Blogs vs. Wikis

A blog is a webpage where one user, the blogger, posts articles, news, or any media and other users then read and comment on the different posts. A wiki on the other hand is a created and edited by many different people. Both blogs and wikis can be created to write about the same things such as a hobby, news, people, etc. Wikis just allow for more interaction by different people on the same thing. Blogs only allow for responses to the main posts.
Convergance is extremely important in our society today. Much of technology and new media is based on interaction between everyone, no matter where they are in the world. Blogs and wikis are the perfect medium for such interaction. Blogs can be used to post news about things going on in one area of the world, with the readers offering their opinions in the comments. Wikis can be used by businesses and schools to create and edit a single write up on an issue or assignment. Email used to be the main form of sending a document around to different people, but wikis make it easier for each person to add their own input from whereever they are. Wikis are all about easy collaboration. Margaret Locher's article "Wiki While You Work" speaks of how a team at EMC used wikis to post all of their information on a project. Having all the information available to them in such a timely manner allowed them get the project done faster and better.
New uses for wikis can be in businesses like restaurants and stores with more than one location. They can use wikis to post inventory information between locations and headquarters. Another use can be for restaurant reviews by consumers. A wiki can be created for each restaurant and all kinds of information and opinions can be posted by the users.

Old vs. New

How do we distinguish “new media” from “old” media?

New media is 21st century. It makes great use of technology, computers, and the internet. New media allows for collaboration by the masses. Its more advanced than Old media and offers many ways for the user to interact. Old media is news papers, radio, television, film, photography; while New media switches to blogs, podcasts, webisodes, youtube, flickr. We can distinguish between the two by examining what makes greater use of new technology and gives the user more involvement.

P2P File Sharing: Moral or Immoral?

In recent years, technology, and more specifically the internet, has brought media into every home, easier than ever before. But it has also brought with it much conflict and debate. Peer-to-Peer, or P2P, file sharing allows for free and easy sharing of large file types over the internet between computers anywhere in the world. It makes big files available to anybody who cares to search for them and allows anybody to upload them online to be found. The conflict comes in where people upload content that then becomes illegal to download, such as music and movies. There now lies an issue of morality; can we download content that we would otherwise be required to pay for? And in the process possibly take down a whole industry? Its a debate that will not be easily answered and will probably go on until one side, either the media industry or the consumers, give in. In my project I plan to lay out the facts and stances of each side as well as give my own opinion of the matter, along with an explanation of the actual technology that provokes all this debate.

What is "New Media"?

New Media is a very broad term used to describe technology and its use in society in the 20th and 21st Century. New Media is computers, blogs, social networking, television, youtube, web 2.0, etc. So many different things fall under the term "New Media". A lot of New Media has just been transformed from Old Media, such has news that has become blogs, photo albums that are websites like Flickr and Picasa, TV and Films that we can watch online using Hulu and Youtube. Then there are things that have emerged as a result of New Media, such as social networking on Youtube and Myspace, Virtual Worlds in Second Life, and the bizzare use of telling everyone what you're doing at any given time using Twitter. New Media has come about because of advances in technology as well as our societys need to be able to interact with others, without actually interacting with them in person as well as better ways to do everyday things such as getting the news. New Media has made things easier and allowed for many types of creativty such as short videos on youtube, as seen in Clive Thompson's article in Wired, "Clive Thompson on How YouTube Changes the Way We Think," and mashups of different songs. All of this is able to happen because of the internet. The internet helps because it allows for communication as well as development by many different people all over the world. Overall New Media has been a huge asset to society and will only further evolve as we need it to. We can only begin to imagine what the New Media of the future will be like.