This is the first news discussion podcast I am creating. It discusses an article from FORTUNE magazine called "Limewire Seeks Legitimacy." Enjoy!
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Fireworks Assignment
I chose an architecture theme for this exercise. In fireworks I used:
-5 Layers
-Various blur and sharpening filters for each layer
-I also adjusted the color/brightness of each layer
-Each layer also has a different opacity, with the higher transparency layers in the background of the image and the lower transparency in the foreground.
Monday, October 13, 2008
First Podcast
This is a link to our first audio podcast. We got an applause sound from FindSounds.com and placed it at the end of the podcast. We then recorded some basic information about this class, applied a wahwah effect to the middle, and then faded out the podcast at the end during the applause sound that we imported. Here it is:
Friday, October 10, 2008
Study: More Employees Checking Work E-mail in Off Hours
It is no secret that information technologies, like email and mobile phones, have become increasingly more prolific and necessary in our world today. This fact not only speaks for the personal aspects of our lives, but the professional ones as well. IT is a larger part of commerce today than it ever has been, with one of the staple technologies under this umbrella being email. According to this article, people believe email to be a double-edged sword. It allows them to be more productive and carry out the tasks of their jobs more effectively, but at the same time the boundary between work and free time becomes blurred. 49% of the respondents in the survey for this article said that email makes it much harder to have that necessary disconnect from work. This fact rings even more true as people begin to use mobile technologies to check their email and engage in professional communication away from their computers.
This situation offers quite a catch-22. The whirlwind of innovation that yields so many amazing technologies really does strengthen our ability to communicate with one another as people. However, the same technology that allows us to stay in touch with our friends and family is the technology that allows us to do our jobs and communicate with people at work. As more cutting-edge technologies start to be developed I think that the professional demands of people will increase exponentially. The fact is that working people, who also happen to have active personal lives, become increasingly more accountable for things in the workplace as these technologies are released. As an owner of an iPhone, I can see how it could be just a little too easy to stay connected to work and play at the same time. I personally am addicted to recieving email on my phone because it helps me stay stay in touch with people I care about. However, because of this technology I am constantly aware of demands being put on me. It is my belief that this issue will only grow more hotly debated as the boundary between work and play becomes even more nebulous and fuzzy because of IT.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Users Protest, Defend Facebook Face-Lift
Recently, Facebook forced its using constituency, a population of nearly 100 million people all over the world, to switch over to its new version. This new version had been in construction and planning for several months and developers touted it as a better and more organized form of the social networking website we have all grown to be a part of. The "upgraded" version provides a series of tabs and other organizational controls to allow users to navigate easily to the specific information they are looking for on a particular page. The new version has been available for trial since July (where users could navigate to and from the new version to test the waters), however a mandatory switch was implemented for all users a couple weeks ago. This has created somewhat of a backlash among the Facebook users of the world. Some see it as something that is now too cluttered and complex, while others view it simply as a change that takes some getting used to.
Personally, I was a larger fan of the old version of Facebook. Like many other disgruntled users, I see these new changes as complicating something that was so refreshingly simple and easy to use. While the update does organize information more effectively and prevent users from having to sift through endless applications and bumper stickers to get to a user's wall, I find myself asking: do we really need all those things anyway? Maybe I am just a simple Facebook purist who liked the utilitarian setup a little too much. This new negative response seems similar to the upheaval the Facebook community was in after the release of the "News Feed," however, I don't see these opposing attitudes fizzling out in the same peaceful fashion. While I am not up in arms or infuriated like some Facebook fanatics, I am now a member of a few anti-update groups that I was invited to by my friends. While it may not seem so, to me this appears to be a watershed moment for Facebook. What will happen if people do not grow to like this version or adopt what it has to offer? Will their fan base decrease? Even though Facebook has become such a staple on college campuses and among people of college age, I think these new changes have the potential to create some unhappy users and other problems down the road.
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