ENGL303 Spring 2010

Copyright is an exceptionally popular subject on the Web, as a simple search on Alta Vista or one of the Web Crawlers will show. The usual rag bag of articles, advertising announcements, academic sites and so on will be picked up by such searches. In this brief article, I want to draw attention to some of the sites that I find useful when wandering lost in cyberspace. The sites are in no particular order, and many of them are linked to each other. I have given them a personal smiley rating as follows:

The article basically says that due to the advent of social networking sites, children have become more interested in instant gratification and have shortened their attention spans.

This article talks about the various ways people are staying connected via the web--including social networking sites, skype, blogging, etc. It talks about how it's not only "hopping on the web" but staying connected "virtually face-to-face."

350 million people use Facebook, most every single day, and it has doubled in growth every year for the past 2 years. It is becoming a major cultural force, read about the effects its having.

This website is a list of magazines that are dead. It also has a funny commentary about the magazine.

This article talks about how Tufts University now accepts YouTube videos as part of their application process. Potential students still need to write an essay but they can also submit a video to show admissions who they really are.

This article explains how the music industry is suffering from the internet allowing music to be listened to or downloaded to your computer free.

Google is becoming more like twitter and facebook, along with email, the search engine, and mobile apps. Google makes staying connected with the world easier by incorporating everything we use into one account.

This is an internet database for songs that have been sampled along side the original song as well as songs that have been covered.

A mother tells her account of how Facebook occupies 20 hours every week including time she should have been helping her kids with their homework.

post secret.

I am actually thinking of focusing my project on music sampling and how artists get permission to sample various songs. This website is cool because it gives you a list of different songs that have been sampled in the past. Some songs I had no idea were samples, I thought they were original songs.

This website is basically the largest index of text/ chat abbreviations used on the web. It chronicles abbreviations from A-Z. "With the popularity and rise in real-time text-based communications, such as instant messaging, e-mail, Internet and online gaming services, chat rooms, discussion boards and mobile phone text messaging (SMS), came the emergence of a new language tailored to the immediacy and compactness of these new communication media. If you have ever received an instant message or text message that seemed to be written in a foreign language, this Webopedia Quick Reference will help you decipher the text chat lingo by providing the definitions to more than 1,200 chat abbreviations."

Totally awesome new project where thousands of pictures make up a 3-D version of the building.

Coca-Cola plans to create ad involving social media for their big super bowl ad. Does this mean that the vast majority of different audience members understand and know what social media is and how it works?

Hilarious website with Penguins fan blogs, comments, and photoshopped images. The photoshop images as well as the witty writing amazes me sometime. Many metaphors, sarcastic undertones and obscure references.

Make your own zine online.

An attempt to answer common myths about copyright seen on the net and cover issues related to copyright and USENET/Internet publication.

This article talks about how our generation stays connected primarily through the web and social media sites, but that we aren't really building much of a community.

This article talks about why it is essential for business people to be linked in the web community. Staying connected through the web isn't only for young people anymore--everyone is doing it.