DGTL12002 Week 6

A social graph is a physical representation of how people, groups and organizations among other things are linked on a social level in terms of social media. At its very base core, it’s just a list of who knows who and how they’re related. But on a much larger and broader scale, it is capable of so much more. The term was popularised during the 2007 Facebook F8 convention, and since then Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg hopes to bring the popular social media platform to a point where its social graph can be shared with other websites outside of Facebook’s control so that user’s relationships can be implemented across the web. However, before Zuckerberg’s dream can become a reality, there are several limitations the graph will have to overcome first. The most noticeable one of these problems is described LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick who states that “Unfortunately, there doesn't exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that's comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens... the graph needs to exist outside of Facebook. MySpace also has a lot of good data, but not all of it. Likewise LiveJournal, Digg, Twitter, Zooomr, Pownce, Friendster, Plaxo, the list goes on. More important is that any one of these sites shouldn't own it; nobody/everybody should. It should just exist.

References

Margaret Rouse (2010), What is Social Graph?, 28 July, http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/social-graph

DGTL12002 Week 5

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DGTL12002 Week 4

The Sheep Market, while fundamentally useless, is an interesting and innovative example of crowdsourcing in terms of social media. The website was created by Aaron Koblin who challenged users to sketch him a picture of a sheep with absolutely no context as to why they were performing said task. The results were overwhelming with hundreds of entries submitted. So what’s to be learned from this rather pointless exercise? Well, at its very core, The Sheep Market shows us just what sorts of results crowdsourcing can have. Sure, no one has anything to gain from a series of crudely drawn sheep (unless your some sort of crudely drawn sheep enthusiast, in which case I’d suggest seeking help), but if these sorts of results can be achieved from such a pointless task as the one set by Koblin, just imagine what crowdsourcing could achieve when used for more practical purposes. The possibilities are almost endless.

References

The Sheep Market, 15 June 2013, http://www.thesheepmarket.com/

DGTL12002 Week 3

In 2009, Tourism Queensland launched what could perhaps be described as the most successful advertising campaign of all time. The Best Job in the World campaign reached out through various forms of advertising to advertise, as the title suggests, the best job in the world: a caretaker of the islands of the Great Barrier Reef stationed on Hamilton Island, and in the process hyped up mass interest in the Whitsundays at the same time. To get their message out, Tourism Queensland used almost every form of advertising imaginable, from the typical TV and radio advertising, to the increasingly popular use of social media, and even the increasingly unpopular through the (or is that decreasingly popular) use of print ads in newspapers. The way in which applicants could apply was by posting a video explaining why they should get the job. This was a highly innovative and successful way of running the competition, as it also gave other people the chance to watch all of the videos entered. This in a way meant that Tourism Whitsunday was getting tens of thousands of people to make them ads for absolutely free. This added onto the general hype surrounding the whole competition won the campaign a truckload of awards and proved it to be one of, if not the, best advertising campaigns of all time.

DGTL12002 Week 2

Trustworthiness of the site

Is Wikia a trustworthy site? With Wikia being what it is, it is difficult to give a distinct yes/no answer. This is because, like most platforms of social media, Wikia isn’t controlled by a single editor, small group of editors or even a whole office of them. Wikia is monitored by more users than I can count, and I can count pretty high. Not only does each of Wikia’s individual wikis (of which, at the time of me writing this, has exactly 349,343 of) have its own team of editors that manage the site, but anyone can visit and any time and add, delete or edit anything they want to. Of course, this means that, when discussing trust as in how trustworthy of a source it is, Wikia can be about as reliable as Wikipedia. This mean that it is up to the editors of the individual wikis and even the general community of the site to monitor the content and check that the Game of Thrones Wiki doesn’t describe it’s titular TV series as a show about 30 year old high-school students who feel the need to sing about every single little thing they happen to see. Trustworthiness therefore varies from wiki to wiki depending on how watchful the editors are, but whether they’re really slack or wiki Nazis, something’s bound to slip through the cracks every once in a while.

User interface and customization

In terms of interface and customization, Wikia offers a basic template for users to begin with. It involves a simple navigation bar at the top of the page as well as a search bar. All its wikis also share a similar layout, with a page heading at the top of the page, followed by several sub-headings that further break down the subject. And then of course there’s the basic stuff you’d expect like a link to Wikia in the top corner and all the copyright information, as well as links to other popular wikis powered by Wikia. Beyond this, the editors of the wiki can edit the wiki to their hearts content, with the option to change colours, the look of the navigation bar, etc. and even, to an extent, the layout of the content. Users also have the ability to add in images, videos and even other interesting features such as a poll or perhaps even a quote of the day feature.

References

Wikia, 13 June 2013, http://www.wikia.com/Wikia

DGTL12002 Week 1

After a series of unfortunate technical issues, here's my blog:

Wikia is a website that enables users to create wikis based on practically anything they want. Often they are themed around popular TV series, movies, games or books, acting as online encyclopedias for their specific topic. But the list can stretch further than this with wikis based around cooking, to music, to toys and much, much more.

As an extra feature, anyone, even users without an account, are able to edit the information on the wiki as they see fit, resulting in what could arguably be described as a ‘Wikipedia’ like sight, but focused entirely on one particular topic.

Due to its wide range of topics, Wikia has something for everyone. Like many other social media platforms, and perhaps even more so, it is impossible to narrow the site’s target audience down to a single age group, class or social group. It’s more the job of the wiki’s themselves to focus on their specific target market, and Wikia makes it easy for users to find a wiki that will interest them with the inclusion of a search bar and a rotating roster of popular wikis from across the platform displayed on Wikia’s homepage.

However, this doesn't mean that Wikia is a database of absolutely everything users will ever want to know about their topic of choice. The level of content and ease of navigation can vary greatly from wiki to wiki. While Wikia provides all wikis with a search bar, some wikis utilise other forms of navigation better than others. This can make it difficult for users to find the information they want. An example of poor utilisation of navigation in a wiki is seen in the The Keyhole, based on the popular Japanese game series Kingdom Hearts. It seems like the editors have given up creating pages as of lately, with many less important areas such as enemies or collectable items from later games not having a page, but instead just a link to that topics corresponding page on a similar, independent wiki. This somewhat detracts from the wiki in terms of the user being able to find the information they want.

The TARDIS Data Core on the other hand, based on the long running television series Doctor Who is so in depth with its information and navigation, that the user could easily find their way to a page about “Tom’s Bakery”, a bakery that made a brief appearance in the background of one panel in one comic book in a mini-series, something that most wikis wouldn't even bother to include. This level of inconsistency across the platform can hardly be blamed on Wikia itself though, but the editors of the individual wikis. To blame Wikia for this would almost be like blaming Facebook for a series of dodgy pictures someone might have posted on their account, and we wouldn't do that would we? I wouldn't, but then again I don’t have a Facebook page so yeah. I’m getting off topic now, so I’ll end it here.

References

Wikia, 13 June 2013, http://www.wikia.com/Wikia

The Keyhole, 13 June 2013, http://kingdomhearts.wikia.com/wiki/The_Keyhole

Kingdom Hearts Wiki (April 2006), 13 June 2013, http://www.khwiki.net/

TARDIS Data Core, 13 June 2013, http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_Wiki