NMC New Media Blogs

Ars Technica just posted some news that Amazon is considering a jump into the textbook market via their e-reader device, Kindle, which has been out for almost a year now. It appears Amazon is prepping an upgrade to the device and may introduce additional models, including one targeted for students. Obviously, this is a huge market and one that is poised to undergo some rapid changes. As the article points out, students are tired of the high prices of textbooks and some are scanning books and putting them on BitTorrent sites for downloading, which is illegal.

Web 2.0... the social web, collaborate, share, create, mashup... Hey its YOUR web so go crazy. Its hard to have a day or two without hearing something related to the social web and how the Internet is changing everything in both anticipated and unanticipated ways. Heck, its maturing faster than your dog. And speaking of dog aging, supposedly one cannot teach an older dog new tricks. But how about the new dogs? They can supposedly learn anything. This is a good time to make a large conceptual leap over to learning New Media in our schools. In classrooms and lecture halls, university labs and IT groups, the social web is well being its social self... everyone is talking about it and it’s the life of the preverbial party. While the informal dialogs are everywhere, its probably time to start thinking about some formal dialogs about the need for teaching new media in our institutes of higher education.

There is a gold rush underway and thankfully it does not involve any long slogs out West with pans and pickaxes. This rush is for data which is increasingly becoming the bedrock of much of what the Web 2.0 and future developments will rely upon for dishing out increasingly complex and hyper specific information for just about everything. One of the hotspots in this data mining is information not only about one's online self, but about one's self in the real world, particularly one's habits and movements. Some may say this is getting too close to information on a personal level, akin to the digital equivalent of the close talker from the Seinfeld era. MIT researcher, Sandy Petland in an MIT Technology Review article offers that this is not the case.

Is now online. This presentation focuses primarily on taking a cultural anthropological look at YouTube but also expands into a wider new media discussion.

Its well worth 55 minutes of your time. Ponder and enjoy.

Keene Haywood (University of Texas@DIIA)

The followers of all things start-up at TechCrunch just posted this about an HP, Yahoo, Intel combined launch into testing cloud computing. I am willing to bet it will get cloudier.

Keene Haywood (University of Texas@Austin - DIIA)

oh my...

The changes to Google Maps are subtle but nice. Specifically, the Directions feature has been moved down to the left and now sits next to your My Maps tab. The Directions interface is also changed to accommodate the new placement on the page. The column tab for hiding the left hand column is now at the top of the column and is more obvious (I circled the tab in red below to really make it obvious). Previously, it was just a small little triangle midway down the column that casual users probably missed. Hiding this left hand column gives you more screen real estate for the actual map (very handy on notebook screens). Also the colors have been changed to a nice light blue which is easier on the eyes. Also, the Print, Send and Link dialog boxes were also given a facelift. These are just the more obvious changes I have noticed. If you seen any other changes, post them here in the comments.

A great resource with books fully online with many New Media related titles currently available.

Hello everyone. I am off to the Colorado high country for a week of lung exercise. I will return the week after next with more content and inspiration from the highlands of the Rocky Mountain state. Have a good week!

Keene Haywood (University of Texas @ Austin)

Apple fans may be so overly enthusiastic about their devices because Christmas comes several times a year for the faithful when Apple releases new products and makes new announcements. Heck, the rollouts should be on an iCal calendar pushed out by Cupertino HQ. In any case, the four pronged launch last week of the iPhone 3G, the 2.0 version of the software, MobileMe and the iPhone/Touch Apps store rollout gave much fodder for frustration and joy. When I upgraded my iPhone to v.2.0 and started loading up on free apps, I was a kid in a candy store. How cool!...Well that excitement lasted about a day when all of a sudden my apps were crashing left and right. I could not get anything to launch after the initial installation. Hmmm.... it turns out that its easy to forget that the iPhone is running the Mac OS X and now that applications are being installed, all sorts of "interesting" things can start happening.