A brief summary of my blogging experience

Link of my blog: http://agnes5062.blogspot.com/

The chosen blog post: http://agnes5062.blogspot.com/2011/02/collaborative-work.html

I have chosen this blog post because it really describes my attitude towards working in groups and I really wonder how to collaborate in cyber space, especially working on such a big project like developing Firefox. After raising the question in my blog post, I “google” for the answer, however I could not find one. I can only find something like the founders of Firefox or the development of Firefox. Maybe it relates to the privacy of the system, I can find nothing about how people collaborate to work on the development.

This is not my first time to write blogs, I have a Xanga account and I loved to write blogs before. In Xanga, I just write something about what I did on this day and that day, just a record for me for remembrance. But this time, we need to share our viewpoints of the lectures we attended. It is really interesting to read my classmates’ blog. They always have different viewpoints even on the same topics and I learnt a lot from them. And when it is my turn to write blogs, I am always looking forwards to all your comments, as you are always raising interesting questions or other ideas that I had never think of before. Because of the wisdom of crowd, I can always get a better and more comprehensive picture of the theories learnt in classes.

Thanks for giving me all the great ideas and thanks for reading my posts. Happy blogging!  =]

List of blogs that I have commented:

1. http://en2848claire.blogspot.com/2011/01/tagging-vs-folders.html#comments
2. http://en2848claire.blogspot.com/2011/01/my-digital-life.html#comments
3. http://en2848crystalwan.blogspot.com/2011/03/ideology-behind-texts.html#comments
4. http://joycema-ma.blogspot.com/2011/04/blog-post.html#comments
5. http://joycema-ma.blogspot.com/2011/01/my-digital-life.html#comments
6. http://julia0406.blogspot.com/2011/03/as-mentioned-in-lecture-attention.html#comments
7. http://julia0406.blogspot.com/2011/01/week-1-week-2-communication-on-facebook.html#comments
8. http://kari-law.blogspot.com/2011/04/online-culture-and-intercultural.html#comments
9. http://kari-law.blogspot.com/2011/01/my-digital-life.html#comments
10. http://en2848pauly.blogspot.com/2011/03/our-names-are-cybones-cyber-lazybones.html#comments

Who got our attention?

I guess most of the people in these days are multitasking. Not only teenagers or digital natives are multitasking, but also digital immigrants. Like my parents, they like to read newspaper and listen to the radio at the same time, or watching TV while doing housework.

For me, my computer allows me to do almost all the things at the same time. For example, I open my Firefox browser and msn at the same time. Sometimes I will open iTunes also. I normally pay attention to all the things that I opened, not continuously to all the things, but on a serial basis. Like, I check who is online in MSN when the Firefox is loading. But if one thing grabs my attention, I will definitely ignore all the others. When I am watching youtube, I will forget to check who is going online unless people talk to me. 


In the attention economy nowadays, artists are those who always need others’ attention, if no one cares them, it would be seen as a failure of their career. Because of the new format of the attention economy, the artists now using youtube channel to promote themselves. To show the other side of them which does not show in traditional media. This helps us to know more about the artist and this is a low cost way for them to promote themselves:

Not just artists, companies need to promote themselves and gain public's attention. Therefore, Facebook is really a good and no-money cost way for them. There are a lot of Facebook fans page created by the companies, they use such pages to update the latest products, events and promotion. If some people read and found these information useful, they may share on their walls in order to tell their friends. One of my favorite company fans page is Kiehl's Hong Kong, this page provides me information about promotion and new products released. I do not need to search though the internet by myself or keep checking the shop from time to time. I can know all the information I need with a click. It is really convenient, right?  =]

Computer games

I am not a person who really enjoys playing video games or online games. Since I was a kid, I am always the one who loss in video games, then I give up playing video games. I knew that I was not born with such talent.  =P

My small restaurant  =]

When Facebook is popular, I started to play the games on it, like Restaurant City and Hotel City. These games require zero technique when playing (That’s why I play these games). Moreover, they have the function of maintaining relationships with friends. For example, when we were having dinner, some of my friends would say, “I need cream! Does anybody here can exchange ingredient with me?” Then someone may yell, “I got cream! I need your leek, I know you have!” Then everyone will keep talking how their restaurants are, what ingredients they need, etc. You may argue that this is a kind of problem solving technique, as every player has different ingredients and limited resources; we need to find our own ways to get things we need. But I would say the function of maintaining relationship would be more important applying on this game, as we end up playing happily and can exchange all the ingredients successfully after our gathering.

Oh,by the way, I found a video on Youtube that is a narrative of a video game addict, just for sharing. I understand that playing games is really fun for some of the people, but it is just a leisure tool for relaxing and having fun. =]

Collaborative work

For me, I am always happy to work in groups instead of doing individual work. When working inside a group, there will always be great ideas while brainstorming thus I believe that the wisdom of crowds really exists. Moreover, we can share our thoughts and problems that we encountered so as to achieve a better performance. No matter in school assignments or in work places, It is always easier for me to work in group than individual. Well, it depends on which kind of group members I have, but luckily, most of the time my group mates are very nice.  =]

Talking about the working strategies in group projects, I guess most of us are more familiar with the parallel one. Because it is a fast and fair way to distribute duties and get things done quickly. In the internet world, I guess it is more or less the same despite of there is no obvious duty distribution. I am a Firefox user (Firefox introduction in Wikipedia),  I think it is a lot better than Internet Explorer (free download link: Firefox). However, before I attend this week’s lecture, I never know that Firefox is created by a group of volunteer but not a company. I wonder how can they collaborate successfully if there is no obvious division of labour? Why people know which part they have to do and how to make sure the works are perfectly done by different experts? Do they have meetings? I really wonder.

Font size & pictures

In these days, people tend to read pictures and interesting fonts instead of reading a text word by word. The old fashioned news times roman with all words size 12 makes a text become very dull and do not know where to start reading.

Take myself as an example, when I saw a magazine cover, I will read the biggest font first, as it is very eye-catching and I think the biggest font tell the most important information. Plus the picture aside, I guess I get the main idea of the story. Then I decide whether I want to read the details of story. From the magazine aside, the first thing I saw is the yellow fonts in the middle, it stands out from the black colour background, plus it has the biggest font size. This line is very eye-catching. It seems that this is the cover story as it tries to gain people's attention. As this is a cover page of magazine, the magazine wants to show the most interesting stories on the cover in order to attract people's consumption. Therefore, there are other stories listed in the bottom part. There is no distinction that the upper part is ideal and the bottom is realistic. The whole page is "real" information giving. (The information are real as they really exists inside the book, yet the stories may composed by the reporters  =P)

How about you? What does different font size and pictures mean to you? How do you read them?

My Digital Life

In my daily life, I spent at least three to four hours a day sitting in front of the computer, sounds crazy, right? Checking facebook, email and youtube become the essential tasks every day. I would say I am a facebook addict, I keep refresh my page when I have time. Here is my facebook account, add me if I am not your friend yet  =] Facebook provides a channel for us to communicate, apart from updating status and commenting, the most important function for me is sharing. As I am a dancer, dancers often take videos during practice so we can do self-criticism in order to achieve better performances.

I can’t leave my iPod as I need to listen to music all the time and I can watch videos by it. If you want to download videos from youtube, here is an online software that I recommend:keepvid. It is free and very convenient (you can download the video as a mp4 file so you need not to convert it afterwards).

By taking this course, I think I can learn how media affect our communication, our language and our ideologies. And I hope I can get a good grade from this course.  =P