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:

Reflection on invisible webs

Reflection on invisible webs.

Today, I shall reflect what I think on Invisible webpages. I know that some information must be kept confidential such as our personal data, our credit card numbers etcetra, but then again, its in a computer and therefore though encrypted, it is still hackable.

Invisible webs got its name from being invisible from general search engines such as Google and Yahoo. I think that this is a very good way to secure information in bulks by leaving it in a database somewhere safe and secure. Furthermore, invisible web databases hold very vital and valuble information. So databases such as EBSCO, holds very important information and can only be accessed if one pays money for it.

I can see that this is the same way on how we claim that the world revolves around money.
To have good stuff, you would need money.

However, there is an exception though. Leakers. There are people that leak these information into general website databases that are trackable by the normal search engines.

This way, the good side is, the people who genuinely want to use this information but doesn't have the money to pay for it can now use it.
The bad side however, people with malicious intentions could use it for their cause as well.

And therefore it brings us back to the same old same old, Internet can be a good place while it can be the worst place as well.

Evaluation for internet resources

The evaluation Criteria :
-Website's information.
-Examples.
-Objectives.

Coverage
-what does it cover/help
-Give screenshots

Authority
-Popularity
-The founders/news reporters

Chosen website

I've chosen http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2009/02/teens_web.html
as I found that their site usually professionally critisize things that they think its wrong which is usually correct in a sense that they are being honest. Furthermore, they are not run by a government organization but still backed up by Laywers, professional reporters as they do not want to have controlled news.

Info found from:
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/consumerism/faq.html#who

Their interface is fairly simple, just an overload of ads but that is what keeps the site going on free. Since there is a heavy load of traffic going into that site, much money is needed. Hence the ads will help gain some revenue for them to keep on posting information to the site.

The catagories are very simple to find and can be found on the bottom of the page and the top of the page. Not to mention that we do not need to register to view the information, we only need to register if we want to post comments on the site.

Information on the site is still being updated up till today.

Applying

Today, we had our class test, it was reasonable.

After that, we were taught about reputation and authority & the difference between
citizen reporters and professional reporters who risk their lives to provide valuble information to us.

In our next practical, I have to find out about the purpose, accuracy coverage and authority on my website that I chose.

It is advisable for me to choose a website that is recently updated.

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Secondly, In second life, we have to come up with a report on our gameplay and what we found out in second life.

Second life is quite entertaining, met some people that gave me freebies as well.
Other than that, I found out certain features like teleporting to friends, spawning items, and attaching them to my avatar.

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Talking about yesterday, our group, Imam, Jereld, Yan Da, Heng Le and myself came up with a presentation that describes about citizen reporters. Though unprofessional and not motivated in delivering proper news, citizens are generally more scattered around the globe and could possibly have first hand view on accidents, incidents and usually faster than reporters. However, it is because of their lack of training that they do not give exactly accurate information even though they witnessed it first hand.

For example, about the uproar on Ris Low & her molester. These kind if gossip news does not benefit our country in anyway other than stirring up the interests of people that likes these kind of news.

Meta - search

I've found out that Meta search is one of the oldest search engines in the internet.
And I found it to be slow in loading the page.

But perhaps thats just me, and just probably too customed in using Google as my primary search engine.

But everything has its reasons and the reason why I've stuck with Google is because of the fast loading pages, a catchy name and most importantly, the accuracy of my search results.

Well, having said that, metasearch does provide some useful information when searching "social networking sites AND impacts".
However, I do wish that they didn't limit the number of characters that can be inserted into the search bar.

The Ayes are :
A very big selection of search choices
Eliminates most of the irrelevant search.


The Nays are :
Limit to the number of words in searching.
Long loading time compared to Google

and thats basically it.

Google is your best friend

Google has rarely failed me in its search missions.
It shows me the materials that are relevant to whatever I'm searching as long
the search is valid.

I've been using Google since primary school. But I didn't find out the search functions until in recent years. This course has also taught me on what Google can do using Booleans.

But however, I find citations annoying.

Difficult - Nay
Easy - Aye.

Yes it is easy, but it is annoying to be following the format
I mean that, as long we give credit to the author in a legitimate format and
read-a-ble.

But yeah, its a burden, but can be dealt with.

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References?!

Though quite late in this post, most of my search are found on Google™. However, I do know that there are specific search engines that are better for specific functions. For example, I've searched the blogs with help of Google search which enabled me to find the blog searcher website.

I've found the following:
(http://www.blogsearchengine.com/)
(http://technorati.com)

Quite useful to me!

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Now! About the Booleans that has brought me this far:
(effect OR impact*) AND (social OR communication*) AND (teenager OR teen*) AND (network OR networking*) AND (sites OR websites*)

I've found this to be a good search base, which from then on, I shall add on functions such as "-" "+" to make my searches even more accurate.

However, the weakness of Google is that it sometimes come up with alot of junk when you're searching pages 7 and above.


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Citations: are a pain. But a necessary pain.

Examples of my citations are:
Weishaar, J. (2009, December 28). "Social Media Marketing: A Necessary Evil?" Retrieved March 19, 2010
from - http://technorati.com/business/article/social-media-marketing-a-necessary-evil/page-2/



Perez, S. (2010, February 18) "Social Networking Now More Popular On Mobile than Desktop" retrieved March 20, 2010 from - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/
social_networking_now_more_popular_on_mobile_than_desktop.php

Some stuff that I found here was exceptionally amusing and intriguing. Like how mobiles are more popular on mobiles. Well, its probably a one sided story and doesn't apply to everyone but still, it does show that mobile technology is the trend now.

______________________

Search Facilities

Search Engines
-Google!

Meta Search
-Meta Crawler

Subject directory
-Yahoo!

The features?
Google searches the whole web and therefore having alot of results.

Metacrawler searches all the search directories
such as Google™ etc.

Yahoo searches the category of subjects
-Hierachical
-Manual.

Summary Day 2

Phew, today was a hectic day. NOT.
Slacked quite alot. Physically.
Raged in my head on new ideas. Mentally.

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Finished Introduction & Introduction on Web searching engines.

Finished Introduction to the Google Search engine.

Will be working on features during the weekends. Decided that I'll be doing quite alot on the weekend. I feel elated to some extent. Touching the computer has quite a positive effect on me. Moreover, I'm allowed to listen music which provides me with the motivation to continue, more or less.

Thanks to that I don't lose focus and sleep.

Today's lesson was .... quite fruitful actually.
Just re-learned on how to cite citations and re-learning to use booleans.
However, it does help me remember, so it works anyway.

The lecturer went through the different search engines, Metacrawler, directory searching using Yahoo™. Additionally, she went through the what-to-do's for the first
30% . Comparing the search engines etc.

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Also, today, we are being recommended to use atom feeding. Well, I certainly do NOT
want to support it. Yes yes, its all convenient and such, but I need to be aesthetically pleased and very much particular in that area.
Anyway, if anybody is interested in knowing more about using Atom Publishing Protocol, visit click here

First 30%

Reference for myself for my first 30%.
Its an open idea. Feel free to use it if you want.

Table of contents.
Introduction to search engines.
Background of search engines.

Google Search Engine
Features Etc. - Give examples on how it helped my topic
-How good/fast google is
-How relevant/precise google search is

2 More search engines
Background
Features Etc.

Compare the 3 search engines.-Figure out your best search engines.
-Why is your best searcher better than the others.
-Compare them in their searching skills/time taken to search
/relevance/background/

Conclusion
Determine the best search engine.
-Why is it the best?
-Why did I pick it?
-Features that lured me to pick it?
-Its reliabilty.
-How much did I use it?
-Summerize.

Summary of Day 1

Things to do list :O

o Decided research topic - Social Networking Websites & the Impacts.
o P1 & 2 - 3 Websites - Bibliography

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Things to note about a website.
5 Purposes of a website.

Using example : http://www.cnn.com
1. Infomation - Facts.
2. Advocacy - Promote a cause.
3. News - Latest news.
4. Entertainment - Have fun
5. Business

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What would I do with $500?
Logically - I would take this $500 and invest in to earn more money.
^That is logic.

However, I a want would be... Games, games & more games.
Notably Final Fantasy 13 that just released last week.

Final Fantasy 13

Cost : $59.99(Amazon)


Modern Warfare 2

Cost : $65.90
My reflection : A moderate-rated game in my opinion. This game is overrated. Campaign mode lasted only about 3 hours and multiplayer mode had no more dedicated servers. Only fun thing was Spec Ops which allows you to play cooperatively with your friend.


Sims 3

Cost : $59.90 w/o expansion
My reflection : Great game. Enhances one imagination to build dream houses and keeps
its players entertained.


Mass Effect 2

Cost : $59.90
My reflection : A wonderfully made game. Story, graphics, animation, scripting
was well done. Kept people entertained with the New Game+ which allowed you to
replay the story with your items and stats intact.


That's not all though. The rest would probably be spent on Game Cards
of games such as :


Granado Espada

Free to play MMORPG
Usually I would buy the $59.90 card as its more worth it.
My reflection : This game, though FTP(free to play) is very hard to accomplish without purchasing cash. Lots of determination and stamina is needed.
Thus, the rich gets richer - and the poor gets poorer. Which tells us our plight in Singapore as well.(Well, the game hoster is IAHGames and is.. a Singapore company anyway.)

My life is pretty simple. Eat. Game. Sleep.
No. I'm not obsessed. But that's my preference.

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Grandiose Opening

Hyperion, Light, Sun & Moon.
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Temasek Polytechnic:
The opening of my EIR Blog.

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I am Jason - common name, typical Singaporean male.
Finds interest in playing outdoor sports; basketball, table tennis etc.
Obsessed with the Japanese language and its etiquettes.

Additionally, I have quite a strong interest in Greek Mythology which
explains my blog Url, Hyperion.

"Hyperion is the Titan of Light, Sun & Moon."

You could say that I'm IT Savvy, so to speak.
I have limitless interest in almost anything related to computer technology.
From coding to building up a computer from scratch. Well, probably this was in my blood since
both of my parents are software & hardware specialists.

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My future core module is Game & Entertainment Technology.
The prospect of this path seems fruitful.
The module covers mainly on coding C++, but still teaching 3D editing programs such as
Maya.
Moreover, more teens these days are attracted and intrigued by what technology can do to make a game fun to play; be it graphic or gameplay, I intend to conquer both.

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To end this, I shall just post on what programs I use.
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Lightroom
Abode Photoshop

3D Studio Max
Maya

Sony Vegas

Dreamweaver
MySQL
Flash

....
Paint.

With that, I shall end the first post.

Omodeto gozaimasu.