would take you to try to learn it all.

How do you say “Blogging” in Mandarin?

I’ve never been a fan of politics, foreign or American. I never have really had a grasp on what goes on outside the US, call me stubborn, or the product of poor use of the American media, but I’ve never really seen eye to eye with what we do outside the US, so I stay away.

(Mainly due to the fact that I figured the Internet was not prevalent that much in that region because of constant warfare and destruction keeping their societies technologically behind.)

I felt like the one area that the government would be behind in controlling in these countries (the Myanmar case blew my mind) is Internet writing. the first thing my brain thought about when I read of the man being detained for writing a blog in Saudi Arabia, was African-Americans being arresting for voicing their freedom during the Civil Rights movement. I know it doesn’t really compare but just the thought that people now can’t even voice their opinions through text on the Internet sickens me. Not being able to voice your opinion in the street, or not carry out your beliefs in public in one thing, but some of the security measures they are taking is absurd.

Reporters Without Borders said last week that Myanmar authorities have stepped up their surveillance of the Internet since the beginning of the year, pressuring Internet cafe owners to register all users’ personal details and to program screen captures every five minutes on each computer. (FROM Good Afternoon Myanmar).

Wasn’t privacy suppose to be one of the benefits of the Internet? Being able to write and publish what you want with LITTLE threat of persecution. (My mom has a funny animal cartoon strip on our refrigerator. It is two dogs sitting at a computer, and they are in a chat room for cats, and the one dog says “on the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog”)

I feel like this is how the Internet should be treated. These other countries are removing that barrier between the writer and the reader, giving them no privacy. Earlier I said that I believe a lot of these problems in foreign countries stem from uptight intolerant religious fanatics. In these countries holy books, or in their religions, is there any mention of restricting freedom of speech via the Internet?

I thought the quote from URL Not Available: China is a perfect representation of the power-trips alot of the foreign countries are having.

Although China is also battling a seemingly insurmountable pollution problem, the regime appears determined to ignore Western calls for greater openness. “Why can’t China accept that dissent and argument are part of being a normal country?” asks leading Hong-Kong based academic Rebecca MacKinnon. “Why behave in such an insecure manner that violates international human rights norms, damages China’s international image, and distracts media attention away from the Chinese people’s genuine achievements over the past 30 years?”

The questions asked in this quote are all the questions I have about why countries like China do this, and i think its disgusting and inhumane, this is probably why I try to stay as far away from politics as possible.

Information and Searching The Internet

Before I start, I just want to say that the whole concept of the speech that I listened too was borderline creepy, but in the most interesting way. Before the podcast started, I saw images of Howard Reingold, and I honestly had no idea that a guy who looked like he had been searching the beach for burried treasure with a metal detector could be so credibile with information about browsing the internet. Reingold honestly looked like a casul version of Captain Kangaroo for the early 90s.

The only other complaint I had, before jumping into the meat of the assignment, was the concept of Second Life.  Just looking at a program like Second Life shows us how far the advancment of technology has come. I thought the concept of an online university was bogus. The thought of an institution such as Unviersity of Pheonix online was rediculous. I think that the creation of a working 3-D virtual university, even if it is only the creation of NMC, is absolutely amazing. However, does’nt it mean that if people had Second Life caracters enrolled in a virtual college, that there must be a massive ammount of time taken away from actual life as oppsed to Second Life? This is what puzzles me about Second Life. I could’nt get to the podcasts before thinking about what I know of Second Life and looking at these images from the online, vrtual lecture series.

But I digress, the real point of this series was to inform us about infomation. More importantly how a person(internet user) can properly search the web, weeding out rumors and speculation from actual credible information.

Howard Reingold discussed how he himself got started and involved with internet technology and new media. He said it began when his daughter was in middle school and high school writting research papers. He woul question his daughter about the sources that she obtained her material from. He stated that on the itnernet there is relativly no gurauntee that what you find is authoritative or true. The credibillity of the author of the site is sorely needed so that a multitude of different people can easily identify that author as being reliable when the users accsess the site and uses its information as a source.

 Right off the bat I though of my earliest experiences writting research papers back in late middle school. In 8th grade alone I had to produce three lengthy research papers in three different topics. I had a 12-15 page history paper, a 10-12 page science paper, and a 8-10 page critical thinking essay for english. At this time, the full force of the intenet had just been integrated in most schools in my area. So, for our papers, our teachers made us get alot of our information from the web, as going to full libraries is hard to do when being only 12-14 years of age.

My whole grade would meet together with the head teachers in each department and they would teach us how to use the general functions of web-browsing. They would teach us about how to use search engines such as yahoo, excite, hotbot, lycos, altavista, and a host of other basic search engines at the time. most of the companise have stumbled since the internet search field and have had to merge or purchase other internet tech companies since the start of inernet browsieing.

After we began writting our papers, we still meet frequently with the teachers and had deadlines that we had to meet. I remember that when we had to turn in our list of possible sources, such as citations, breif bibliography and a list of websites, our history teacher scheduled a meeting with us soley on how to refine our searches becaue he felt like most of the material we had gathered from the web was not credible and unreliable.

We were taught how to phrase our queries differently so the searches would be more efficient. But after doing some research, and especially after listening to Mr. Reingold, though being eight years later, I have realized that lot of search engines get there results from the same pools of information as other sites. So after doing a steady number of searches in one specific field, won’t the results start to overlap after awhile regardless of what search engine you are using?