Web 2.0 Hype or Hapiness Response

This article brought up a lot of good points about accessibility problems surrounding the Internet and Web 2.0 applications. The author brought up technical, mental, and physical issues with accessibility, however, I feel that two of those three arguments are somewhat irrelevant.

The Internet is an extremely technical entity. It seems like everyday there is some new application or a new feature that looks to be the next big thing. The nature of Internet is to advance its technical features, and this can sometimes leave some users in the dust with their slow download times and their out-of-date PC's. To me, this is not a legitimate reason to slow or "dumb-down" the Internet. I'm not saying people should load up their sites with as much content as possible, but applications like facebook, twitter, digg, etc. really don't take an extremely long time to load. Even on a 56K modem, the only thing that takes a painfully long time are videos, and that's just simply unavoidable. From a web developers standpoint, I feel that the users who are reluctant to upgrade their technology are also the users who don't particularly care to use it, so why should a developer spend countless hours making a site more accessible when those people with 56K modems probably won't make use of it? In my experience, the users who do update their technology and do use the services are the ones who lose out, because that time spent making sites accessible could be spend improving the features that already exist.

From a mental standpoint, the article talks about old people being less inclined to try out new technologies. Is this really a developers responsibility? Again, from a developers standpoint, my job is to create software and applications that work as they've been designed. Making software more appealing to older generations really sounds like something for the marketing department, not the developers.

The last argument this paper made was the physical disconnection in Web 2.0. Well, they've got me there. The world of physical disabilities and 3rd party interpreting hardware (screen readers, etc.) is an absolute mess. The bottom line is that the internet is an extremely interactive medium, and those who's interaction is disabled in a certain way are bound to experience some limitations. Until more regulations are set in place for developers and third party software and hardware, this is an aspect of the web that i don't see drastically improving in the near future.

Video Podcast Topic

For my video podcast, I will be talking about some of the technology being used behind the 2009 Soul of Athens project. Our proud achievement this year was connecting Adobe Flash to our Drupal database. I plan on giving a brief description of how we did this, as well as talk about it's strengths and possibilities.

Creativity & Research Fair

My trip to this year's Creativity & Research Fair was an enjoyable experience. My favorite table that I visited would have to be the Digital Media Gamers, all of whom are good friends of mine. The group consisted of Tony Urso, Adam Moore, and Brandon Evans, although several other students have helped work on the games they were showing.

The group displayed two games they've produced: "Blazar" and "Financially Correct". Both games were fun to play, and showed a great deal of hard work and skill on the side of the production team. "Blazar" is the more complete game of the two, as "Financially Correct" is still in production.

This group has a lot of talent, and I'm very excited for the opportunities that may await them. Good luck guys!

Promotional Podcast on the Soul of Athens

I chose to interview Caroline Caine on the 2009 Soul of Athens project for my podcast. The Soul of Athens is my capstone project for my Interactive Multimedia major, so I decided to do my podcast about it. Both Caroline and I have been putting in countless hours into the project, so I figured a few more wouldn't hurt. I will be giving our marketing director a link to this podcast to let her decide if she would like to use it for actual promotional use.