I find my self always learning new things in this subject that are quite relevant, rather than other subjects that can some times be full of jargon and complication of simple stuff. What i picked up on this week was the idea of cloud storage and its possibilities. Since the tutorial i have signed up for the free 5gb that amazon gives out. As soon as i entered my email i was of course bombarded with the daunting and over worded "end user agreement" and thought to myself after learning about what rights facebook has to the content we up load i better have a skim through it, two or three lines i decide to brush that idea. I swear thats how they rob us blind, by making the most cumbersome and boring bit of writing that even a ridaline junkie would not even be able to sit down through. Never mind that i signed up and have been using it ever since. It is so easy now, i was always pretty good at loosing USB's with important work on them, so now i just throw it all up on the sky drive. Im not sure if i would trust it, (or be bothered to read through the end user agreement ) to store my personal goods on it just yet. I like the idea that if you physically loose your storage in a fire or something else its kind of safe somewhere else.
Also what intrigued me was the idea of the "hit driven model" being modified into a modern version where there is still a basic "hit = popular" idea but now instead of a mass hit it is more a "niche hit model". This is evident in sites like
reddit.com where the user can give their approval or disapproval to stories if they think its not worthy. I think its awesome that we, the consumer now has a much better way of picking and choosing what we want to read.
Haha - Good on you Duncan for trying to read the end user agreement. I did the same thing - and could not get through it. I don't know how people can be lawyers! Still - I have been experimenting with Dropbox. I'm still alittle sceptical of popping too much of my documents online - itjust somehow feels a bit unnatural. But it's a cool way of transferring data without using thumbdrives - I think my thumbdrives might be virus infected so try to avoid it.
ReplyDeleteI liked reading about your thoughts on the topic and agree with basically everything you said. I also think the concept behind Reddit is awesome - pop culture type things and fads/memes do get mixed up in this which doesn't happen with professional journalism. but I think it is news all the same.
I think digc has taught me a lot of things too, maybe not extremely useful things that I can apply to everyday life but things like what media convergence is and that if I have an original idea I should copyright it straight away.
ReplyDeleteI use Amazon as a back-up back-up because it is the back up to my physical external hard drive and my many USBs. It's handy but because of the small storage space I tend to put things in my cloud and then delete them once I know they've been used and that there is a copy in my other back ups.
I especially liked your reference to Ritalin junkies.