Anthony Foster – New Media Theory Blog

YouTube is set to become a regular feature on television by allowing digital cable subscribers to access YouTube videos directly on their sets.  Only providers who are partners of YouTube will be allowed to legally share the videos and other service providers will be blocked from accessing YouTube’s API.  Syabas is the first company to be blocked from the service after they had already been providing their customers with this feature for quite some time already.  Syabas refused to come to a valid agreement with YouTube after YouTube demanded a multi-million dollar advertising commitment from Syabas in order for them to continue providing the service.

How many people would actually place a high value on a service like YouTube on their television set?  YouTube is already a free service and it is all too easy to log-on to a pc and watch videos whenever the viewers want to.  Also, with many different applications available on mobile phones, viewers can watch YouTube videos on the go almost anywhere. I don’t blame Syabas for not meeting the terms demanded by YouTube, which happens to be owned by Google.  This story struck me as especially interesting after reading the article from my last blog posting.  Google is slowly trying to take every aspect of information provided through the Web.

Google recently drafted another version of a legal settlement in hopes of taking one step closer to creating what has been referred to as the “Library of the Future”.  This cyber library will include scanned copies of millions of published books, all of which will be made available for viewing online in Google’s search results.  The current proposal is meant to make more content available from unknown authors and out-of-print books, but it also allows Google to scan and include current copyrighted material in their search results.  Opposers to this project, including the multi-billion dollar corporation Yahoo, argue that a digital library of this scale would give Google a monopoly over all of the world’s books.

Read the full story on Wired.

A few days ago, a Brooklyn teenager was cleared of criminal charges for a robbery that he did not commit.  Nineteen year old Rodney Bradford, a native of Brooklyn, was arrested on October 18 in relation to an armed stickup that happened in the apartment complex that he lives in. Rodney was identified by one of the victims as the suspect and he was imprisoned at the Rikers Island prison for almost 2 whole weeks until his release.

The deciding factor in determining Rodney’s innocence was a status message that he posted on Facebook just a minute before the crime took place. The message was traced to show that it originated from a computer in the home of Rodney’s father, which matched up with his alibi. This case marks the first time that Facebook, or any social networking media for that matter, has been used as evidence in a criminal court. Who would have ever thought that Facebook would ever be used to help an innocent citizen avoid wrongful incarceration?

View the full story here.

Last week, a reported 600,000 to 1,000,000 Xbox 360 gamers were banned from online play for violating Xbox Live’s terms of use. Most of these bans were due to the gamers using modded systems to play pirated games that they can download from the internet instead of paying the roughly 60 bucks for an official copy of the game. This isn’t the first time the Microsoft issued a large amount of bans, but this wave following the release of the newest Call of Duty game is by far the largest. It goes to show you that the underground community of video game modders is only increasing with time.

While many gamers may be detered from illegal pirating in the future, others are only motivated to find a new method to get around the high cost of purchasing video games and still enjoy the pleasure of playing them. With the new video games on-demand feature that allows gamers to download certain games directly to their console and store it on the systems hard drive, I predict that the future of video gaming may be disc-less. All games and other content will have to be downloaded directly from the source and that will prevent piracy… at least until someone figures out how to get around that obstacle as well.

http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/700627/Microsoft-Bans-Up-To-1-Million-Modded-Xbox-360s.html

So I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on blogging this weekend… and one of the resources I came accross was this web page. It contains 10 tips from Jorn Barger, the man who is credited for coining the term weblog, for new bloggers.  Its a bit dated (from the year 2007) but I found the information pretty useful.  I am interested in learning more about Jorn Barger and I may be posting some more info about him in the following days.

In an article titled “The Internet as a Diversion”, author Aaron Smith writes:

“Three-quarters of online economic users–those Americans who use the internet to keep up with news about the economic recession or their own personal finances–go online to relax and take their minds off of the recession, according to an April 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

Listening to music and watching online videos are among the most common of the activities we evaluated; roughly half of all online economic users have done each of these activities to relax. Approximately one-third of online economic users have played online games or chatted with friends (on a social networking site, listserv or other online group), while an additional 22% have taken their minds off of their economic or financial circumstances by creating or posting content online.”

Click here for a similar article in the Dallas News about consumers looking to the Internet to take their minds off of the recession.

I think the year was 1997, give or take a year or two, the first time I read a non-linear text.  Of course I had no idea how to actually define the genre of the book that I was reading.  All I knew is that I couldn’t put it down for days and I wanted to do nothing other than read.  I had never been so excited to read anything prior to this.  It wasn’t even a reading assignment for school.  Just some recreational reading… something that is very hard to imagine for a 10 year old boy in the summer time.  This book that intrigued me so much was a part of the Goosebumps (http://www.scholastic.com/goosebumps/books_audio/) series that was so popular at the time.  This particular one was about an evil puppet that came to life and caused quite a few problems for the characters in the book.  I had read some of the other books in this sci-fi genre, but what made this one so special was that it gave me a set of options at certain points in the storyline.  Rather than just reading through a book where the end was already decided before I even cracked the seal, I was able to become an active participant.  When the character in the book encountered a problem, I put myself in his shoes and the next page I turned to depended on what choice I made (Billy heard a loud crash in the attic, to go get help turn to page 54 or to go upstairs with a flashlight and investigate turn to page 72).  I absolutely loved this!!  It almost felt like a video game to me.  So for a whole week I read for hours at a time, retracing my steps every time I reached an “ending” in order to go through every possible path of the tree.  I would have felt like I was cheating myself if I did not read all of the approximately 400pgs in this book (probably the most pages I had read in a single book up to that point in my life).  I was reminded of this book a few years ago when I watched a special edition DVD of the movie Final Destination 3.  It was very similar because at certain points in the movie an option would be presented on the screen and the characters’ fate would be dependant upon the button you pressed.  I find things like this very interesting and although I know it wouldn’t translate well for every genre, I do wish that there were more texts like this.  I think I might try to find some for sale online so I can order and become deeply engulfed in a book like I haven’t been since back in 1997.

Hello All!

So here’s my first attempt at posting a blog for this course although it is not my first attempt at a blog ever. As I mentioned on the discussion forum, I have a featured blog on the SUNYIT website, but I still have a lot to learn when it comes to blogging. Just today, I have already learned that blogging has a lot of power that I have not been able to tap into with my limited knowledge. Maybe I’ll simultaneously upload to both of my blogs — or post occasionally post links to “link” them when topics are relevant. Once again, I hope to learn a lot from this course and it seems like its gonna be a ton of fun. Looking forward to reading all the different kinds of blogs my course mates will be writing.

Bye