Social Media

What is Social Media? Social Media is a WebSite designed to allow you to interact with friends, relatives, and the general public. You can share information, develop your own space and create your own personality for others to view. It is Interactive and allows you to be in control (to a large degree) or how others view you and communicate with you.

Our IMM Class had the priviledge of having a visit from Wayne MacPhail. Social Media is rapidly growing with Sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter and del.icio.us, to name a few. Wayne, along with a very impressive media resume, has become a pioneer in the field of Social Networking Consulting.

Social Media is also catching the attention of Companies and Industry and they are rapidly creating their own unique Social Media Pages. A business may try to start out using some of the social applications to advertise, but soon find that this is frowned upon by the community. To use a social media as a promotion to your company, it has to be created as a vehicle for the community. A company would have to get "involved" by giving back to the community. People that use Social Media discover very fast the motivations if your sole purpose is advertising, you are soon blackballed. A company must contribute to the Outcomes (common good) with, collaboration,community, conversation.

Social media is Social Behaviour based on Social Observation. Case in point, Susan Reynolds and the "Boobs on Ice". Susan is a New Media Consultant who frequently used blogs and various social networking, she is also battling breast cancer. In 2007, after a needle biopsy on her breast, she used frozen peas to help with the pain of the procedure. She then uploaded a picture of her with the frozen peas from that image, The Frozen Pea Fund was launched. People all across the internet were supporting her in the fight and within days, peavators were uploading images of themselves with peas.

De-lic-ious is a social book marking site that moves behaviour from the desktop, to the "Cloud" (internet). Bookmarking allows you to submit your favorite bookmarks and share them with others. You can find out with bookmarks, how many people have tagged it.

Quote from Wayne MacPhail and his talk, You don't use a Social Network, you become a Part of It.

Krista Yeo

Visit from James Eberhardt

The guest speaker for our IMM class for Multimedia Pioneering was James Eberhardt. We have previously been looking at building applications for the large viewing media. The second half of our Course we are looking at building applications (prototypes) for small media viewing such as cell phones.

James is a Director of Technology and concentrates more on development than designing. His list of work includes speaking at the FITC in Toronto in 2007 speaking about Flash Lite on Building Mobile Applications for usability. He was previously the Director of Technology at Marblemedia and now works at Design Axiom and teaches Flash Lite at George Brown College in Toronto.

His credits include (but not limited to) the following:

The Border Mobile Contest
Seductive Shorts
This is Daniel Cook


Some of the key points of James' talk was a brief history of mobile devices and that although we have progressed, we still have a long way to go in the development of computing. This is good news for those interested in entering the field of mobile computing. He covered various information on Devices, SMS/MMS (Short Message Service and Multimedia Messaging Service), GPS (Global Positioning System), 2D Barcodes and Flash Lite.

He provided a few demonstrations on capturing images and how the GPS can track the location where the picture was taken. Another demo was of the 2D Barcodes which is currently being used to provide information that you capture with your cell phone and it will provide you with more information on the site you are visiting. 1D Barcodes are used by Groceries Stores to all you scan items, Post Offices, etc. The 2D does not replace the 1D, but rather the 2 technologies will co-exist. 2D allows you to hold more information making it perfect as an enhancement. Barcodes that were used were QR, Shotcode and Dynametrics.

Communication and Streamlineing have always been very motivating for me. I believe that mobile computing will be more predominant in a few more years when costs for Internet access is reduced. As James pointed out, there are not many jobs for Mobile Programming, but it is great to get a head start on this exciting technology.