Tutorial Six - The Internet and Online Communities

Over the last few weeks I have joined some online communities and here are some links to them:
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anna_maree/5490916970/
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/EERAManna?feature=mhum
and Blogspot: http://www.annamareefa.blogspot.com/

The first online community is Flickr. This is an online community where people can share pictures with their friends and sometimes with all people involved with that site. Flickr provides a service to save digital images online so that they are stored somewhere. I think that this is a good idea for saving images, you can lose your memory card or your camera, you can even erase the hard drive of your computer, but once something is on the internet it is almost always on there forever. Anybody can contribute to Flickr as long as they sign up to the site. People contribute to Flickr so that they can save their digital images somewhere and also to show their friends the images. They can either set the images to private where only their friends can see them or they can set them to public where anyone who wants to can view the images. The ethical issues that arise when using Flickr are that anyone can post pictures that they have access to and these pictures could be of people who have not given permission for them to be put online. Below is an image, this is the type of material that is posted on Flickr.


The second in YouTube. This is where people share video clips with anyone who has access to the internet. YouTube provides us all with a wealth of information, sometimes useless and sometimes useful. It provides easy answers to most of our questions (as long as we put the right wording in the search box). Anyone can contribute to YouTube as long as they sign up to the site. When people use YouTube they are most likely seeking an answer to a question or they are seeking random entertainment.  Below is a link that shows an example of what is posted on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulDA6lkQitY

The third is Blogspot. which is where people can post blogs about their thoughts and opinions, this is where people can create a picture of their life or make an imaginary life where other people can read it. Blogspot provides an opportuniy for people to voice their opinions and to record there lives. It can be used as a diary or it can be used as a place to vent either anger or frustration, whatever you want to vent really. Anyone can contribute to YouTube as long as they sign up to the site. They can contirbute video, pictures, words, poetry, lyrics, music, what ever they want to contribute. Most people who contribute to Blogspot either do so because they have to (for this class), or because they want to be heard. My blog shows an example of what one might post if you had to create a blog.