ROLLAND REY CASTRO: February 2008 Archives

Essentially The MacBook Air is advertised as and displayed as the sleekest in computing technology and the thinnest and most portable computer to date. In the “guided tour” the viewers are exposed to all of the great features such as the “optional” slate drive, the backlit keyboard keys, track pad gestures, the hidden ports and so on. Basically they are selling the a new brand of computers to the consumers, especially with the selling point of “no optical drive” they suggest that renting movies off of iTunes is the way to go, but there is an optional optical drive to buy.    

The MacBook Air is definitely pushing the extreme portability with logical functionality. The notion of “Air” could  deliver the mindset that says “Hey I can use my computer absolutely anywhere” and It is almost as if it feels that Apple understands that there are trends in wireless connectivity and downloading, hence the justification of removing the optical drive. Not only does Apple want to respond to trends but they have a customer in mind; The middle to wealthy class who are fashionable or artists of some sort. This Laptop is so prominently in the news that owning one would be a fashion statement; any user who buys his laptop truly has great taste and they saved or could easily afford such a peripheral as compare to users’ older computing technologies.

The product is meant to be used as, well, any other laptop but with a twist. It is meant to be used anywhere you can show it off, and to be used as the ultimate gateway to the Internet as the iPhone revolution that is starting to change internet cellular connectivity.

The MacBook Air essentially represents a couple of themes. First is that CD’s are going out of style (I don’t care what Blu Ray customers or supporters think).  The fact it has no hard drive and I as a heavy computer user I am, doesn’t feel affected if I were to buy one (without the optical drive), and shows times have changed.  Computing is now taken everywhere. Slowly, but surely, I feel the trend for computing is portability, style, wireless networks. Apple wants to push the idea that computers are apart of our biology. In a way, I feel the trends with laptops are that owners use these devices as if it were apart of them and act as a personalized view of the wild Internet. We can see this trend in social networks, applications and lack of any major offline software except for the yearly office applications and video games.

I guess it makes me wonder, is this manipulation? Or is this a response to users needs? I honestly can’t tell the difference at this point, but I can tell you it is not pure innovation, just evolution.

You know how there were explorers’ guilds back in the time of Columbus and such? (I don’t know actually, I’m just to lazy to Wikipedia it) Well that same idea is coming back to the internet. I for one know the net is chock full of zany and exotic information in the forms of pictures, video, audio and text. Well one company decided to make a social network out of “stumbling” upon websites. StumbleUpon adds a parasitic bar to Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers and is making finding random crap on the internet a social phenomenon. Boasting over 4 million members I would have to say the idea is working rather well.

But this isn’t the first idea to implement the social networking into a browser. Flock, is an open source browser which allows popular networking features from major sites such as Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube accessible without even opening a web page. You can share files with members and keep up with them with the built on newsfeed, so you always know what’s going on.

They are both free and ad-free as far as I know so check them out. Its worth a try and I think it’s an interesting exploration to see social internetworking come to the browser front.

Blogging is the about the evolution of sites such as Livejournal and aesthetics such as white spacing were better introduced. There are a multitude of blogging niches, which have popped over the last two years and have further evolved (or deviated) such as Twitter. Why post long and troublesome entries when you could send your latest away messages from aim to a TwitterBot (A type of AIM bot which transfers AOL Messages to your Twitter). But I found something even better, and may start gaining popularity with its fun end user interface and deep developer style customization. This my friends is called Tumblr.

There is blogging, twitting, and then there’s tumbling. Tumblr is a great web 2.0 app because it acts as a scrap book that can enable you to work with multiple types of posts such as: regular blog posts, audio posts, picture posts, chat log posts, qoute posts, and link posts. Best of all, whatever you post fits in aesthetically great with the styles they provide when you sign up.

Some of the drawbacks are the lack of comments (I had to code comments into my Tumblr) and a clumsy network to find or be found by other tumblers, but for personal use its acts a decent enough repository for whatever you come across on the web. Most importantly I feel websites like Tumblr are setting the tone for evolving how humans will map their thinking processes out in he future, In other words, another point for information mining on how people think and decide to share what they think.

You can check mine out Here (yeah I had to give myself a little self promotion an example).

I have never seen so many start-up companies take advantage of the whole social web 2.0 aspect as the latest offering comes from Planet of The Internet. The idea behind this site is that people can sign up and buy virtual pixilated houses and companies can purchase pixilated office buildings o help advertise themselves. So far there is only one city taken up by a couple of companies and six or more citizens. This almost reminds me of Second Life and even more reminds me of Habbo. The differentiating factor is that Planet of The Internet is acting more of a profile site with a pixilated overlay to keep the same old social web idea seemingly fresh.

I think it’s a unique idea, but with houses and buildings looking the same, I could see internet users rather repulsed that their individuality is greatly reduced unless they pay more money for a better house or possible accessories (if they ever come out with such an add-on).  Besides what could be repulsing, I noticed a phenomena: Turkish users. Are they starting to defect from the heavily Turkish base that is located at destination Xuqa? Hmm… it might be interesting to track.

I would really like to participate in this project, but I think their emailing server is down, because I have not received my confirmation yet ☹. Will post an update to this blog post when I am fully signed up.

One of the greatest social aspects of the web is its ability to bridge people from great distances. The latest instance takes the social web to the family scene with a project called Kindo. This is primarily a family tree building site where you can add as many members you want. The cool thing about Kindo is as you add members to your family tree you have the option to contact them through their known email addresses and make them official members who can contribute and build up the family tree. I think the project has great potential in hitting that “in the family only” social niche and could be a great way to keep family members’ information stored and can offer a venue for strengthening contact between parents, cousins, siblings and so on especially when college rolls around.

On the pessimistic side, Kindo does offer a way to gather up information and see how people are related and interconnected. This information could be used by particular marketing and advertising companies (so lets hope Kindo never becomes popular and sells out).

Overall I think this is a great project to have families commit to, especially future generations and well… people like me who can’t tell the difference between 1st and 2nd cousins, and need a chart to remember (cough cough myself).

If you have a Mac (more advertising) or a webcam and mic, check it out, its perfectly harmless fun.

The democratic race currently going on in America is pretty intense. There were three noticeable players in the race, hose being Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, and John Edwards. The latest runner to “drop” out of the race was John Edwards. This sparked some interesting news because Edwards is slated to become a powerful figure in determining who win the democratic race. To delve into this debacle I explored two sources of information; CNN.com, a popular mainstream news site and Democrats Now, a blog started in 2007 by a person named Andrew Levine who is following the democratic race.

CNN.com immediately went straight into the article asking the question, “Who will John Edwards endorse?” and gave both Clinton and Obama an equal chance of receiving his support. Article went immediate to support Obama after the quizzical questions of who will have Edwards support.

It’s quite funny actually check out some of the key phrases in these statements:

 “Some political pundits predict Edwards' supporters are more likely to lean in Obama's direction.”

“Time magazine journalist Joe Klein said, ‘I don't think he endorses Hillary Clinton. The question is whether or not he endorses Barack Obama.’”

“Klein contends Clinton ‘represents a lot of the things that [Edwards] campaigned against, you know, the old Washington Democratic establishment that he believes got too close to the corporations in the '90s.’”

So it appears rather clear that CNN has their support invested in Obama and they’re trying to rally support from his previous followers in mind and democratic voter support overall. It was almost a little advertisement for them, especially looking at the content of the article, which was rather skimpy, compared to the Democrats Now take on the situation.

Democrats Now had a rather lengthy take on the situation and proposed a rather interesting theory that John Edwards may not actually be out of the race.  This blog entry focuses on the fact that Edward stated he would “suspend” his campaign. The excerpt then switched focus to the fact that Edwards had lost a couple of caucuses and had major competition with Barrack Obama, and even worse going against a popular female candidate, Hillary Clinton. Levine describes his chances as horrible but actually presents a rather viable argument, as compared to CNN’s experts.

Check out the thorough explanation of how John Edwards most likely dropped out from:

“The reason why is clear: the candidate who posed the biggest problem for him was Barack Obama, not Hillary Clinton. White and Latino racism could still do in Obama’s chances to win in November. But Iowa showed that he could win handily in a nearly all white state, at least among persons willing to caucus under the aegis of the Democratic Party. That validated his candidacy. That’s why Obama was able to win nearly 80% of the black vote in South Carolina and why he could raise some $32 million in January. That’s why, even after she bounced back in New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton is still not the clear front-runner. Edwards could probably have won the nomination on the anti-Clinton vote alone, if Obama was out of the picture. But he didn’t have a chance against Obama one on one – not if the African American candidate is seen as viable – and, in a three-way race, running also against a woman, his prospects were even worse. No matter that his politics were better than Clinton’s or Obama’s, for women and African Americans along with nearly everyone else. For Democratic voters this year, the prospect of nominating the white guy, when there’s a black man and a woman in the running, was just not going to fly.”

Levine goes on to construct arguments for both Hillary and Obama on who will gain his support and in conclusion Levine states that Edwards will most likely support Obama based on the fact Hillary represents a restoration in “Clintonism” but otherwise thinks that Edwards might try to stall his running and come back full force later.

The arguments presented in the Democrats Now blog were pretty solid for the most part, and it actually felt like a plausible reason for Obama being the prime candidate for winning Edwards support. It felt rather informative and gives the democratic audience some thinking to do. What I do enjoy from this blog is that Levine readily supported Edwards and even offers a theory of him coming back into the race later and even throws support at other candidates with is ending sentence because he feels that Clinton and Obama represent corporate America. As compared to the CNN article advertisement this blog explained why Obama could win and why Edwards would throw support behind him, but equally levels Clinton and Obama in their running.

I think its funny to see how informative a person following the race could be compared to a giant news company who is clearly capable of describing every aspect of the situation properly doesn't. Of course the blogger could be paid, but there was no clear endorsement or siding located within the blog. Essentially it was neutral, and that’s the best type of news.