The Next New Thing

With the wide spread of internet and technology today, almost nothing is impossible to create. All we need is great and interesting ideas. As New York City is a place of mix cultures, a variety of people with different cultures and languages can be found easily.
I have an idea to create a new kind of new media: a small device connected to the internet that can translate into many different languages. All people who speak different languages can carry it on the street, and they can understand to each other. The little device will translate automatically. It should have an option for the users to create a file for the conversations; and that file can be archive directly to their own computers or send to their social networking sites. After all, the main purpose of the device is translation among people who can't speak other languages. In addition, this device should be cheap and easy to access for users, just like the internet.
This is just a little idea, there's still room  to expand it and make it better. What do you think?

P2P File Sharing

New media is broad in today's community. P2P file sharing is one of them.
File sharing is which users can store or save files like documents, music, photos, videos through the network, and they can get these files at any computer that has network connection for free.
P2P file sharing is quite similar to the file sharing. The only difference is that P2P is between peers. For example, one peer can distribute a file from his computer network, and other peers can get that file from their network.
Some examples of P2P file sharing include Bit Torrent, Napster,  and Open Nap.
File sharing is fast and convenient to share files through the network. Yet it has some negative aspects too, its legality. Brian Stelter and Brad Stone's article "Digital Pirates Winning Battle With Studios" points out that illegal copies videos like Batman were downloaded millions of times; this means a huge loss of revenue to Hollywood studios. As a result of piracy, copyrights law suits are brought.

Our Class Wiki - So Far

Throughout the semester so far, I have contributed few things into our class wiki.
The first topic was "New Media: About". I wrote some comments about the website.
Secondly, I added a subtitle under the Business section "How Business Recruiters use social networking". It explained how some of the companies use social media to look for talented workers.
Thirdly, under Critical Issues I added another subtitle "New Media and Privacy Tips". It showed some safety tips to protect and control personal information when using social networking.
References were created for each of the above topics.
Lastly, I added two images, the logos for Facebook and Flickr including some additional notes in the Some of the New Media section.
Some of the material I posted on our class wiki were found when I was doing my term paper. The topics are closely related.
Later in the semester, I will investigate few more topics for contribution.

Privacy & Confidentiality

Privacy and confidentiality are important factors in the new media. Nowadays, loss of privacy on the social networking is becoming a big issues. The more information is lose, the less the users are going to trust the new media. Studies show that the younger online users have less privacy concern than the adults. Young users give out a lot more personal information on the social networking sites such as their name, home and work address, phone number, and etc. This information can be easily spread out online. Therefore, users should be aware of all information given out, they should always limit the access of their sites to strangers, only allow people they know. The social networking companies also must be careful when storing online users' private information. To keep a good and long term relationship between the users and new media companies, both parties have to deal all information carefully.

Advice to Baruch College

             New Media is a powerful tool not only good for communication, but also for education. Using the new media, college like Baruch College can improve a lot. 
              As a student here, I see that Baruch College is using Blackboard and email a lot on the interaction between faculties and students. There are many other types of social networking can connect these two parties like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wiki, and others. Once students joint to the college sites, the college can post information on it to keep all students informed about the college. For instance, the college may post the class cancellations due to Hurricane Sandy just happen a week ago.
              In addition, with the new media, I would like to advice Baruch College to open more online classes. Lots of students at Baruch College are in the work force. The more online class are offer, the more student register for them, and it can reduce the density in school during the school days. 
             As you can see, the new media has a potential growth in the future; Baruch College should consider using more to improve better.