Second Life Cont.

As I further my experience with Second Life, I have found a lot of the theories come into play. People actually forget about social norms and rules on the internet, especially when they are behind an avatar. A lot of the fun looking things seem to all come with a price tag. For example, buying land and owning property all cost money. Second Life has become somewhat repetitive, but that is not bothering me too much since it is the very interesting and sometimes comical conversations I have with other users.

Zombie Second Life

Grimly's Bloodbath & Beyond- I found this location through Second Life’s suggested areas. With the zombie craze hugely popular right now,  this does not surprise me that there is a world where you kill zobies. This place was hugely addictive for me though. I just ran around killing zombies. Pretty straight forward. It was fun to get with a group of people to fend off the zombies. It made it seem more realistic, or at least as realistic as a virtual community can get. This location implemented the use of online gaming into virtual communities. I had to join a group to get a gun (after joining, I was able to stay with the couple of group members or I could go off on my own, but I chose to stay with the group).This helped meet the new users too. I ended up spending hours in this world. Teamwork was a big key part of this world. At first, members of my group would get mad at me because I was new and did not know how to play, but after awhile, I was right with them getting mad at new members because they were not at the skill level as the rest of us. 

Mindmeister

This week's social media tool was Mindmeister. Mindmeister is unique as it lets one create an online web for just about anything. A web can be created for a person's schedule, their presentation, or like what we had to do for our research paper, an outline. This corresponds with E-Learning since it helps someone stay organized. Mindmeister also allows multiple people to edit one web. This would be useful for group work.

Mindmeister's main function is to help organize people. A web is like a more visual outline of something. Mindmester allows people to set their webs to public and allow their friends to edit and add on to their original web. These friends could also be coworkers too. I can see businesses using this tool to help organize presentations for their company.

The most interesting thing I found about Mindmeister is its uniqueness. I remember doing webs way back in elementary school when I was writing papers. This site takes that same idea, and puts it into the technology world. I have never heard of any other website out there that allows this same process. I like how easy it is to use too. All one has to do is just class the add button to add topics and delete to delete them. There is a lot of customizing available too. I just stuck to the basic overlay, but Mindmeister allows for different background layouts, fonts, colors, etc.

The most challenging part of Mindmeister, I found, was trying to move the subtopics to my subtopics. I would have my web branch out to subtopics, but then I wanted my subtopics to have subtopics. This was fine for me, but when I wanted to spread those ideas out more, they would become their own branch from the main topic. This was frustrating because if I had a lot of content on one sub-branch, it would be squished next to the branch right below it.

Mindmeister helps communications. As previously stated, one can add friends to add and edit to their webs. This is helpful to express each others ideas. The best part of this is that the site automatically saves EVERYTHING so I could look back and see what edits someone did if we were sharing a web.

Overall, I think Mindmeister is a great tool. It allows people to stay organized (something that I very much appreciate) and is very easy to use. I also like that the site saves my webs. This way there is no reason for me to lose what I have done. If it were on a piece of paper, there is a good chance I could lose that somehow, but since this is on the internet, it is available to me virtually anywhere.

Another Second Life Expereince

This week, my experience with Second Life helped support the social construction theory. I was just messing around the different worlds (mainly Freebie Island) and ended up near a bunch of people who were all apparently a part of a certain group. After reading their public chat logs, I found they were a group of people who all met over Second Life and meet up together regularly. This supports the social construction theory because it shows how technology has influenced friendship. From this group, there was a person from Oklahoma, another from Texas, and another from North Carolina. These were the people who I engaged in conversation with. While talking to these people, I noticed some clues to help support the SIDE Theory. The SIDE theory says that groups will create their own norms for each other. When chatting, all of these people used "text message lingo" (wut, btw, lol, u). This is laziness, to me, but in the world of the internet, it is the norm. 

Virtual Communities Update

After initially working with Second Life, I found myself more intrigued in the tool. I found myself coming back just to see the interactions of different users. This past week, I found myself talking to a girl from the United Kingdom. This is interesting to me because one, it was someone accross the Atlantic Ocean, and two, I never talk to random strangers on the internet. She was very open, which did creep me out, and that is what amazes me about online communities. I cannot get over how open people are on the internet, especially a place like Second Life. It should be interesting to see what else I find as I continue using the tool.

Flickr

This weeks social media tool was Flickr. Flickr allows people and organizations connect to one another via pictures and video. This is how the tool relates to this weeks topic of organizations. Many different organizations are on Flickr. One can search through the groups tab on the page to find so many different groups to connect with.

As stated before, Flickr allows users to connect through the tools of picture and video. This is good because it potentially allows clients actually see what the product/business is like before engaging from just a reading like other sites allow. I see Flickr more for personal leisure rather than business. I say this because it has a more laid back feel and less professional. It seems like it is more for friends and family to share their lives through picture and video.

The most interesting thing I found out about Flickr is that they limit to how much content you can upload to their site. Though after a couple of pictures I was no where near the limit, I can see how this would potentially be a problem. I did think it was interesting how unpopular it seemed Flickr was. I remember hearing about it in high school and new friends who did use it, but upon trying to look up friends' profiles, they ended up deleting their profiles awhile ago.

The most challenging part of Flickr, for me, was deciding what goes on the site. I am not one to upload photos on websites since they are out there for everyone to see. I do a lot of rethinking before any photo of me goes up. On Flickr, there were not any personal photos.

I think this tool helps the communication process. Users can share photos and video so others can see what is going on in their lives. This can go both ways since there are some things that should not be shared, but for the most part, it seems to help out a lot.

Overall I feel OK about Flickr. It emphasizes on media and pushes it. Facebook is definitely its main competitor, but for what it is, Flickr does things well.

Online Gaming

     The social media tool this week is Dungeon Blitz. This online game allows players to create characters, embark on quests, play with their friends, and complete quests with friends. Online gaming is helping users communicate more frequently while allowing users to engage in the game. Dungeon Blitz is a fantasy style game. This means that users will see dragons, spells, and other magical characteristics.
     Dungeon Blitz is a typical fantasy game. There are many characters on the game. The game allows the characters to interact with each other to complete quests. It is integrated with Facebook so adding your current friends is easy. The game also helps characters think when they should use certain spells and how often.
     After playing Dungeon Blitz, the thing I found most interesting was its ability to make me wanting to keep playing. It is an extremely simple concept, point and click to kill enemies. Even though it was easy, I was seeing myself wanting to keep playing to level up and progress my character. This is very common with fantasy games.
     I did not find anything too difficult with Dungeon Blitz. It does take a couple of minutes to get used to the controls and know character's abilities. There are different classes, and these classes allow a user to use certain skills better. On the first level of the boat, I got real frustrated because of the flying bat like creatures. It took me a good couple of minutes to figure out what to do.
     I feel this game helps improve communication. As stated before, it is integrated with Facebook so one can play with the friends that they have on Facebook. This adds an added level of communication with people. It helps connect friends by allowing them to do something besides creeping on other people's pages.
     My overall experience with this game is very positive. The only thing I wish was that it had a chat log to chat with other users who were not my friend on Facebook. This could be a security reason, however, since it is a Facebook game and Facebook allows 13 year olds on their site. It could be there since a lot of online gamers are inappropriate.