Folksonomies – Collaboration and Emergence
Remembering our earlier experiments with delicious you will recall that what makes the sharing of content so much more than the sum of individual contributions is the attachment of metadata (data about data) to the original data. As with delicious, on content sharing websites this process is known as tagging. When submitting content to a site, the user also contributes extra information through the application of a descriptive ‘tag’ that identifies the nature of the content. As these tags accumulate, they evolve into a folksonomie that allows anyone to search for the content through the use of keywords. Tagging is not limited to content sharing sites – it can be anywhere metadata about specific content might be useful.
Reading this week – Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication through Shared Metadata. Mathes, A. (2004)
Internet memes
Youtube is one of a number of sites that has provided an ideal spreading ground for Internet memes. A meme in the sense of the Internet is a slice of cultural information that spreads and becomes popular largely through the net.
Mashups
Not surprisingly Youtube has been the focus of several copyright claims as many members upload content to which they do not hold appropriate rights. However the site has become an even more interesting center of copyright disputes as users have produced combinations of copyrighted works to produce original content. This type of content, which mixes elements from a number of different digital sources, is known as a mashup.
Discussion board
We discussed what we thought about the mashups and if they were breaking copyright laws in our opinion. I wrote : Although i find the mashups funny,some hilarious, i still can not work out how they are not breaking copyright laws,they are clearly taking direct images and/or footage from other sources that are copyrighted. Maybe i dont understand this weeks material as well as i thought,i will go over it again but i think the mashups are definitely breaking the copyright laws and dont see how anyone could think otherwise. (once again i do like them though,quite funny and i did spend some time browsing for more,hehe)..Heres one i liked:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T5_0AGdFic&feature=related
Activity – Playing around
We went to the website bighugelabs and created a poster. I decided to create a motivational poster, I thought this task was fun and can see myself playing around with this site some more.
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