Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Blog #6

Jenkins talks about how social networking sites are helpful learning tools. Jenkins states :

Collective intelligence can be seen as an alternative source
of media power. We are learning how to use that power through our
day-to-day interactions within convergence culture. Right now, we are
mostly using this collective power through our recreational life, but
soon we will be deploying those skills for more “serious” purposes (jenkins 4).

Collective intelligence is a way where all of the people involved in the internet are able to interact with each other and provide answers to problems. Wikipedia being the main example of it, but others sites like 99designs.com relies on input from hundreds of graphic designers. Weinberger believes that information is miscellaneous and i can come from several users, this means, users se the content they want to see in the internet.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Blog # 5

(image by jake prendez)



In chapter 8, Weinberger talked about labels and what we today call tags as a way to search for data. He used examples used in amazon and walmart and how when you type certain words the engine gives you results of similar words. This relates to the third order of order because tags and labels can mean different things to different objects and subjects. This means that for example a song "x" can be part of your hip hop collection, but can be my old school songs collection, or my roommate's workout mix. This same idea applies to stuff available on the internet. The tags and keywords users give to particular information on the internet does not depend on one finite perspective. By that, we shape the cyber world.


Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Blog #4

Weinberger suggest 4 new strategic principles to rethink the ways we organize physical objects and ideas.

- Filter on the way out, not on the way in.
Weinberger tells a story of his friends that works at The Harvard Business Review. The job of the friend was to filter all the work submitted to the Journal. In this case, this person's job is to make sure the stuff published is "worthy" for the readers of The Harvard Business Review, but who is this person to say that something filtered out can't be of use for a reader?. In the third order of order, filtering on the way in decreases the value of that abundance by ruling out items that might be of great value to a few people (Weinberger 103). What this means is that user should filter the information for the to assign the value of a particular work to a particular person at a particular time (uff.. that was long)

- Put each leaf on as many branches as possible
This concept is very easy to understand if you have some presence in cyberspace. We are use to think that a leaf hangs from only one branch, but with information in the internet, we must hang it in as many branches as possible. This is done by tagging pieces of information with as many tags as possible.

-Everything is metadata and everything can be a label
This one is a little hard to grasp even thought we probably use this concept every time we look for something online with a search engine. By everything is metadata, Weinberger means that any information you know can and should be used as a keyword to find data, and data is something you do not know. He gives us the example on how you can use the keyword "shakespeare" to find a shakespeare play which title you don't remember or you can use a quote from a play whose author you don't remember and gets as result "shakespeare. In the third order of order, everything is connected and therefore everything is metadata (Weinberger 105)

- Give up control
Users are now in charge of the organization of the information they browse (Weinberger 105). Remember the person that works at the harvard business review? that person is out of a job in cyberspace. Users help other user understand information and data out on websites. take for instance Netflix, user are able to rate movies and when you search for a movie it will show other movies users like and it will suggest you to also watch those.

All of these are important because in Web 2.0 the user has control of the content of the web. Before Web 2.0, the information was very linear. In web 2.0 most of the information out there is shared by other users and all of us customize the information to better suit our needs.