Blog #6

The key points that Jenkins mentions were about convergence, black box, and participatory culture. I think its interesting how Jenkins talks about how players are becoming participators and participators are becoming players now.  There is no one sole role for each. Basically thats participatory culture.  Each of us can have our own say, opinion, way we view things and help each other.  In media today there is no black box now, we are moving towards convergence. Uniformity if you will with different characters, kind of like how Weingberger talked about the miscellaneous. For example you can be a writer, a publisher, a spectator, and more on the web.  The internet is not a black box or a delivery technology.  It is the understanding that all media is always changing, its right in front of us on the internet.  The way marketing, communication, and other technologies is changing, he talks about how we have to keep up.  And for the businesses who don't want to try and stay in the game, they will be left in the dust.  This new folksonomy is the future. Whether or not we are ready for the change is clear. We are not, but it will take some time and he talks about how we have the choices to sort through these many uncertainties.

Splashy pants story was crazy haha, and I always wear old spice, even before the commercials =)

Blog #5

Weinberger, relying on German philosopher Heidegger, says that "the meaning of a particular thing is enabled by the web of implicit meanings we call the world" 


Basically what I got out of the reading was that the philosophers example about the hammer. If you didn't know what the hammer was used for, you wouldn't know its meaning. Also he talks about its relationship to wood, trees, all the way up to the sun.  To the sound it makes when hitting a nail to how humans need it to build and are not gods.  He makes it very clear that to understand the hammer, you have to understand much much more.  And what Weinberger is trying to say is that all the implied meanings that we put on the web and all the relationships/tagging, gives our world meaning. 


This is related to the third order in that we are giving more information, more relationships, more insight to the web.  We can't just look at dictionary.com anymore for meanings, we can look elsewhere, to blogs, articles, photos, even youtube clips. Basically we are not limited to one source, to one type of meaning, we have everyone pitching in to help each other.








Mobb Deep - back at you  

The Jungle Book

In what Wienberg says in chapter 5, the law of the jungle, he goes on about how what we use to do back then is changing in ways that would have been impossible to think of back then.  No one thought our advances in the internet, knowledge managing, and communicating would get this far, but it has, and it will keep advancing at the pace we are going.

For example, back in the day, for a artist to get well known, they would have to be the lucky ones.  I'm not saying that all the famous singers right now are just lucky, of course they have talent, but think about it, there are so many people out there that we never herd of that could probably sing as good or better.

 A line from one of Jadakiss's songs titles Why, he says this "Why is a brother up North better than Jordan That didn't get that break."  And I don't want to take away from Jordans glory, but Jadakiss could be right.  A singer right now was found on youtube and just got signed, Alyssa Bernal.  Its so easy to scout for talent now.  We went from scouting events to just going online and searching for it.  I believe that  Web 2.0 and having youtube being so miscellaneous was Alyssas break.

The good ol days haha

 I saw a connection in what Wienberg was saying and what Tim O'Reilly has said in his "what is Web 2.0" article.  The connection was how Tim was talking about how other applications evolved into web 2.0, like for example mp3.com to napster, or personal website to blogging.  I thought of this when I was reading what Wienberg was saying about how being miscellaneous is how these new web 2.0s got big in the first place. It makes sense, I'm sure that the New York Times are still read a lot even online, but when Wikipedia was being read more then that, you know that being miscellaneous is the right way to go.


"Many people now understand this idea in the
sense of “crowdsourcing,” meaning that a large group
of people can create a collective work whose value
far exceeds that provided by any of the individual
participants."

This quote is from the article Web squared, and it reminded me of how Wienberg was talking about gatekeepers.  That was the limitation of having experts going through all the papers and choosing which ones would make the cut to get published.  But just like what Tim said, "Users add value," and being able to post everything online is catering to everyone online.  Its so easy, and its using the "long tail" really well that Chris Anderson talks about because the chances of someone being interested in your post, tagged photo, and other things is very high, even if its just one more person.