CMN450 Participatory Media and Communication

Wired published an article explaining why surveillance may not be in our best interest even if there isn't anything we need to hide.

It's not always teens who are misusing social media. A school is sued by a student for 2 million after misusing their Facebook photo in a PowerPoint Presentation.

This website showcases the best designed and developed websites in the world.They aim to discover, recognize, and promote the talent and effort of web designers, developers, and agencies who create unique digital experiences that are useful, innovative, intuitive, and beautiful.

Nikas Agevik, an app developer wrote a blog disclosing all the lessons he learned about creating viral apps.

An article about software developed by MIT which allows people to practice interpersonal communication. The software is called MACH (short for My Automated Conversation coacH), uses a computer-generated onscreen face, along with facial, speech, and behavior analysis and synthesis software, to simulate face-to-face conversations. It then provides users with feedback on their interactions.

A really great video on what Reddit is and how you can use it. I think many people are intimidated by Reddit's interface and is confused by how to use it, but it is a great source of user-approved information that is constantly updated and relevant.

When the SOPA bills were around, many sites chose to do a 'black out' of their pages in online social protest to the bill. Tumblr extended that protest by offering their users the means to actually call to Congress and express their displeasure. The entire SOPA incident was actually a very interesting time for online history, especially for a large collective mass of people to all fight for a singular cause.

If we're talking about fanfics, we can't avoid the topic of slash, I think. Slash fanfiction has been around since the original Star Trek, where fans would write stories about the possible relationships between Kirk/Spock. With the advent of the internet, however, fanfics of all kinds now have a place to be archived shared widely, but it's important to know where most of it began.

Becoming popular on the internet usually doesn't happen overnight. Being able to monitor your reach is essential to understanding what you are doing right and wrong with your online medium. Twitonomy is one of the many analytic applications for Twitter. It tracks tweets, retweets, interactions, clicks, follower growth, et cetera.

Let's just reveal everything about my regular online life, lol. I play a lot of 'virtual pet' sites, where you collect little creatures, but Aywas is one that stands out a lot. In the spirit of participatory media, it's a very different kind of participation from the usual kind of pet site. Aywas encourages users to create their own pets by colouring them in with sophisticated art programs (such as Photoshop) and submitting them. In turn, these pets are then eligible to be 'bred' with pets other users have made, and a site artist will mix and match the designs on both parent pets to create a new one. It's a very interesting concept and heavily user dependent for participation. If you're interested, shoot me a message at user ID #6429 and I can get you started!

I think a great example of participatory media doesn't have to be a new concept--text based roleplaying has been around for ages, and barely needs any kind of infrastructure to work. I know people who've text based roleplayed through email and messengers, as I still do! It's incredibly fun and expandable to many people, and just needs a bit of imagination.

We all learn that virility has its positives and negatives on the internet. This article illustrates how an overnight sensation, Flappy Bird, caused the creator great turmoil. The untimely popularity ultimately caused the creator to remove the popular game.

With the overdue update to HTML5, many designers have already opted to use the newest version of the markup language. Awwwards is a website that collects the best web designs from web designers, developers, and agencies in the world through an evaluation system. This link shows some of the best uses of HTML5 in web design, to date.

Web design is like fashion. One must understand the upcoming trends to be able to produce beautiful designs. This like shows some up-and-coming design trends for 2014. Recurring themes are HTML5 and 'less-is-more'.

Some quick and easy production tips which will help improve the quality of your audio recordings. I think this article will be really helpful when working on Assignment 1.

Oops, Just noticed Brittany already posted this link. Sorry for the double.

A handful of very helpful tips on recording audio. Very applicable to both podcasts and video production. Next time, we should try using 'foambrero' to dampen background noise.

Interviews with several popular tumblr users. While the people interviewed are interesting and unique, the questions they are asked are repetitive, and the article itself offers only a narrow view of the so-called "tumblr generation."

An honest look at the pros and cons of fan fiction, which questions whether or not fan fiction will ever find a place in main stream media.

Article discussing the positive aspects of the online communities known as "fandoms." The authors view of fandom is a bit idealized, and the discussion is one sided.

10 of essentially the worst possible tips for customizing your blog. The examples used are the most basic and tacky of tumblrs default themes, and each tip offers suggestions to make them even tackier, uglier and more difficult to navigate. Should be titled "10 things not to do when designing a tumblr theme."

Good tips for how to establish a decent community of followers on Tumblr.com. None of these will guarantee you to become "tumblr famous," but they are good advice for running a well organized, at least semi-popular blog.