When I first started working on this movie, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. A film about Web 2.0? How could I resist? Once I came up with an idea, I worked furiously on the screenplay. By the end of the process, I was even scriptwriting in my dreams. I finally started filming with exactly two weeks left to the due date. Didn’t really bother with sleep anymore, and my friends began to complain that I was never around. This has probably been one of the …

“8 Democratic candidates face a new kind of questioning”
Tonight at 7:00pm Democratic candidates engaged in a “new” form of interaction with voters. Users were invited to submit questions via home-made YouTube videos for the candidates, and both the chosen questions and responses were shown on CNN for two hours.
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Is it truly a “new form of questioning”?
While watching this debate, I had the thought that’s it’s almost a reverse kind of fireside chat. The phrase “from your living rooms” was used multiple times, obviously to emphasize the idea that these questions …

I’ve been keeping my eye for the past few weeks on the new Facebook polls. They have been interesting at best, and utterly ridiculous at worst. However, the latest one was a little different:
“Who do you look up to the most?” (CHOICES: Politicians, athletes, businesspeople, artists, or scientists)
I think part of what makes it interesting is how abstract the question is in relation to former questions. (i.e. “boxers or briefs?” “Is global warming a concern?” “What’s your favorite burger joint?”) What do they mean by “look up to”? Admiration? Respect? …

On Monday, we were all discussing Ashley’s idea of creating a Facebook page for the class. Many ideas were thrown out (see? there’s that phrase again) and I thought I’d recap a couple. These are more thematic than technical, but I think this Facebook thing has huge potential.

Page rather than group, because we want flexibility of content.
This will serve as an online community for the members of this class. Even after the class is over, we can stay in touch and continue to exchange ideas and engage in discussions.
Even …

I think I can finally connect a few thoughts I was having last Thursday.
Web 2.0 is all about connections between people and interaction in the online environment. It involves creation of new content in addition to simple acquisition of available information. But what about the cabinet in the short story we read? It automatically knows what Bishop wants. Right now we input information into a computer and use it to find what we want. The computer does the work for us, but we still have to tell it what we …

I can often be overheard declaring my passionate love for rack focus shots. (Why yes, I am a film geek.) But it wasn’t until recently that I really asked myself why. For those of you reading who may not know exactly what a rack focus shot is, I’ll explain it briefly. It’s basically a shot in which the camera focus shifts from one plane of the frame to another (i.e. foreground to background).

(images found here)
If you think about it, a rack focus actually imitates our natural perception of perspective in …

I had one of those weird dreams the other night. You know the kind–the ones that happen right as you’re waking up, and it takes you a few minutes to sort out what’s real and what isn’t. I rolled over in bed and saw huge butterflies with black and dark violet wings fluttering around my room. Some of them were on the ground, dying, and some were still in the air, but just seemed to be waiting for their turn. Eventually I realized that there weren’t really butterflies in my …

“If an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is “almost human”, then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of “strangeness” in the human viewer.”(Wikipedia)

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