Media Geek Girl

The recent financial turmoil has been the perfect example of how information has become a lot more prevalent than during the time of - say - the last Great Depression. Being a crisis which involves the activity of the international financial markets, which is mostly fuelled by 'confidence' and 'sentiments', it's been a great measure of the rapids shifts in mood all over the world, partly in reaction to equally volatile headlines. Just take a look at these depressing recent updates of twitter news bots that have almost become a feature of their streams lately, not to mention the latest headlines (at the time of writing this article, the headline at the top of my BBC Live Bookmarks feed read 'Stock markets plunge across world'). Good news seems to be few and far between, but tends to be worded in equally hyperbolic terms. A number of articles have picked up on this crisis' significant differentiating factor of the degree and speed of accessibility to relev...

Image via CrunchBase The recent rollout of a new twitter application - Qwitte r - which emails you alerts of the latest unfollows on your twitter stream and may even provoke some introspection by showing after which tweet exactly the unfollow occurred - has stirred quite a bit of interest. From the conversation I've seen on twitter and friendfeed, more people signed up for it than I expected - although perhaps my perspective is skewed as they were mostly early adopters. To me, Qwitter offers three possibilities: 1. Masochistic torturing of self for more sensitive types who wonder what was it about their particular tweet/tweeting habits that prompted the unsubscribe 2. An opportunity for introspection and self-improvement for the earnest, analytical types. They might enjoy picking apart the possible elements of their tweet/tweeting habits that offended. 3. People who simply do not care about what people think about them/their tweets and sign up for the service for the heck of it, o...

Uncertain times lay ahead for the next wave of websites that tried to strike it big. For a while there, from what I heard and based on the invites I received in my inbox, it seemed like Friendster had it made. I had no idea what it offered but meanwhile, I began reading of another network that was growing in popularity in the US - Myspace. A while later, I began to overhear friends discussing the addictiveness of Facebook. The cautionary tales of the prior two contenders saw me hold off until it became clear that Facebook was the winner - and the critical mass of my friends was established. My restraint was fortunate, as consequently I entered completely oblivious to the unhappiness the introduction of the mini-feed had caused but a mere half-year ago, with the brand new concept of a constant stream of activity immediately normalised (after all, no one else was kicking up a fuss). Something else had happened to the web while I had been away. Perhaps it was because the types of sites th...

In this inaugural post, I thought it would be appropriate to reflect on my return to life online. I'm not sure if it's due to the progression of my age or of internet trends (wouldn't it be cool if there was a correlation between the two), but it just seemed as though this was an appropriate time to return. The internet went mainstream, for me, around 5 years ago, in 2003. Dial-up speeds began improving and broadband became more affordable. My friends and I, reliant on our parents' graces and income to indulge our online passions, started to embrace the latest 'craze' - blogging. It was considered a one-uppan ce to have knowledge of basic html, at a time when popular blogging platforms like diaryland did not (and still does not) offer wysiwyg editors and bolded, exotically-coloured or, even, scrolling text wishing friends happy birthday was a badge of blogging honour. Tightly clustered badges with small fonts proved that you were a member of a fanlisting, or a b...