Wikipedia

I think that Wikipedia is much more useful than Encyclopedia Britannica to some extent. Firstly, I searched "web 2.0" in Wikipedia ,where I got a long article which contained many subtitles such as the introduction, characteristics of "Web 2.0", Technology overview, innovations associated with "Web 2.0", criticism, trademark and so on. As well known, wikipedia is open for everyone to edit, so all the contents are created collaboratively by volunteers and edited by other contributors as well. We could also go to the See also in this article where we could be linked to other correlative pages for reading more comprehensive information about "Web 2.0". Additionally, if readers know something else, they could refresh the contents as well. Athough there are many editors hired by Wikipedia for correcting the contents in this site, more that thousands of new and refreshed articles appear per day will be quite tough work for these limited editors to correct. Thus, the articles maybe not trustful in Wikipedia. I am also happy with the multiple languages system they have in this site, since I could find the Chinese version about "Web 2.0" in this site.

However, I feel a little bit unsatisfied with the searching result in Encyclopedia Britannica, since I couldn't get the adaptive information about "Web 2.0" instead of some links to Wiki, Wikipedia and Libraries. Although the rearching result is incorrect, I still clicked to the linked pages for checking it with my curiosity. The article I got without any subtitles which is different from Wikipedia article's format.

"A great encyclopedia is inevitably a sign of national maturity and, as such, will pay tribute to the ideals of its country and its times"In my opinion, we live in the age of information explosion, since everyday we get thousands of information and messages actively or passively. From anohter aspect, people like us will act as media to transfer these information to others by oral or written way. Wikipedia is playing as a free platform role on the internet for the global people, where everyone could create the texts with images by themselves. For the globla people, Wikipedia provide the possibility more than 100 different languages users to edit contents in their own language. Traditionally, encyclopedia should be the most authoritative and reliable texts. Wikipedia is open to everyone and may include the mistakes in its contents, but this makes information transfer quicker than the traditional way. This is my simple thinkings about Wikipedia as a cultural and global phenomenon.

Lies Abolished: vulnerability

With tears in their eyes
Struggling to contain their anger
For more than a month

Democratic reforms
Reflected on the differences
Driven by my heart

The first suicide
Yesterday
Could have been worse

DIGITAL ART

Airport

This is the Whitney Museum's portal to net art and digital arts and an online gallery space for commissioned net art projects. This site consists of gate pages, commissions, exhibitions, resources and collection these five areas. In this site, they provide original net art projects by the Whitney Museum and information about current and past net art and digital art.
Rhizome

This is also an online platform for the global new media art community. They support creation, presentaion, discusiion and preservation of contemporary art that makes innovation by using new technologies in significant ways. They also support almost everyone an access to be their community and could get one year free right to browse Rhizome's content. The the important thing is that this site much focus on presenting the latest new media influences to this communities.
Digital Art, Internet Art, and New Media Art

I think the similarity is that these three definitons are related as art to some degree, and also get some connections between themselves and new technologies such as computer, Internet or other stuffs. Digital art is art created on a computer in digital form. It can be purely computer-generated, or taken from another source. Internet art is art or cultural production which uses the Internet as its primary medium. Artists are not necessary to choose internet as their subject, even thought they usually get in to this popular topic. New media art is a genre that encompasses artworks created with new media technologies, robotics, and biotechnologies.
I Love Bees (ILB)

ILB is a alternate reality game(ARG) that served as a real-world experienece of, and a viral marketing campaign the Halo 2 video game. Like all ARG, ILB is aslo a cross-media game that runs through fiction game world and reality world during playing ILB. The game is started when he or she gets a plastic honey bears in the mail by the previous person in this game. Then, Halo 2 advertiswment will show up at screenings, then player will use their curious to visit the website and get a confusing characters and sentences. As a mystery game, users start to communicate with each and share their thoughts as well. ILB would be considered as Internet art from above definition.

Virtual World

Virtual world is a representation of our real world in some sense. Virtual world's designers simulate the real world rules such as gravity, topography, locomotion, real-time actions, communication and so on to their users. The players will take the responsibility to play as a specific character by one login account in this created world, which seems quite same to our real life but actually virtual.

Actually I couldn't say that I really enjoy living in the virtual world so much. Personally, how to playing games is a question for me, because I am so bad about playing computer games since I was a child. I prefer to read, exercise and meet friends in person to have real communications and practical experiences. So before I took this course, I almost know nothing about these virtual games, but now I have got a little experiences and touch in Second Life. Maybe I am opinionated and fogyish, still I do not have so much interests about it. I can remember that after 1 hours hanging around in a small island of Second life, my headache force me to log off. I felt that is even harder than living in my real life, well this is only for my personal case. Of course, I can't refute that there are thousands of players enjoying living in their virtual world and I do believe they must have their reasons to do so. I think most of them would like to have a quite different life experience in this created virtual world, to implement their dreams in the virtual world, to communicate with stangers or acquaintance, to get relax and so on.

However, many people like living in virtual world, since they think that will easier and more private than living in the real life. I am thinking that the virtual life never leave with player's real life. For example, in Second Life, almost players use English as the communication tool, so which has required that these players have to know English. If you want to buy a house or an island, you need to buy and could pay for the money from your real life which is not virtual at all. So in some sense, virtual worlds never apart from our real life.

Folksonomy, Flickr and Me

After reading these links, I would like to conclude or kind of copy the definition of folksonomy from the reading. Folksonomy comes from the combination of the words folk and taxonomy, and the term folksonomy means “people’s classification management”. Thomas stated that folksonomy is tagging that works, which contains three tenets of this term: tag, object being tagged and identity for clarifying tag terms and providing for a rich understanding of the object being tagged. The Process of folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate. Flickr is an example to this.

Flickr is one of photo sharing web services and an online community platform. Users can get free space in Flickr to upload their own photos or images and share with almost everyone (if you setting your Flickr for public use). Other users can also leave their comments in your Flickr space and in some sense to get contacts, feedbacks or reflections from viewers. But the interesting thing is that Flicker allows photo sunmitters to categorize images by using tags, which will be easy for searchers to get images about a certain topic. In Flickr’s site, it also provides a quick access to images tagged with the most popular keywords, which viewers can get the information quite conveniently.

I t created an account in Flickr two days ago, but I have not uploaded any images until now. Well, I think I will share my images and photos in my Flickr soon^^

QQ, ChianRen, MSN and Me

WhenI graduated from my secondary school in China, I got my personal computer as a present and started surfing on the internet. As I can remember, not everyone has their own computer during that moment, thus many people usually need go to Net-bars for using internet. However, as the development of Chinese economy, the conutry can control more margin in their hands to satisfy their desires. Therefore, almost every family has had one or even more computers in Chinese families nowadays.

QQ(left image is QQ's new logo for this year) is the first thing I knew when I started, which has the almost same function as MSN. But as I know, you can use QQ to search people who is online for get some information such as age, gender and location( these information is created by themselves, so not all of information is the same as the truth), then you can add them as your friends for further communications. Contrarily, others could invite you as their friends. At beginning I do not have many friends, since I only want to use it to contact with my friends only.

MSN---we usually use it to contact with our acquaintances, of course you can also add strangers if you can get their e-mail dress from other ways, which is quite different from QQ's searching offer for the users.

ChinaRen(Ren=人 in Chinese mean human or people) is the biggest community for students to find their previous friends and classmates. I created my account here 4 years ago, and also found my middle and high school's classmates communities there. It helpes me get back my contacts with my old classmates. Since not all of them are not my closed friends during that time in my school time, by the internet we get to be quite closed now and have deeper communication without distance. So I would like thanks for the digital culture's phenomenon make me and my friends get closer and closer.

my Twitter and Second Life names

My Twitter name is the same as my real name Jia Li which will esay for my to remember, since there are quite a lot of things need to keep in out mind( seems our mind space is limitless~~~).
My Second Life name is Jiajia Kidd.