Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Module 2 - Emerging Technologies Tetrad



If few years ago, blogs were only viewed as a journal on a cloud, now they are offering the option of rich site summary (RSS) feeds where readers can receive immediate feedback if there is a new post.  However, blog features are still carrying over many technical features of an email.  As cloud computing continues to expand, many features of blogging will start to change as well in order to accommodate new users.
An article in the New York Times  E-Mail Gets an Instant Makeover (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/technology/21email.html?_r=2 ) states that teenagers are preferring a faster and immediate response to their messages, which is lacking on Blogs. Therefore, I think Twitter is the cluster and chain to Blogs and WordPress, where users can post “on the go,” although, they can only post up to 140 characters. The chain is formed because the Twitters might eventually completely replace Blogs in the near future and it does bring to mind journal writing. As a cluster, Twitter shares the same laws with Blogs.

Reference:
Elon University/Pew Internet Project. (n.d.). Imagining the Internet: A history and forecast: Back 150 timeline. Retrieved July 22, 2009, from http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/back150years.pdf


Pew Internet & American Life Project. (2010, June 11). The future of cloud computing. Retrieved from http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1623/future-cloud-computing-technology-experts

Thornburg, D. D. (2008b). Emerging technologies and McLuhan's Laws of Media. Lake Barrington, IL: Thornburg Center for Space Exploration.

7 comments:

  1. The beauty (though I don't partake) is that Tweets are short and to the point. Blogs are enhanced with details and more thorough descriptions. So do you really think blogs will be fully replaced by microblogging outlets?

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  2. Hi Erin,
    Currently Twitter only allows 140 characters. The option to "re-twit" creates an asynchronous conversational environment. Mobile applications allow the user to receive an immediate response. An example comes from David Pogue’s presentation in CUNY Technology conference where he discussed his twitter experiment. The story is posted on his blog (http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/the-twitter-experiment/).

    I think blogs will not be fully replaced by microblogging, but the blogs' initial design will shift.

    Orit

    http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/

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  3. The connection from twitter to blog seems like the connection of writing a diary to writing a journal: both are writing thoughts, but for very different purposes. Twitter is the medium used to express personal thoughts, while blogging is often used for more professional purposes.

    However different, the technologies on the cloud (wiki, blog, facebook, twitter, GoogleDocs, etc.) often allow users to feed to each other, in some ways closing the gap between professional and personal lives.

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  4. Hi Lori,

    Because blogs do not limit characters, and now users have the possibility to insert video and images, it does work as a connection to groups of similar interest. The Julie & Julia Movie was developed from a blog. Furthermore, the George Siemens connectevist learning theory is based on the connections we form using cloud computing.

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  5. Orit,

    I just read, though I don't remember where, that people are blogging less and less. I think you see that online tools, such as Twitter, are becoming a replacement or supplement to blogging. For people who are creating content from their smartphones, Twitter is much easier than blogging. Using a very tiny physical or virtual keyboard can be rather difficult when typing for long periods of time.

    Erin,

    I do think blogs won't become obsolete, but I do believe microblogs will become the more prevalent way to create and read content.

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  6. Hi Orit,

    Great tetrad. I enjoyed your link to the creation of the printing press and think you were correct in your comparisons. Blogging is a unique way for people to share and communicate ideas on the web. I wonder how much of our current political climate has been brought about because of blogging.

    George

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  7. George,

    I think blogging has a major impact on the political arena. Even the white house is blogging! http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog

    Orit

    ReplyDelete