Will I continue to blog

Although this has been a fun experience, especially compared to most assignments, I wont be blogging anymore after this class is over. If I find something interesting enough to tell my friends about I will usually just tell them right then with an instant messaging client or even over the phone. This was definitely more fun than most assignments though. This assignment taught me a lot about blogging, as I had never blogged before this class and wasnt really even very familiar with blogging at all. Before this class and this blog site I had a generalization in my mind about what all blogs looked like. Im talking about the terrible looking websites with a yellow background, thin column of text as the blog, and the rest of the page filled with ads. This class has, at least, allowed me to gain some respect for blogs.

Online Communities

So, a few weeks ago we were asked to make a blog post about three online communities that we're involved in. It took me a little while to think of them, since I dont actively participate in myspace or most websites like that. The three communities I thought of were online gaming communities, a forum I post on with my friends, and blogger.

The online gaming section is huge. Ive played video games online ever since I had a computer. Ive played and participated in their online communities in everything from World of Warcraft, to Counter Strike, to Halo. Each one of these had its own special community. In games like World of Warcraft you would have communities that would expand outside the game to websites and forums. In Halo you would have a close group of friends that you would play with everytime you were on.

The second online community Im a part of is a forum I post on with my real life friends. It originally started as a website where we would talk to each other and our friends we only knew online. Over time its because just a place where me and my friends talk about our lives and interesting things we see, sorta like Blogger. The most talked about thing right now is just us communicating with one of our friends that is currently in Iraq, that website is pretty much the only way he can communicate with us almost everyday.

The third community I mentioned was Blogger. This is the weakest :( of the three communities. I post here about the class and people read what I have to say, and sometimes even respond. Ill even read my friends posts and respond to them sometimes.

Travel Planning Online

I, personally, am not a huge fan of traveling. I like where I live and usually hang out around here. So, I have never planned any trips online or even looked for interesting places to travel to. I have helped my parents do it though. My parents are both very stupid when it comes to computers, so, when they were planning a cruise to the Carribean I was largely in charge of all the reservations and payments that were handled over the internet. Id also like to say that the Carribean is an awesome place to go on a cruise to, much better than a cruise to Alaska. This summer I'm likely going to Hawaii with my family, in which case Ill be in charge of handling all the online portions of the trip. I really do like handling travel purchases online though, it saves you all the trouble of having to go to a Travel Agency and have them do the same thing for you. I actually remember going to a travel agency and looking at a wall full of brochures when I was a kid.

Dot.com to Dot.Bomb

While watching the presentation in class on dot.com to dot.bomb I got a call on my cell phone from my mom. That isnt too common, so I had to go outside the room to make sure it wasnt an emergency. When I came back into the room, maybe 2 minutes later, the entire presentation had changed. All of the dinosaurs, that were representing the success of businesses, had completely changed position. I was surprised to see that some of the companies that were around back then are still around today, but I was even more surprised that I had never heard of almost any of those companies. Its like as soon as they went under everyone just forgot they ever existed.

Scavenger Hunt

This scavenger hunt has been pretty easy, only a couple questions were hard. A hard one was the financial information on Oracle. The search engine one and the cookie one were really easy, except having to go print the cookie. You should update these papers, since they say 2004 on them, in question 12. Anyway, click here for a really cool website. Ya, I dont see how we are supposed to reach 3 paragraphs just on this topic. Emailing you now! Oh ya, Lukas is my partner for the scavenger hunt.Amazon shopping cart and Camcorder in another shopping cart.

Burn Rate

My topic for my presentation is a book entitled "Burn Rate", by Michael Wolff. Burn Rate is Michael Wolff's story of how he handled the internet boom. The book sounds like it could be interesting, but honestly, I don't expect it to be. I chose it because it was readily available and Prof. Fry recommended it. Thanks for letting me borrow it by the way. I plan to start reading it within the next couple days, because it seems like it might take a long time to read. Anyway, I'm just going to hope it will be able to hold my attention for most of the book.

Community Needs

Most communities, like the one at Exit133, are based upon a common interest of all its members. That is the key component to almost any community. Some communities though, like your family and relatives, you are born into. But for most communities, the most important thing is a shared interest. Another important factor for many communities is leadership, this may be by someone who runs a website (Like Derek and Exit 133), or by a group of people that help to organize what the group does. Overall though, communities vary greatly and so do their needs.

Online Purchasing (Part II): Biggest Purchase

In the other Online Purchasing post I comment on how Ive bought computer parts over the internet, these parts added together and purchased all at once came to somewhere between $400 and $500. This is probably the largest purchase Ive ever made online, but how high would I go? Probably not much more than that. Once you get above the $500 mark you start getting to items that I would have to see in person before I would purchase them, like a car or television set. Although my parents did buy a truck through E-Bay for somewhere around $14,000 a while back. The one thing that I think of that I would be willing to purchase over the internet that would be above $500 is a travel package of some sort, with the plane tickets, hotel reservations and whatever else comes in a travel package. Another thing I MIGHT consider would be a prebuilt computer, but why buy it prebuilt when I can buy the parts and make it myself for half the price.

Services Online

To me, the two most important online services that come to mind is online banking and online billing. Before online banking was around, I didn't even bother with the bank at all, I kept my money on me or at my house. It wasn't worth it to me to drive to the bank and wait in line to take out money or even check how much money I had (Of course this was years ago and I probably didn't even have a car way back then). Now Ill simply check how much money I have, and transfer money between my banking accounts online. To get money I still usually just take money out with my debit card after buying things at the store. I love being able to pay bills online too, not that I really have a lot of bills to pay.

Another really useful service online is being able to look up information. Using Google to look things up saves me countless hours on almost every assignment I have to do that involves research. Even if I have a book for the class that will have the answer in it, it's usually faster to just type the keywords into the search bar of Firefox to find the answer quickly.

Online Purchasing (Part I): Comfort

A couple years ago I bought my first items over the internet. It was several hundred dollars worth of computer parts to build my first computer. When I ordered the parts I was pretty nervous and didn't completely trust the internet yet, but I didn't really have a choice since the parts I wanted were much cheaper on Newegg than at the local computer shop. The parts made it to my house safely within a few days and everything turned out great. Since I made that first purchase Ive been much more comfortable purchasing things online. In fact, I actually purchase most things over the internet now, so long as they aren't really cheap or really expensive. I used to go buy PC games at the store, now I can just order then through the games website and download the entire game within a couple hours. I started out uncomfortable purchasing online, but since Ive never had anything bad happen from it, Ive actually become just as comfortable purchasing most things online as at the store. Since I made my first purchase online several years ago Ive made countless purchases online anywhere from video games, to computer parts, to movie posters.

Speaking of Newegg, a couple weeks ago in class someone brought up Egghead, a computer parts store that went under when the internet started selling things. When I heard Egghead mentioned I couldn't help but wonder if Newegg is the internet version of Egghead.

Exit133

So, a couple weeks ago we had a guest speaker in our class named Derek Young. Derek maintains Exit133, a website devoted to all the happenings of Tacoma. The one thing that really stood out to me during Derek's speech is that he managed to make a new post on his blog almost everyday, even when he had only a very small audience to write to. That just amazes me that he could write that much and stay interesting, when I struggle to find things to write on twice a week. I suppose he can find things to continue to write on because he has his helpers that help find him topics, but him keeping the topics interesting is still completely because of his writing style. Over the past few years Exit133 has really grown and isn't just a blog anymore, its a community built around Tacoma. I thought it was really awesome to get to meet someone who was so skilled at blogging and ran such an influential website, good job getting him into the class. It was a cool day and I look forward to meeting any other guest speakers we might have.

South Park

Ive been a fan of South Park since somewhere around season two when I first started watching it (It's in season 11 now). While watching a recent episode I couldnt help but be reminded of this class. In this particular episode, a parody of the show "24", Cartman, Stan, and Kyle, use the internet in every way imaginable to track down a terrorist that is planning to attack South Park. They use everything from Myspace.com to youtube.com to mapquest.com to find at who and where the terrorist is. Season 11 has been great so far, and is only getting better. If you've got a childish sense of humor and can take a joke, then you'd probably love South Park too.

Impossible...

Yesterday in class we brought up the idea of doing vanity searches in google, that is searching for your own name to see if you can find yourself. As soon as it was mentioned I knew what the results would be for my name "Justin Running", can you guess what the results were? The first page contained the results "Justin running cross country", "Justin running marathon", and "Justin running from something?", the last one having a picture of someone running from a pink hat sitting on the ground. I tried adding on things like "UWT" "White River High School" or "Bonney Lake" on to the search, none came back with any results. After trying to find myself for sometime I labeled it impossible. Now, finding my alias online, thats easy. I can search for any name Ive used for posting on a forum or any character Ive played in an online game and I can show up somewhere on the first page with the right search parameters.

Publishing

On Wednesday, in class, we had another discussion, much like the email discussion. This time we were talking about publishing on the internet. It was a lot harder to come up with things that are published, since I really didnt know anything about publishing. I used the easiest idea possible while naming off published thing, it was "Books". But then when we had to find a specific thing, published on the internet, it was a lot harder. My first idea was the "News Tribune" newspaper, it was one of the first said. My second idea was "Time" magazine, it too was taken before my turn. All of a sudden it hit me, books are published on the internet and Professor Fry loves "1984", so why not find "1984" on the internet. So, I did a search in google, and the first result was a website with 1984 online, the chapters are listed on the left if you want to read it. The publishing discussion was much more difficult than the email discussion and because of its difficulty had me and probably much of the class very nervous for our turns.

An HTML Reminder

Today in class we got an assignment to create a website. We were given a list of steps we could follow to build this simple webpage. Back in High School I took a class on HTML, so I figured this would be easy and I wouldn't need the instructions at all, of course I was wrong. I remembered the simple parts right away, like "html" and "i", but I couldn't remember a lot of the other tags. It took me about 5 minutes to create the page, but for whatever reason the heading was the same size text as most of the rest of the text, despite following the instructions. I remember back in my HTML class that we started by using notepad and typing out all the tags, then about half way through the semester my teacher told us that we should be using Dreamweaver to design our websites. I continued to type out the sites by hand because I was used to doing it that way and I felt that I could customize my websites better that way. This assignment served as a good reminder of how to work with HTML and of the fun times I had in that HTML design class. I'd love more assignments similar to this one.

The Beginning

So, here's my blog. I plan to make a post every few days that relates to the things that I do in my Living and Working in a Virtual World Class. The class seems to talk a lot about the way the internet works, and the past and future of the internet. The other day we talked about ways that normal mail (Snail Mail) and E-mail differ. The only thing that I could think of by the time it was my turn was that normal mail keeps people employed, such as mail sorters or mailmen. After thinking about it for a second, I realized that Email keeps people employed too, the first thing that came to mind were the people who maintain servers, or even the companies that produce computers and provide internet. It was interesting to see that almost every "difference" between snail mail and email had a counterpart in the other form of mail. Overall, it was a pretty fun experience and I'm really looking forward to the class.