“Where’s Mobi”- is a mobile application I developed using J2ME. A user can sign up for this service via the web, download the “Where’s Mobi” application and install it on their mobile phone. The user then sets up a secret SMS message that they can use to retrieve the GPS location of their phone should they lose it. Details Here!
I was blown away by my Time Warner Cable DVR set top box when I first got one. Beforehand, I rarely watched TV due to the fact that I was in my 20’s and either working, in school or out enjoying a very active social life. In fact, I missed out on experiencing many of the popular shows like the Sopranos because I was never home when they were on. After getting a set top, everything changed. I think I watched more TV than I ever had before. I loved catching up on all the shows I had missed and watching them back to back, or whenever I pleased. One of my favorite uses for the set top’s timeshifting capablities was to pause and rewind my cooking shows. I love to cook and had been yearning for the day when I could cook along with my favorite cooking shows and to have the ability to pause and rewind if I missed a step. Yet, I felt frustrated by the fact that I didn’t own a placeshifting device that would allow me to watch the show from within my kitchen. To compensate, I used an extention cable to put the TV in the kitchen during my cooking shows.
TV Feature:
I would really like to see more interactivity applied to cooking shows. It would be great to have the ability to view the recipes while watching the show and to switch between different camera angles. It would also be nice to see on a Google map which stores in my area carry the ingredients, or other recipes that use similar ingredients. The ability to aggregate all my favorite cooking show episodes and organize them in some logical fashion would be incredibly useful, a digital cookbook!!
Spoiling Survivor:
First of all it was amazing to me the lengths fans would go to in order to figure out the show’s ending before the show revealed the ending. How the efforts of this virtual community could change how the producers managed the show and even alter how the show was both produced, edited and delivered. Even though the speculative nature surrounding this show was encouraged by it’s producers, it could backfire by fans taking it too far, revealing too much to an audience that might not want all of the shows details to be revealed so quickly.
I found it was interesting to think about the Survivor virtual community through the lens of Levy’s belief, that such knowledge communities are the key to breaking down the divisions and suspicions that currently shape international relations; his model of collective intelligence as “achievable utopia”. No doubt collective intelligence played a vital role in the last few presidential campaigns. I am excited to learn as they continue, just how much power they may deploy against the current political and corporate power structures. The breadth of information these fans were able to find and share with each other, if that same energy could be applied to governmental issues, image the civic and political problems we could solve.
“Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?” Jenkins Reading
It’s not that more and more fans are demanding the right to participate as deeply as they wish with their media of choice, they have always been there, just that now we can see them thanks to the web and new technologies. With this point in mind, I think it is becoming more and more unreasonable for the media producers to even think that they will be able to control how the media consumers participate in the production and distribution of these goods. I feel that the emergence of these new technologies has emancipated cultural production to go back to it’s grassroots.
Writing Fan Fic:
I found this to be quite a challenging assignment. After all, it’s what we pay good writers for. Even great television writers find it difficult sometimes to come up with clever ideas and flush out a show under time sensitive deadlines. Writing a whole episode in one week was frustratingly difficult. I found myself trying to be clever to the point that I couldn’t even massage out a decent plot line. However, I felt a little more comfortable with the dialogue, having watched these characters for years and knowing their quirks and idiosyncrasies, gave me a little more confidence in how they would react to each others comments and what they might say.
I decided to tackle a Seinfeld episode. I watched a few episodes and realized that there are usually four plotlines, one for each character. These plotlines can be jokes that are strechted out to thirty minutes. I wanted to play off a joke about chopsticks that I heard Jerry make years ago and then that thought developed into a bigger joke about Elaine, Jerry and George discovering fortunes in their fortune cookies that seem almost personalized for them. They then go on to try the fortune’s personal recommendations and in the process they offend many people around them. Later they discover that Crammer has been suppling the fortunes to their local Chinese restaurant and along with Newman, has been writing up the fortunes.
