Tim McCall Weblog

Caitlin, Jen D. , and myself will be meeting on Thursday to set up our game plan and create the proposal for our white paper project. We met today(Tuesday, Oct. 16) and have changed our topic to the future of Interactive Television. This is due to the fact that it is hard to compete with RAND on the topic of NetWars. We will be focusing on new technologies and methods of delivery, and issues such as the Black Box. We feel there is substantial research in the field of Interactive Television.

Thanks-

I’m am perfectly content with my news comsumption methods these days. I can be the creator and the consumer. If I feel that a television station is being biased on an issue I can simply find hundreds of other resources about that issue on multiple mediums. If I feel that none of these mediums have the story right, then I can go bitch about it, with the same worldwide audience as the big guys do. If you have read my previous blogs, which my blog stats say you havent, I am very torn on just about every issue we discuss. This is because I am worried that we are moving so fast that we might go overboard with a lot of the advancements we are making without thinking about the consequences of our actions. And as always it comes back to the same issues; if everyone is making news, who is reading/watching/listening to the news. Also professionalism and democracy are huge issues.

GET EDUCATED

I watch the news when I don’t want to do anything. I watch because it allows me to be informed about daily issues with little effort. I guess the transformation in me that has taken place in the past 5 or so years is that I look as news more as entertainment rather than information. If I actually took the local news as fact, and let the sensationalization seriously, I would never step foot in New Haven again. They make it seem like as soon as you cross the town line, you can hear shots fired. If people are critical of media, then they are free to make their own minds up about issues. People have been critical for a long time, and now there is a international platform for them to voice their worries. I like this aspect of the common person keeping checks and balances on the creators of news, but people go to school to become journalists and broadcasters, and whether or not it is something you can simply decide to do and create quality material is debatable. Some journalists cant blog, I guess it depends on the techniques that you are used to.

ILLITERATE

I do think that the issue of media literacy is huge, and we should be teaching it at younger ages in our schools. I did not even know the concept of media literacy until I was a freshman in College, and it is something that has benefited me greatly. I think that by teaching media literacy it will create more critical users, which allows people to not be taken advantage of by biased news.

After thinking for a little while I started wondering if there was such a thing as unbiased news, and as Bruns discusses in the wiki news article, would people even be interested in unbiased news? Even I was saying that I don’t take most news very seriously, and watch and read for entertainment purposes. Everyone has very unique opinions and I don’t think that there will ever be such a thing as pure news. Money, and personal beliefs of not only the professionals, but the amateurs as well will always get in the way of the facts.

So, I dont think the news isn’t changing, just the medium, and accessability and massive amounts of varying opinions. This is going to create a more networked system of news, rather than the heirarchal way we are used to. I am fine with this and I just hope that quality does not suffer as a result from it.

Pretty cool mashup for hip-hop/rock fans….

I was fine with Yahoo. It was my home page, and it was fine for my search needs. I don’t know when I made the transition to Google. It happened without me knowing. I think that there was so much buzz around Google, and since everyone was using it as a search engine, I started using it. I have started wondering, Is Yahoo dead? This article shows how the leaders of the Yahoo team are trying to get them motivated.

After reading these articles, my initial reaction was to compare and contrast the two. Evaluate the pros and cons of collocated versus virtual teams. The obvious and what seems to be the big issue that keeps arising is the value of personal versus virtual relationships. Then I realized that it shouldn’t be a versus thing. It shouldn’t be a matter of which technique is better, but rather a hand in hand advancement of team collaboration practices. The in person techniques work and the virtual techniques work so a combination is probably the best fit for most people.

I understand the points about people not trusting other people in a group, and people not being stupid, but I think that Verzuh thouroughly explained how to deal with trust and why his rules were basic.

TRUST ISSUES
I believe that there is a difference between professional trust and personal trust. Developing personal trust is something that I have with only a few people, and this has taken years to gain. In a team assignment or project, you rarely even have months to complete it. This professional trust is not trusting somebody with your deepest darkest secrets, it is having a mutual respect and understanding in regards to the task at hand. This is why I believe that it is an essential task of the leader to collect a group of people who are qualified for the job. Verzuh talks about an interview process which would make sure of the dedication and pride that will earn this professional respect amongst colleagues. Trust starts at the top, and the leader of the group should have absolute confidence in everyone in the group. Knowing that your leader has trust in someone will allow you to be reassured that your peers will work hard along side you.

MOTIVATION
The trust issues take place when skill and motivation are lacking; therefore the leader must always recognize motivation and keep the goal in mind. I don’t think that Verzuh wanted to say that people in the cooperate world are dumb and can’t remember the overall task. I think that in situations that become complex and have many different pieces that fit into a whole you can get bogged down into that one piece and forget where and why it is going to fit in. This is why you need to always keep that goal handy so you dont lose track of the big picture. When reading about web design many authors say that this is a key aspect to success.

COMBO
Ok so now that our trust is established and our goal is readilly available, where do we go from here. I think that a combination of in person and virtual collaboration is the perfect fit for a team. We know that we need that personal touch to explain ourselves and set the groundwork, but for the individual aspects that go into the whole project the tools that the virtual world offer are so much more efficient to use and share. As for an identity, I think that this can also be a combination of both forms of project team techniques. I like the example that Lipnack and Stamps give of the Distance gauge will help your team know who is available in person and who is only available via other communication techniques such as the web. Using this you know all team members involved and you understand what it takes to collaborate with them.

I found it interesting that Verzuh’s article was written almost ten years after Lipnack and Stamp’s. This is just evidence that there is still a split between those who are pushing for more virtual interaction and those who prefer strict personal contact.

I found another interesting article on the future of wireless communications. If you find these articles interesting, you might want to add TVover.net to your reader.

After posting my response and talking about the transitional period that we are in, I found something interesting in my RSS feed. This article is showing that the number of online video consumption has greatly increased over the past couple years, but there is still more room for improvement.

Thanks,
Tim

HANGIN OUT

From these and previous readings I’ve found that we are in a transitional period. We are at the beggining to middle stages of this period and are about to enter into phase two. It is exciting and scary at the same time. The feel of the whole thing is very “Hippie.” I’m not saying thats a good thing, Im not saying that is a bad thing. I just wonder as someone who is somewhere in the middle of the left and right, what this transition has in store for me.

ISSUES

The stories of GoldCorp, Sinclair, and Diebold are amazing. The fact that people can pull
together for a common cause and stir up tradition is something that is going to take a lot of getting used to by many people. After reading these articles I also believe there is a lot more to figure out while we are in this transition from industiral to information based. The few strong ties versus many weak ties is a huge issue that comes up in many aspects of life, business, friendship, media consumption, etc. We talk about one side or the other, but why cant there be a happy medium? Can’t businesses have there in-house stuff, and open up some collaboration online? Just because you have many aquaintance like contacts online does not mean you cant have your strong real life ties. All this is basically myself explaining to myself that it doesnt all have to be one-sided, that new school and old school can work together, and at the end of this transition, we will have a healthy balance between traditional values and this new way of living/working/communicating.

MONEY MONEY MONEY

Being broke I obviously think that money controls everything. After reading Chapter 7, I still believe that money controls everything. The web and blogosphere are an awesome arena to combat this issue. This is the thing that is so great about the web, that it is relatively inexpensive and you can “Be Heard.” This has greatly narrowed the playing field, but money still and always will be the one of the main ingredients of successfully visible content. Collaboration is the obvious next step in combatting “big money”. It will be interesting to see how “big money” reacts to this; will they create new formats, or join in collaboration?

HOLLYWOOD

One aspect of big money that is being affected is Hollywood. As someone going into the film and television industry I wonder where collaboration fits into this? Will producers and directors put scripts and screenplays online for open sourcing? We already have many viewers who are in contact with the creators of content, who leak spoilers and upcoming plots. It is tough to see how far is too far when we are sharing our intellectual property. These issues all need to figured out before we enter the next phase of media.

When I first heard about Wikipedia a while back, I thought it was a great idea, but then my old school mind set kicked in and automatically thought that it would be chaos. You have so many contrasting opinions, and so many people who want to vandalize whatever they get their hands on, that the site would be a mess. I eventually started using it when I needed a quick fact or some information on something specific. Without even knowing it, I had become a user of something that I thought would be unsuccessful. My old mindset did not kick in again until it was time for me to sign up and actually give to this thing that I have been taking from. Signing up was easy, and the introduction answered all my questions about how to edit and navigate the site. My first thought was that I didn’t have anything to contribute to this thing that hadn’t already been said. Ok, what are some things that I know a lot about that others might not? After some thinking I remembered watching a documentary on one of my favorite basketball players; Allen Iverson. The site was packed with information, but I found some points that I could have made clearer. I also found that there was a large chunk of his teen life that was missing. When I tried to edit the site, it told me that it was semi-locked. I could not update the site for four days. After yelling at my computer, I realized that this was a technique of peer review similar to what Benkler was talking about. There wasn’t chaos like I’d imagined, there was professional entries, that had been critiqued by hundreds of people before me. What came to my mind was those neighborhood watches where everyone in the community makes sure it is running smoothly. The people who want this site to be effective watch eachothers backs, and it is easy to understand that having many editors is far more comprehensive than simply having one. After this epiphany I typed in Tang Soo Do which is the form of martial arts that I practice. This page seemed to need some help so I added input on some of the theories and practices.

Through Wikipedia and becoming a creator as opposed to always being a viewer was rewarding and helped me have a better understanding of how far Wikinomics can go.

Like everyones been saying mashups are cool. The first thing that I am going to talk about is not a mash up according to the wikipedia definitiion, but is a cool combination of many different arts. Im talking about capoiera. Capoiera is a Brazilian Martial art that combines dancing with martial arts and gymnastics. It is something that has become more and more popular and now another style called street capoeira has formed.

The other mash up that I find interesting is the MyDeathSpace page. This site is an online memorial to MySpace users. This site combines the deceased MySpace pages with the newspaper articles describing there actual death. It is an eerie combination that is a new twist on personal media.