|
|
All articles by Jesse S. Somer -
Want to find information about someone lost in space and time?
The Internet's here: Just make your search one that doesn't invade
someone's privacy.
-
“Man, you’ve gotta come over and see what’s happened. It is
totally mind-blowing!” Jimmy yelled through my cell phone.
Currently I was downing a huge slice of plain-cheese pizza at the
local pizzeria-Domingo’s on Main Street. My phone rang so I
answered just in case of an emergency, but as it was just my
‘lunatic’ friend Jimmy I decided to get back to my serious Zen
meditation approach to pizza consumption. “Yeah yeah Jim. Look,
whatever it is can wait, I’m conducting some really important
research here bro’.” I didn’t give him a chance to reply. Folding
up my phone, I shoved it into my pocket and got straight back into
reaching pizza enlightenment. Sprinkling some parmesan cheese onto
the already super-thick layer of Domingo’s mozzarella, my mind
imagined the cheese to be snow falling onto a glacier in Iceland.
The red tomato sauce seeping through cracks in the cheese was lava
from a recently erupted volcano.
-
If you have a business and haven’t got a website on the
Internet, you’re pretty much crazy. I don’t want to sound
judgmental but you must be either really behind the times, or just
plain scared to get yourself onto the Web. If it is the latter, the
fear is an irrational one, having a website is only going to do
great things for your life. Have you seen how many computers there
are in the world today? Look at how much they’ve now been
integrated into everyday human culture and society. Everywhere you
go there are Internet cafes and computer retailers, people with
mini-computers on the train, or laptops at the local park
(receiving wireless broadband Internet). If you can’t see, hear,
taste, smell, and feel the opportunity in having a website for
every one of your potential customers to visit, you must be
catatonic, drunk, or insane. If you truly do fall into one of these
three categories, I’m really sorry, but if one day you do find a
balanced state of life again, please check out the Internet and see
what it is doing for people all around the world.
-
I’ve been writing articles and stories on the Internet for a
couple of years now and I’ve come to realize that there’s something
very wrong with current article submission sites. If you write
articles for Newspapers or magazines you will have noticed that
most of the stories have photographs or pictures accompanying the
text. It adds a whole dimension to the story, piquing interest in
the words that may have otherwise been skimmed over and ignored as
just being another of an infinite number of articles. Extremely
valuable information could be lost to our consciousness, and to our
community on the Internet. Pictures have been used in the ‘paper’
for decades, if not centuries. We’ve come to expect an exciting
aesthetic presence when something new and interesting is presented
to society. So, why is it that this area of the most modern medium
for the written word doesn’t allow images?
-
I have two Dads. That sounds strange doesn’t it? One is my
genetic father, and the other is my geneticist father. The genetic
Dad I’ve only ever lived with for one year when I was an infant,
while the geneticist Dad is what you would call a step-father, but
I’ve lived in close proximity with him for more than 20 years. I
feel close to them both. I connect differently with each of them
but on a pretty much equal level. The reason I’m sharing my
personal information with you is because I’ve just had a
realisation about my fathers in relation to the area that I work
in: computers and the Internet. It’s really quite interesting.
-
I’ve been having a bit of a problem lately. As I’ve been working
for an Internet company for a couple of years you might expect that
I’d have my own website by now. I really wouldn’t mind having one.
As a creative writer it would be great to put up my books to sell,
as well as advertise my skills for freelance work, and be able to
put up my resume and portfolio. I even like the idea of making a
few dollars by having items that I like, such as music albums or
favorite novels that other people can then click on to buy through
affiliate sites. The problem is this: There seems to be a barrier
in my mind to taking the plunge into the Internet world. Today I’ve
decided I’m going to get to the bottom of it.
-
I asked a colleague from work today if he had any news about new
Internet phenomena that would be cool to check out. He told me
about the concept of social software. Social software is where
someone takes an existing computer program and combines it with
another idea to make it more personalized for people. A perfect
example of this comes in the form of a new craze taking over the
world: Google Map mash-ups. http://maps.google.com/ is already a cool site
that has taken a personalized approach to many different ways of
helping people. For example, I typed in ‘Pizza restaurants’ into
the finder with the name of the town my father lives in near
Atlanta, Georgia, USA and it showed me exactly where all the pizzas
were, the names of the restaurants, and contact details (if I
wished to place an order over the phone). Pretty cool. This is only
the tip of the iceberg. Other people around the world have taken
the Google Map software and combined it with their personal
interests to create a whole array of exciting maps filled with
photos and information. The ultimate site to check some out is
http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/.
-
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent many, many hours of
your life watching television. From sit-coms and game shows to
cartoons and reality TV, we’ve sat in front of the box for a large
part of our life watching stories of one sort or another. What we
mightn’t have known is that for every one show that gets on the air
there were probably a hundred that didn’t make it. This might be
hard to believe with shows like ‘The Joe Schmo Show” and “The
Simple Life” out there but our world is a strange place with weird
people, now isn’t it? However with the advent of the Internet and
legal file-sharing you can now film your own TV show and put it up
on the Web for everyone to see. If it’s any good, word will get
around. That’s how the Internet works: Word of mouth.
-
If you haven’t heard of Neopets than I have to seriously wonder
what planet you come from, you definitely don’t hail from Neopia.
www.neopets.com
is one of the most popular sites on the whole Internet, and what
does this mean to you and me? It’s a kid’s site. Our next
generation is finding a home in virtual reality, and they love it.
Neopets has over 70 million members from Timbuktu to Kalamazoo, and
has had a total of over 300 billion website page views. According
to Wired magazine’s Dec. 2005 edition, Neopets is the second most
‘sticky’ website on the whole of our planet’s World Wide Web.
Average users are on the site around 6 hours a month…with so many
members the mind boggles as to how much time our future generations
are spending time with their virtual pets. What is a virtual pet
anyway? Why does every kid on the Earth want one? What do you do
with them once they’re in your custody?
-
This article has an accompanying comic strip that can be found
at: http://www.m6.net/articles/images/myspace.jpg
|
