Reflection on Citizen Journalism

This post should be way back, but since I forgot to do this, I shall do it now.

Citizen Journalism is a good way to have fast news. Whether be it gossip news or actual news.

The good part of citizen Journalism, is that when a professional journalist is not present, the people are there to witness what happened first hand. However, due to having no training in inspecting the scene and scanning the surroundings, these news tend to be short and sometimes leaving out important information like how did it happen.

However, alot of these news are gossip news, such as the Ris Low incident.
When plenty of these citizen journalists entertained her antics and news on her english. These kind of news DO NOT benefit the country in anyway.

Comparing those kind of journalists with professional journalists that go over to dangerous countries and risk their lives to provide news to the people like what our lecturer gone through that day. A reporter lost his life reporting news to terrorists. He didn't even get to see his newborn children.

Therefore, citizen journalism should not be taken too seriously. Though sometimes it may be useful.

Reminiscences; The Last Days

I was a fish out of the water.
I was egoistic without a purpose.

Learn how to LEARN from others, and take advices from seniors seriously.

Through these 8 days, I've seen and met various people whom had different personalities comparing to me.

Self control is a very important aspect in this 8day course. I can say that I'm trying.

Trying is not enough.

Now, I've emerged victorious among all the challenges that lied before me once, is now nothing much but a fleeting memory & experience that I'll take with me through life.

Most importantly, a thing that I've learnt at the beginning of the lesson. To stay optimistic & bright.

"When you were born, you were crying and everyone around you was smiling. Live life so that when you die, you're the one smiling and everyone else around you is crying."

I have to thank some people, if not because of them, I would not be here and done what I need to do. Thank you.

But I'll still keep your names anonymous.

Reflection on Twitter.

To be honest, I am anti twitter.
I find that paying money SMSing or using wifi to just tweet something like
"DAMN LUNCH WAS GOOD" a whole waste of time.

I mean like, okay... your lunch was good. Uh... so?

Well. I heard twitter is coming up with the "Audio Tweeting" which will allow the user to replace typing with your real life voice.

Twitter as a whole is just another organization that wants to make money.
However, that is just my opinon.

In twitter, many people boasts about being able to learn new things by tweeting about their experiences. Yes.

Twitter is all about convenience. That is all.

Reflection on "useless information"

If you would know, how I would like to delete you so,
But then again I can't, so I shan't.

The internet is filled with useless information.
I can really justify this. As a frequent researcher, I've encountered many
difficulties in searching what I want.

Well, at most, I've encountered this problem when searching for my research topic.
Thats why I had to use booleans, -, +, and colons in my research so as to give me what I wanted to search for.

In our lecture 6, it stated that "Users have too much information to sift through
Internet can be inefficient and time-consuming"
I second that.

However, I don't really agree that "Difficult to recognize inaccurate information".
To be honest, inaccurate information is very much easy to spot if we look carefully.

Ultimately, things that irritates me the most is the advertisements, popups and paid goods. Its like, on the search, they typed in the "FREE" Tag, but however, when I go in, they required credit card or the most irritating icon in my opijnion, the "Add to shopping cart" icon.

Reflection On Blogs

Blogging is a very good way to convey your opinions to the world.

However, in Singapore, casual bloggers tend to focus on the "my opinion" way of blogging. Hence, their blog turned into somewhat like a Life Journal.

For example: "Today, I went to the shopping mall with my friends! It was LOADS of fun please. HAHA! Guess what?! I bought a new jacket for $35 bucks and now I'm broke :(
Anybody want to sponsor me a ticket to watch Clash of the Titans <:)?"

That, is what Singaporeans have been blogging nowadays.
Professional blogs however, tend to focus more on how the government manages issues, making a portfolio of their work etcetra. Reflections like these are usually done in those blogs as well.

Well, I for one, do not fancy mindless blogging without a purpose. Though contradictory, I do admit that I do that kind of blogging sometimes.

Putting that aside, blogging has become a system where people share information and stories about themselves & most importantly, to share their opinions.
Though blogs do not allow outsiders to edit their content unless allowed so, blogs have a "comment" function or one could attach a "tag board" like the one in Sharon's Blog where you can find it by clicking it by the affilates section. This way, outsiders can put their feelings and thoughts on what they think is right about what you blogged about. I feel that this way, as the post publisher, I can learn from my mistakes and as a post commenter, I can learn on issues that the poster had ranted about.

Thus, blogging is a very good way to obtain information from various people.

Reflections on Wiki's

As a frequent computer user, I usually get my general information from Wikipedia. Wikipedia has loads of information from many different sources that people contribute.

However, there is a bad side of this. Some people might add information that is not true or offensive. When that happens, the wikipedia team or other users will correct them by editing the page. Well, this tells us that there are some false information out there and not very reliable if you are searching for something very specific and detailed. To test its reliability, we'll have to check the citations that the users have specified.

The good side has its benefits though. When a big group of people come together to contribute, information gets in fast and therefore will be faster than what a single researcher could do alone.

Hence, its a sacrifice between reliability and convenience.

Also, if a page has been violated a few times, the wikipedia team would have to lock that page to prevent people from editing any further.

As a user myself, I use wikipedia alot as MOST of the information there are still reliable to a certain extent. Therefore I'll use wikipedia as a first step into researching. Then slowly finding other more sites that focuses more on my topic.

My Dream Holiday

My dream Holiday would definitely be Japan.
Osaka to be precise.





The symbol of Osaka, Sakuras(CherryBlossoms)

Background:

From what I know, Osaka is very traditional as you can see above, their icon is that temple.
Also, it has been nicknamed as the "nation's kitchen".

Evaluation:
For this evaluation of Osaka, I'll be using the website : http://www.osaka.world-guides.com/



Purpose:
The purpose of the website is to show what Osaka has for us, tourists and what we can do when we get there. So, as a tourist website, it is expected that we find out their main tourist attractions such as the Panasonic Square, Osaka Aquarium and Paradiso. There is also the Osaka Castle that is preserved for tourists to view. I feel that this is a very good way to promote their culture whilst attracting tourists.


Coverage:
This site covers the tourist attractions, its geography, the historical sites, land marks, museums and popular neighbouring states such as Kyoto.
The site has hyperlinked major attractions such as stated above, the museums landmarks etcetra to other pages explaining more about the topic in detail. Ultimately, this website functions exactly on how a tourist website should function. Explaining only about the attractions while not informing on what we should be wary of such as the issues on the citizens like the curfew inposed on the citizens. Putting that aside, the links to the other pages are generally as descriptive as the page I'm evaluating right now. The site also has links to hotels in Osaka, Maps, Weather and travel tips and more on the right hand side bar.



Authority:
This site is parented to http://www.world-guides.com/ and it uses Google custom search.
This international site provides information not only about Japan, but to other countries such as New Zealands, Morocco, Scotland and many more. Reviews on the site can be found by clicking the "Your Reviews on xxxx" at the bar, right of your screen.

The site also has a "comment card" where people can fill in their dislikes/likes about the site and the information provided.



Accuracy:
The site is decent. It provides enough information to you. Not so much that you would feel tired from reading, but just enough for you to grasp the basic knowledge on what you are going to expect when you go there. Their sentence structuring does give off a feeling of excitement and intriguing. No spelling mistakes spotted.


Currency:

Since there was no update page, I can't really tell if this is being updated regularly.
However, since ithe site does feature Reviews that was done recently. The last review on Osaka was in 2008 by Ross Martlander


Accessibility:

The site is definitely easily accessible, with all the services provided for free. You do not even need to login to comment on the website. However, though it is accessible in a sense, safety of the site is another concern that needs to be noted.


Presentation:

The site layout is fairly simple that can be done without too much hassle. Some links at the bottom such as Hotels and such can be improved by making it bigger or designing it into a button as it looks like an advertisement to me considering that the site is full of advertisements.

Also, the navigation bar at the right could have been done better with the text colour and such, it really looks like advertisements from my point of view. Not to mention that I didn't know it was a navigation bar until I took a closer look at it.


Usability:

The site features a feedback or comment card system.

It is fairly easy to navigate around other than what I explained above about the text color.


Overall:

If they had done a better job in the layout and hired a more professional graphic designer, I think that this site would have looked more appealing to people and hence attracting more people.


Pictures on the tourist locations:



Osaka Aquariums:


Osaka Castle: