Google

The most remarkable thing covered in the video, in my opinion, was how astonishingly successful simple ideas were in those days. I'm sure building the programming and infrastructure to IMPLEMENT those simple ideas was a challenge, but the basic principal behind the thing was elegantly simple.
I'm also impressed that after all these years and new applications, the base Google screen is still uncluttered and gimmick-free.
Maybe the people who stick dancing babies in their credit check ads will take a hint...
The video does raise a question: can you take other companies' ideas, stockpile people's information, and help Red China censor content and still not "be evil?"

To Google or not to Google

I thoroughly enjoyed the search engine video. Whip me with a piece of wet spaghetti but I didn't even mind the guy that hosted it that much. I'm reading, or I should say, I was reading (before school started) a book called, "Mastering Online Research." It's full of info about using search engines but doesn't have any information about the history of them (might have been a logical place to begin the book). The history is fascinating. It's nearly impossible to think about using the internet without having access to a search engine. How widespread would the use of the internet be without Google?

I want a lava lamp in my office, too.

I think Google's office environment and how they run their company are directly related to their success.  We saw in the video how there are games, chairs and lava lamps set up all over the over.  I've heard that there is a child day care center on site, as well as an exercise area and a gourmet cafe, and I heard that employees can bring their pets to work.  I think this type of environment fosters creativity, which is an integral part of Google.  Gmail, Google Labs, Gchat, everything is full of creativity and good design.

I think companies should take note of this little business tactic.  If you treat your employees well, and give them a place to grow their knowledge and creativity, they are going to produce some pretty spectacular things for you.

the search engine video.

The one thing that struck me about the search engine video was how quickly Google became a worldwide phenomenon. It went from an idea two guys came up with at school to becoming its own verb in just a couple of years. Google is now up there with Coke and Kleenex (and others) as the brands that have become the accepted terms to describe any product in their field.

And I didn't think the host was all that annoying...besides trying to insert himself into history as much as possible.

Some search related articles

Some great Wired articles of the past that you might find interesting.

http://bit.ly/MvSIR - Wired Special Issue Googlemania March 2004

http://bit.ly/B9XEv - How Yahoo Blew It Feb 07

http://bit.ly/lhPFe - The Great Wall of Facebook Wired 6/09

i am back.

i told my pup i was writing this and he demanded he be included on the post. his name is duna edes. duna is hungarian for danube, the river that goes thru budapest, hungary. that is where he was born. edes means sweetheart. he is a havanese, which makes him a cuban hungarian american. what a cultured little dog i have.

i am on my laptop at home...i'd almost forgotten what this felt like.

i am originally from texarkana, arkansas, where i graduated high school and college (but on the texas side). i miss my family and being in close proximity to razorback fans (woo pig sooie!), but that's about all i miss. my choices for a career there included working for a bad newspaper, tv or radio station...no thanks. there's not much more demand for the mass communication field there. i decided to move down here and go to graduate school 1) to get out of texarkana, 2) to live in austin, and 3) because i had a degree and no idea what i wanted to do with my life. plus, i am a huge nerd and love being in school - if they created a career as a professional student i would be the perfect candidate. i also love music and live shows, reading, writing, traveling (especially europe), and anything outdoors.

since starting my graduate career in the fall of 07, i have really taken on an interest in new media. it is almost impossible to function day to day without some form of social networking (exaggerating a bit, but it is becoming more true). and recent events show that social networking and blogs are dramatically changing the role of media in our society. why not jump on the new media train? besides the fact that being knowledgeable in and familiar with using new media will help out when pursuing a career, it's also really stinkin' fun. my new job has kept me incredibly busy at work since starting last monday, and i don't have time for news/twitter/facebook/digg at work anymore. geez. i'm actually having to work at work now...

one of the founders of the internet said something interesting in the second half of the video. he said that their reasoning for wanting to create the internet was based on a tradition of sharing knowledge, and that everyone was contributing to it. i think this is more true than ever today. it's good to see that the purpose and function of the internet has not changed from what its founders saw it to be.

Have Any Of You Heard About Dream Cat Venus?

Hi, this is Jesse. I thought this article from cnet.co.uk was interesting because it gives an example of technology for the elderly (a group typically weary of technology) in the form of a friendly house cat. This cat/android is amazing. I think it's interesting that people who may have a fear or be intimidated by technology may be open to it through something that seems familiar and not threatening. Here is the link. (I am using bitly for the first time and like it) http://bit.ly/mnpef

hooray for internet

hey all! it's jennifer teeters. i have had no internet at my house for a week (thanks, time warner), and my new job as a plans acquisition manager at work has left me no time to breathe, let alone do anything non-work related. i am writing this from our classroom. sigh. my roommate text me earlier to say the time warner was at our house "fixing" the problem, so i should have access to the world tonight. i will write more then.

Hello Everyone!

My name is Giovanni Metcalf. I'm from El Paso Texas. I moved to San Antonio to attend St. Mary's, where I received my bachelors in English communications. After I graduated I moved to Austin, where I have almost lived for two years. I currently work at the Hyatt Regency on Townlake, as the hotel concierge. I love my job! The Perks are great and I get to meet a lot of interesting people. I'm still not sure what I would like to do once I get my masters. For the longest time I wanted to work in the music industry, within publicity and promotions, dealing primarily with electronic music. Now I think I might want to pursue nursing. Who knows what I want? I'm really looking forward to this class. Not so much getting the twitter account, which I have managed to avoid until now. Recently, my boss asked me to spice up the guest services web page at work. I had put the project on hold, but hopefully after a few classes I can actually get the ball rolling.

The video we saw on the history of the Internet was interesting. I've seen some similar videos in the past, but its always nice to remember how far we have come since the beginning.

Great meeting everyone, definitely looking forward to a challenging class

Hello all, from T.C. Sprencel. Well I can tell that I am probably the least-experienced student in the class, at least in terms of what we will be doing and learning. My cultivation in the new media realm is limited to rudimentary website design and casual use with networking sites like Facebook and Myspace. But that's why I'm here; one can hardly expect to master a skill without confronting ignorance. I certainly look forward to working with, and learning from, all of you.

I have yet to nail down my educational/career aspirations. I do have several areas of strong interest, including writing, comedy and humor, baseball, food, and travel. So I'm just waiting for the niche to emerge for, perhaps, the satirically-driven traveling ballpark food critic! In all seriousness, though, I eagerly await both the education and direction with which I hope to be endowed after taking classes such as this one.

After watching the video in our first class, I can only marvel at the reduction of the seemingly infinite amalgamation of information that is the internet into such basic components. It's kind of like a six-page calculus problem: one rarely recognizes the simplicity of that first step in the grand scheme of things. With that in mind, I look forward to building upon my very simple understanding of our subject matter, so that one day I'll have the knowledge to look back and wonder why I was ever intimidated by the intricacy of new media.

This is going to be a fun class...

Hi everyone, my name is Roberta Flores. I'm from a little town called Dilley, Texas; it's right in the middle of San Antonio and Laredo. I'm really looking forward to the Online Media Design Class. I graduated in 2008 from Texas A&M University Kingsville, where my major was journalism. I loved writing news stories and designing pages for the school newspaper and even was a reporter for two months in Seguin. I decided to come to grad school because I wasn't necessarily sure that I wanted to do reporting for the rest of my life. I also graduated without any experience with web design or html!

Since print journalism has been going through such a radical change, I believe it is the best time for me to get some training and experience with the tools of the future. I decided to become a new media major because communication through the web is not only fascinating, but because I don't want to be one of those journalists that gets left behind and keeps talking (or dreaming) about the old days. One of the things that I found very interesting (and did not know before) was that the person who created email worked on it in his SPARE time! Wow.

Not only are these guys legendary, its nice to know that they were mainly college students. This reminds me that anything can be achieved if you set your heart and mind to it; these guys were dedicated and unwilling to give up until they completed their project. I also had no idea that they were inspired by a mouse finding its way through a maze and applied this concept to the method for sending data to and from computer to computer. Pretty cool... If you guys want to look me up on Twitter feel free to do so....See ya in class!

I'm a PC...for now.

I’m really excited about this class and the coming semester. I am already planning on taking the next new media course in the spring semester. I really enjoy talking to you all and learning about your backgrounds. As for me, I was born in Los Angeles but never got to enjoy the beach, we moved to El Paso when I was four. My first language was Spanish and I did not learn to speak English until I was eight. My parents still don’t really speak English. My family is a very traditional Latino group, I’m not. The same can be said about El Paso and its people. Growing up, that reality always led me to believe the rest of the world ignored us. We lagged in education, technology, jobs, social attitudes and any other progressive aspects.

I believe the educational progress of the Latino community is directly tied to the group’s acceptance of technology. The Latino culture, in my experience, is always hesitant to accept new or foreign concepts that threaten their comfort zone. The community cannot afford to be two steps behind, as they usually are, in utilizing a new medium (i.e. Latino print magazines and newspapers are making a profit). The socioeconomic factors remain (digital divide) and I’ve seen them first hand. However, the strength in numbers of the community and capitalism could provide a smoother transition than past technological revelations for the group. There is a specific role in there for me I just have to define it.

I have no doubt that after this class I will be a better, and more rounded, communication professional. I also have a suspicion that this class will help me better define my career plans and ambitions. This class can be considered a new venture for me. I am excited at the thought of knowing something three months from now that I have absolutely no idea about today. I ask you all to consider that. How many times do we get that opportunity nowadays? I hope Dr. Royal doesn’t get scared that one of her students knows nothing about his graduate class. I am sure I’ll be an Apple at the end of the semester, if not earlier.

The video from last week was interesting on many levels. One pertains to what “we don’t know” about upcoming innovations. If they were talking internet in the sixties, what are they developing now? It is an exciting time to be around. Something else that was interesting was the near misses or the obstacles they encountered that actually assisted them.

Great to meet y'all!

Ha! That would be a great pick-up line, Dale!

Tweets, and blogs, and walls--oh my! Man, I don't know any of this stuff! I'm really looking forward to this class. I've been avoiding learning how to use all of these new communication tools for too long. In my last position I was forced muddle my way through Dreamweaver, but it will be great to fully understand what I'm doing.

The video was great. I knew some history about the Internet being created for defense purposes, but I didn't know how instrumental universities were to its development. Students were writing the code? Wow!

See you soon!

Hello all...from Dale

Hey everyone - I'm really excited about this class and it's been great to hear everyone's stories and backgrounds. As for me, I've been a producer at News 4 WOAI in San Antonio for the past nine years. I actually quit a couple of weeks ago and moved to San Marcos to focus on grad school. The stress of the news biz got to me and I decided it was time to do something new...and I've wanted to do this for five or six years now.

You can reach me on twitter. My handle is @normalguyguide. But I have to warn you - I tweet A LOT. Especially on Top Chef nights. So my feelings are never hurt if I get unfollowed...some people don't like to be bombarded. I mentioned in class that I was supposed to do a Top Chef blog for the San Antonio newspaper. It looks like that is on hold or won't happen now. They want me to blog as my real name and not my NormalGuy brand. That's a dealbreaker for me.

I thought the coolest part of the video was the story about email's invention. It was a completely sidebar little thing this guy tried out just because he thought it would be neat. And the title of "inventor of email" has to be one of the greatest ever. Imagine dropping that to someone at a bar. "What do you do? I created email. Sweet."

See everyone on Wednesday!

New Media vs. Old Media

I'm looking forward to digging in to Cindy's class. Like I said during my intro in class, I tried to build a site and failed miserably. I want to combine my 25+ years of experience in TV and film production with some sound knowledge on web design to become more well rounded in combining old and new media.

The old media folks and the new media whizzes are battling it out, to a certain degree right now, at least in the area of journalism. I follow and contribute to both and don't necessarily favor one over the other (although, unlike my paper, I've yet to find a comfortable way to read my laptop while on the toilet).

I do believe that we, as media developers and consumers, are experiencing the period that is the changeover between old and new. The battles, the growing pains and the uncertainty will all eventually be settled and journalism and all of media will be vastly different than just 10 years ago.

I thought that the video was especially interesting (although, as a producer, I thought the quick cut edits at times were distracting). It's always fun to look back and learn about the development of any great innovation but to see the things that lead to what we now know as the internet was truly fascinating (of particular interest was the guy who developed e-mail, basically on a whim). Now it's up to us to learn, to develop, to participate and to innovate in the next chapter of the internet revolution.

Hello all! --- Yvonne

I'm really looking forward to this class and I'm ready to get my hands dirty with all the web building tools I'm so ignorant about...

As I said in class, I volunteered to be a webmaster for Lion's Club before I knew what that really meant. After I sent the humbling email that said basically 'Hey I don't actually know how to do this stuff,' ta-da, I'm in this class! So there's hope for me yet... I'd like to do their website for our class project if I can. (They're the ones who run the tube rental place in San Marcos that contributes all proceeds to local social service organizations, like the non-profit I work for Southside Community Center)

I also teach 2 labs of Kym Fox's MC1313 Writing for Mass Media, which I really enjoy. I know I'll be using tidbits I learn in this class and posing similar questions in the labs just to see what dialogue comes of it in class.

On the internet video, it's interesting/unsettling that we made our technological advances in times of military crisis or in some kind of international competition. That seems to be what really spurs our big decision makers to spend money and manpower to develop the things that really help us.

See you all soon :) ---- Yvonne Paris

Hello! :)

Hi Everyone,
This is Lesley. I just graduated with my undergraduate degree in Mass Communication (Journalism). I took this class with Cindy in my undergrad and I really enjoyed the class and Cindy. I decided to take it again because I knew that even though it was only a semester ago so much had changed in the software. I'm excited to brush up on my web skills and revamp my web site.

This is now the second time that I've seen the film over the history of the Internet and it still takes me by surprise. The idea that many people didn't believe that the idea of the Internet would be successful and that people wouldn't be interested it in is simply mind blowing especially when it is now such a prominent aspect in every day life.

I'm excited for Cindy's class and my first semester in graduate school.

Introduction

It was great meeting everyone Thursday. I look forward to an interesting semester! The video has been interesting and informative so far--I needed a brush-up on the history of the Internet. It's been a while since I've studied its history.

"I am you and what I see is me"-from echoes by pink floyd

hi all,

most people call me "eric". but who am i? my answer: thoughts come and go, but it is the sum of my actions that dictate who i am, and perhaps someday, the results of those actions will be the only proof of my brief existence... that, and this blog.

to the point, the video we watched in class made me wonder: what if the inventor of electronic mail thought to himself: "Nah, this is a dumb idea... No one will ever use this." what if he had trashed the idea completely. i'm sure it would have surfaced in another form or fashion, but it may have been many years before it's inception as a popular form of communication. it makes me think of human potential in general. look at how far we've come with technology just because of people like the inventor of e-mail. there are no limitations but those we place on ourselves...

anyway, here is the SparkNotes version of my story:

grew up in South Texas. moved to Austin in 1997, put college on hold to pursue Kuk Sool Won (Korean martial arts), moved to the Houston-area in 2005 to study martial arts under the Grandmaster's son, Master Suh, "Alex" Sung Woo. while in Houston I earned my BA in English. I moved back to Austin in June 2007, when a series of random events thrust me into the pursuit of photography. i am self-taught and have been shooting for nearly two years (www.ericmphoto.net).

I love to learn. through this masters program i hope to develop skill sets and understandings of today's technology and, more important, technology of the future. i want to know where we are going, not just where we are.

my ultimate goals in academia are to earn at least 3 more degrees before i reach age 50. i love learning.... good luck to us all.

Nice to Meet You (From Caitlin)

First of all, I am excited about this class. I tend to gravitate towards the philosophical/theoretical elements of mass comm, so it will be good to learn some logistics - but I have the feeling there will be plenty of excellent discussion going on here as well. I love that New Media can be interwoven with so many topics and I love that the benefits of connectivity tend to make people very positive and enthusiastic.

A few older family members of mine have lamented about the "old days" of computers, when the machines were "as big as a room" and had to be kept at chilly temperatures. The film definitely captured these early awkward days and gave me an appreciation for how far things have come. As others have noted, it is amazing how haphazard the network developments were... it seems fortunate that anything came of these early experiments at all. And I think it's hilarious that all of the grunt work was assigned to grad students.

In addition to taking this class I am also taking a class in the English department, I am working on a thesis about literary journalism and I am a lab instructor for MC1313. Outside of school I am an austinist.com contributor (I mostly do film writing) and I like to do typical Austin hippie things like yoga, going to shows and brewing my own kombucha. I am trying to be more active on Twitter: my handle is camo_g.

Looking forward to a fine semester!

Hey...from Josh Shepherd

What's happening on a great Saturday afternoon? It's Josh checking in on the blog. I thought the film on the internet was super interesting. I wonder if it would have been different had it been produced before the dot.com bubble popped. It was great to hear that they basically had now clue what they were doing. There really didn't seem to be a plan; they were just throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what stuck. As long as it was good enough, that was all that mattered.
I am really excited about this class, mostly because the work I have done on my podcast has opened me up to all these possibilities. I spent 7+ years in broadcast land and this arena of new media is fresh to me. I love the ATX having been here forever by attending elementary, middle, high school and college all in Austin.

Anyway...any one interested in my podcast or site. It's on Itunes or you can go to http://www.backlineshow.com/ BacklineShow is my Twitter handle and Facebook handle, as well.

See everyone on Wednesday!

A Little About Me and First Day of Class

Hello all,



Well, I just moved to San Marcos from the Rio Grande Valley about two months ago. So far so good. My first class in the program was Media Law with Prof. Walsh. Tough course but I'm glad I took it because it exposed me to the idea of free speech and how the First Amendment is constantly being challenged. It will be interesting to see what new challenges privacy and free speech will face in the twenty-first century with things like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.



Technology that's used to transfer information fascinates me. Cell phoes, MP3s, and PDAs have become so ubiquitous in our culture. Everyday I see people glued to their newest gadget that they swear they can not live without when only ten years ago no one could have imagined them. I'm no exception; I long to own a 3G iPhone.



I'm taking the new-media track because my goal is to either work for or start a web based news focused topical magazine. I would like to explore topics through feature stories that include video, audio, and open forums. Also I want to learn about Flash and get better at Photoshop.



The thing I learned from the film we watched in class is how the Internet got it start military technology. It always fascinates me what leaps technology takes through the pressure to win wars. Also, I didn't know e-mail came about as a side job and wasn't really paid much attention to at first. It was also funny in a nostalgic way to hear the "You've got mail" prompt from AOL.



Okay, I think this post is getting a bit long so I'll leave it here and wish everyone a great weekend.

See ya in class.

Hello there, I'm Carly

Hi class!

I got into new media kind of on a whim. Last year, I was looking for something new and stumbled upon Twitter. It took me a while to fully understand its potential...but once I did, I was hooked. I find the ability to connect with an entire community fascinating. Since then, I've been soaking up as much information as I can about new media and social networking.

This is my second semester in the graduate program in the SJMC, but I've called Old Main my home for several years. I graduated in December '08 with a degree in Mass Communication (PR). I'm so excited to learn from Cindy and to start my own site.

You can find me on Twitter here.

You can find my blog here.

Other than school and work (I'm assisting Dara Quackenbush with Mass Comm Week coordinations), I love reading and hanging out with my super awesome weenie dog, Harper, who loves Lone Star.

Something I found interesting about Wednesday's video was a comment made by the narrator of the film, the Internet is a vital information link during crisis and war. I feel like we've especially seen this recently, for example, during the Iran Election Crisis. The Internet (mainly Twitter) was protesters' only way to get vital information to the rest of the world.

Welcome to the Online Media Blog!

Welcome to Online Media Design at Texas State University. On this blog, we'll talk about issues, comment on class discussion and share project ideas.I'm the instructor, Cindy Royal. I've been teaching Web design for 10 years, first as a graduate student at UT and now at Texas State. I've seen many of my students go on to online or multimedia careers. It's an exciting time to be in communications! As you probably know from other places online, there are many places online that you can learn about me. There's my personal Web site, my tech blog, my music blog OnThat Note and Twitter. Mainly, I love technology, am an avid live music fan and when I have time, I like to hike or kayak around Lady Bird Lake in Austin. I look forward to working with each of you this semester.

Once you are a member of this blog, it's easy to set up your own blog, maybe on a topic of your own interest. We'll be discussing in class.

I've used this blog in the past with other classes, so you can see some of the previous topics and posts.

So, I want to learn about you, and so does the rest of the class. Take a moment to introduce yourself. And, in your post, make a comment about the video we saw on the History of the Internet, something that you didn't know or found interesting.

Reading Response to "Everything is Miscellaneous" by David Weinberger

David Weinberger's explanation of the new digital disorder in his book "Everything Is Miscellaneous" illustrates just how effectively the internet has re-ordered our entire lives from the ground up. With the ability to communally tag and categorize content continually, we have completely restructured the organization of information online. This is not only a testament to the Web's democratization, but it also illustrates the power of community - a community which decides for itself how items should be categorized. While the pre-internet, "analogue" methods of categorization could rank items by title or by subject, metatags allow us to rank them by title AND subject AND date, or by length AND genre, and almost every combination of a work's characteristics. This allows users to search for material via multiple paths as opposed to a single, narrow search, allowing users to discover new works just as though they were browsing through a book store. However, this new method is not without its flaws, as human decision is completely subjective.
To discuss this new method, Weinberger compares Amazon.com's model to the Dewey Decimal System. "Dewey created a single way to cluster books; Amazon finds as many ways it can. Melvil Dewey took the design of the system upon himself; Amazon lets anyone create her own category, give it a fun name, and publish it" (p. 61). But what happens when categories (or tags) are chosen in haste, or only few are added, or they're misspelled, or arbitrarily chosen? Who monitors them?

The new system, as rounded, encompassing, and editable as it is, still does not always provide the most accurate results. To test just how accurate this new tagging system is, I tried a very amateur and probably quite flawed experiment. Using Flickr.com, I randomly chose 16 words, and searched for them as "tags only" to see how the first picture that showed up on the page correlated with the tag. First, I searched each tag by "most recent," then I searched by "most interesting." And my results were most interesting.

The first thing I noticed was that the results ranked by "most interesting" had substantially more tags than those that were "most recent." Not surprising. But, most of the tags were added by the author, showing me that the owner probably often goes back to his or her photos and adds tags as needed over time. Secondly, I noticed that while other users added more tags to the pictures that were "most interesting" than those that were "most recent" (for obvious reasons), the difference wasn't all that much. This tells me that users rarely tag others' material. And if they did, it was usually only one other tagger. A third characteristic I saw was that the "most interesting" pictures had many more "odd tags" that had nothing to do with the picture than the "most recent." This tells me that even though people continue to add tags to their photos, they can be very poorly categorized at times. This leads me to my final observation. The "most recent" photos and the "most interesting" photos had nearly the same number of photos that did not match their tags at all. For example, when I typed in the tag "world," my first result by "most recent" was a picture of girls at a bar with the Jonas Brothers. Or, when I typed in "telephone," my first results by "most interesting" was a photo of guys hanging out at a pool. This happened about a quarter of the time for both results.So, while this experiment was by no means "scientific," it did illustrate the fact that human error still abounds in the world of digital tags. While most of the photos had several tags, no tags were more "important" than the other, and no tags were denied access because they were not an accurate depiction of the picture. But that could be the author's decision. Because these models are completely subjective, it's up to the community to correct any problems, and perhaps Flickr.com users don't frequent others' pictures enough to monitor that. Flickr.com is just one site that allows tagging, and perhaps with time, the system can become more reliable. As Weinberger states in the book, "such a cluster of photos is not a true case of a family resemblance, because all of those photos do indeed have one characteristic in common: Someone has tagged the 'italy.' But like a family resemblance, there is no single explanation of what makes 'italy' an appropritate tag" (p. 197). And we realize that dealing with the internet is "sort-of, kind-of," and that is fine because it's a "third-order mess."

Obviously, the new digital order has opened doors in terms of discovering new material and searching data that have never been opened before. It provides a way for people to organize the constantly updated information on the web, but it also allows that information to be as messy as ever. That is the beauty of the internet, and it's what Tim Berners-Lee set out to do - make it a "permission-free zone" (p.189). Despite our inherent human nature to have order, we are sitting amidst orderly chaos because the information is continually changing. When we collaborate on the Web, we open ourselves to more than just what we believe to be true, even if our photo of a tree is tagged as "Chris." We should appreciate more that someone cared enough to add a tag on our photo than whether or not the tag fits our ideas.