Filesharing and copyright- remix and mashup

Anything on the web can be copyrighted and there are ridiculously complex laws governing how these items can be used. This means songs, movies or photos. The web and new software has made it very easy to take things that are on the web and use them in new ways, then distribute them and share them all over the web. There are many websites such as flickr, spotify and torrent which allow music, videos and photos to be sen and shared with everyone. Things can be taken from these sites for free and reused in a different way. Songs can be remixed and put on Youtube, indeed they make up a large proportion of the videos on youtube. The companies who want to make money out of these songs get very cross as their copyright laws say that the songs can't be used like this. There has been many legal cases taken to court about remix and mashups. The most famous is the case of Shepherd fairey and A.P, a company whose photo was reused to make the famous Barack Obama HOPE poster by Shepherd Fairey.

Mashups are quite common and they can be defended in court by saying that they used the item with 'fair use' which means that they did not use it in a way that would make it seem worse or change the value of the item. If the remix actually promotes the product then that can be argued as well.
I think that people should respect the copyright laws but they should still share their remix but with a reference. I beleive that sharing is good and the way forward.

Pecha Kucha presentation

This is my presentation and this is around what I said to each slide
Slide 1
I will talk about endangered animals that live in the wild.
There are different classifications of endandered and I am going to explain each one
extinct in the wild
critically endangered
endangered
Slide 2
Extinct in the wild
Alagoas Curassow a bird that lives in zoos in south america particularly brazil.
South China tiger, a subspecies of tiger which apparently all other tigers descend from them originally. They are smaller and more valuable to poachers than the normal tiger.
Slide 3
south china tiger
20 left in captivity around the world
they are dying out. It is the locals in the area that they live that killed them off. They attack the local sheep and livestock and the locals kill them. Their bones are used in traditional medicines and their skins are sold by hunters.
Slide 4
Critically endangered
will decrease by 80% within three generations.
Arakan forest turtle lives in Burma
Brazilian merganser- waterfowl
The black rhino
Slide 5
white vs black
SLide 6
White, wide mouth-dutch word weit , grazer grass, larger
black pointy lip, browser, smaller
Slide 7
black rhino endangered
Smaller easier to hunt for their ivory
Land destroyed to graze cattle. They do not eat grass.
3, 610 left in the wild( kenya and east africa)
Slide 8
Endangered
blue whale
panda
snow leopard
Slide 9
Giant panda
As well as being very cute they are in danger from logging companies as they only eat bamboo so forest which live in are being cut down very rapidly. Not meant to be herbivore so needs to eat so much so many die lack of food.

Slide 10-What can we do?
we can support the many animal charitys at work in these areas.
We can campaign against logging and deforestation.
We can buy fairtrade products that support these charities too.



Honestly I thought that I did my presentation well as I didn't really read off my script or the board too much as some other people did. I have leant not to put too much text on the slides so I had none at all. I thought that I engaged the audience quite well and that my slides were good because of their simplicity in the stye of Pecha Kucha.
I was given an A grade for my presentation.

Pecha Kucha and presentation

Presentations are sometimes quite hard and there require a lot of nerve to get up on a stage and present to people. some people find them very difficult, whereas some relish the thrill of it. Presentations can be done quite badly by people in high places so it is an important skill in life to be able to do them well as they can be very useful. I enjoy presentations and public speaking and I did manage to win out of the presentations on global issues day. Doing regular speeches in English and many presentations in Geography has helped this but also being involved in public speaking and debating too.

This is link to a very useful page about presentations. The golden rules are to have as little as possible on the slide and to talk about it yourself, to keep it natural and elegant, to suggest or show something and not to just tell it and keeping it to a bare minimum.
There are many presentation making applications such as Microsoft power point, google docs-presentation and slide share. These can all be really good and produce brilliant presentations if they are used well.

This video shows the ways to not do a presentation.


These ways are: to not put every word on each slide because then what is the point of you being there at all; to make sure that you spell check; only have the essential points in bullet points, as they are the essentials and they need to stand out; make sure you sort out your colour schemes as they can make it hard to read and a distraction; don't put too many slides in your presentation; don't have too much data as it gets too complicated; don't have too many animations and entrances as they are distracting; and finally, have a good font that can be read.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is, as all schoolchildren know, enormous and almost anything can be found on it. If you type in almost anything in google, one of the first pages that will pop up is bound to be a wikipedia page. There are more than 12 million pages in several different languages and 2 million in english alone!. It is the largest free encyclopedia in the world. Contrary to what most teachers would have you believe, wikipedia is actually reliable most of the time. At the end of each page, each editor must write a bibliography of where he or she got their information from. This can help to check for reliability, but another way is by checking its edit history. If people spot mistakes, they should and do correct them if they know for certain that one fact is wrong. This means that if a page has been edited many times, it is generally more reliable than a page that has only one version.
Wikipedia has grown ridiculously since it was made public. I has only been around for 8 years but because everyone chips in in small portions, it has developed into an amazing source for all kinds of knowledge. As H.G. Wells said:
'The time is close at hand when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in exact replica.'
Vannevar bush dreamt of a knowledge machine which could be accessed by anyone. He was dreaming of wikipedia. Tim Burners-Lee wanted all science documents to be published on the web. This ,unfortunately, is not what happened. Science documents are among the only articles not on wikipedia. They are being encouraged to be put on it and this is happening slowly.
Unfortunately, some people want to spoil these dreams of a free encyclopedia by Jimmy wales and the people above. Vandalism happens on wikipedia but the wikipedia team normally notice quite quickly and come down hard on the vandal. Wikipedia has a set of rules which must be obeyed on every edit or new page. These are that every page must have sources, no vandalism, correct facts and don't be afraid to edit a page.
Because so many people edit it, wikipedia can be used as a news source. On the july 7 bombings, people were posting all the information that they could get up there and because it was continuing, it had hundreds of edits in the space of a few hours.
On wikipedia, fewer than 2 % of the users on wikipedia make most of the edits and apparently if 10% of its top users vanished, wikipedia would crumble and be destroyed.
I believe that wikipedia will keep on growing and expanding until eventually, it will fill the dreams of many people.

tagging and delicoius

Delicious is a website that could be considered a wiki because people add to each other's sites, sign in and can add or edit or comment on lots of things. It is called a social bookmarking site because you put up on your home page lots of websites that you can comment on or tag. Each person can add hundreds of bookmarks to their page and add lots of tags. The tags allow each person to search these sites and see which sites other people like and what they think of them. The tagging means that each person can add their viwe and if they have seen these sites before and what they think of them. This encourages other people to go to these sites if thier friends like them and they can chat on and about these websites. That is how it has become a social networking site as well.

This is a video explaining about social bookmarking



Tagging on flickr has moved on a lot. Photos and videos can be geotagged. This, as I mentioned in my last blog, is if a camera has a gps tracking device, then the photos can be tagged on a map. manual tagging is also easy. This allows people to search and easily group photos and videos by the place or what is in them. this allows people to find pictures of themselves or a place that they know well. They can then tag something and each photo builds up a history and it has lots of information about itself.

Flickr is a photo and video sharing website. Flickr was developed by Ludicorp in Canada. They launched Flickr in February 2004. It was originally a game called The Game Neverending,a massive multiplayer game for all the world. Users load their photos on the site and make them available to all other users (if privacy settings allow this).Similarly to Facebook, photos can be 'tagged', meaning that they are specifically labelled with a word, or a specific preson. So when another person searches the word, the photo tagged with that word will come up.In this way, hundreds of photos can be grouped into a category about that place or person. Photos can have lots and lots of tags so different people can easily share them. Now a new form of tagging has appeared, 'geotag'. This is, if a camera has GPS, then the photo will appear on a map.By this tagging, people can comment on each photo and each photo has a history of people who were there, or who remember something else about it. After 5 years in operation, Flickr claims to display more than 3 billion images. Each one of them has masses of information so the website holds so much information.


This video explains how it works.

Facebook privacy

The number 1 rule about social networking is to only put something on the web if you don't mind it being seen by others. By others I mean almost anyone at all. Be prepared to have what you put on the web twisted and used in other contexts. Only write something on anyone else's blog if you won't regret it or you wouldn't mind the whole world from seeing it on your own blog. On facebook it is possible to limit what certain people can see by using friend lists and changing your privacy settings. Facebook changed it's terms of service and this produced uproar. I think that it is ok for facebook to change its terms of service but only if people are warned about it and left in control. This could avoid the huge uproar at the change.You should check your privacy settings and make sure that you are fine with them.
Facebook shouldn't be so dominating in not letting you delete your account and letting go of your information. I think that facebook is ok if used responsibly. Then it can be good fun.
The most important thing on your facebook page is your privacy page. This is to help with your safety for the future. The school, emoployers, teachers, family and friends have facebook and it is possible for them to access your information even if you do not want them to. DFacebook is not secure and some people either do not know this or do not care. If you are interviewing for a job and your employer sees a picture of you making a fool of yourself at a party, then they might not employ you. Having bad privacy could ruin your life or destroy friendships, So MAKE SURE THEY ARE AS YOU WANT THEM.