.....Cannabis and the media.....

Cannabis use is deemed as a crime in various countries across the world. the way in which this crime is perceived in the media varies as-well, from a positive representation in mediums such as films etc to negative representations in biased documentaries etc.  i have noticed from my research that the way in which it is perceived is all dependent on the sourcing medium that it originates from.  here is a example of this; notice the age status and the change in representation due to the age if that had been youths it would have most likely been represented in a more negative way.

Critical reasearch

my critical research topic is crime and the media i plan to look at the media depiction of cannabis and sub topics such as classification and mental and health effects and how they are displayed in the media. i will post some links to articles soon.

tom  

i am going to be concentrating on web 2.0 devlopment for my case study, with varouis social network sites to choose from, i am constantly trying to identify thier usp's thus discovering what makes these site appealing. i am reasearching about the features of certain social networking sites such as myspace.

HOME TASK

Chairman Markey, Ranking Member Upton, and Members of the Committee. It is my honor to appear before you today to discuss the future of the World Wide Web. I would like to offer some of my experience of having designed the original foundations of the Web, what I've learned from watching it grow, and some of the exciting and challenging developments I see in the future of the Web.

The special care we extend to the World Wide Web comes from a long tradition that democracies have of protecting their vital communications channels. We nurture and protect our information networks because they stand at the core of our economies, our democracies, and our cultural and personal lives. Of course, the imperative to assure the free flow of information has only grown given the global nature of the Internet and Web. As a Federal judge said in defense of freedom of expression on the Internet:

.[1]

The success of the World Wide Web, itself built on the open Internet, has depended on three critical factors: 1) unlimited links from any part of the Web to any other; 2) open technical standards as the basis for continued growth of innovation applications; and 3) separation of network layers, enabling independent innovation for network transport, routing and information applications. Today these characteristics of the Web are easily overlooked as obvious, self-maintaining, or just unimportant. [2]

How did the Web grow from nothing to the scale it is at today? From a technical perspective, the Web is a large collection of Web pages (written in the standard HTML format), linked to other pages (with the linked documents named using the URI standard), and accessed over the Internet (using the HTTP network protocol). In simple terms, the Web has grown because it's easy to write a Web page and easy to link to other pages. The story of the growth of the World Wide Web can be measured by the number of Web pages that are published and the number of links between pages. Starting with one page and one site just about 15 years ago, there are now over 100,000,000 web sites[3] with an estimated over 8 billion publicly accessible pages as of 2005.

The universality and flexibility of the Web's linking architecture has a unique capacity to break down boundaries of distance, language, and domains of knowledge. These traditional barriers fall away because the cost and complexity of a link is unaffected by most boundaries that divide other media. It's as easy to link from information about commercial law in the United States to commercial law in China, as it is to make the same link from Massachusetts' Commercial Code to that of Michigan. These links work even though they have to traverse boundaries of distance, network operators, computer operating systems, and a host of other technical details that previously served to divide information. Mails from one country traverse borders with minimal friction, and the cars we buy work on any roads we can find. Open infrastructures become general purpose infrastructure on top of which large scale social systems are built. Having described how the Web got to where it is, let us shift to the question of where it might go from here.

i belive that what chairman markey said is very, true the interent has proved to be a amazing meduim for all kinds of things, from tv guides to blogs etc all of which are hihghly demanded in our socieety, and it has a become a meduim of infomation that in some respects the modernt society cannot live without due to the fact that we have gotten so used to using it in our day to day lives. also the fact that the internet has much more exapansion to do is in my opinion very true with web applications like web 2.0 (myspace etc)

ARTICAL ON MOBILE PHONE MUSIC SERVICES :)

Record labels are predicting that this month's launch of three new mobile phone music services will usher a return of rising sales after years of decline.

Apple's music-playing iPhone grabbed the headlines with its arrival in Britain last week. But music executives are just as excited about the new unlimited downloads service launched on Vodafone. At the same time Nokia, the world's largest maker of mobile phones, has opened a digital music store here.

The world's biggest music company, Universal, is backing the MusicStation, the Vodafone service. Rob Wells, head of digital at Universal's international division, predicts the £1.99-a-week subscription service will have mass market appeal. "We are at a turning point in the UK," he says, predicting digital music sales here could offset falling CD sales within a year.

Global sales have been falling since 2000, down another 5% to $19.6bn (£9.4bn) last year, according to industry group IFPI. Although digital sales are rising fast, at a tenth of the total market, they have yet to make up for tumbling CD sales.

One place where the gap has been closed is Japan. Total music sales there edged up 1% last year. Japan's success in offsetting falling CD sales - something the IFPI calls reaching the "holy grail" - is largely attributed to the prevalence of mobile downloads.

"Mobile is obviously extremely important because you have the market reach and secondly, the type of demographics that are very important to the music industry will almost certainly have music-enabled mobile phones." There are already indications that mobile music sales are picking up in the UK. The Orange UK network says its music sales jumped 70% over the past six months and it expects them to double by the end of 2007.

PricewaterhouseCoopers analysts say that new handsets are helping the mobile music market move away from mere ringtones to full song downloads. They expect the UK mobile music market to almost double from a predicted $83m this year to $156m in 2011. The music industry's optimism is underscored by several barriers to mass market mobile sales that have disappeared, such as high data delivery tariffs.

UK industry association BPI also cites support from new business models such as subscription schemes and enhanced handsets - four out of 10 UK mobiles can now play music.

Philip Makinson at telecoms specialists Greenwich Consulting says at £1.99 a week MusicStation brings big changes for music buyers but not necessarily for music sellers.

"Can something like this save the music industry? Well, MusicStation per se in the short term no. Because firstly it's only on Vodafone at the moment and secondly it's very cheap, meaning that the actual revenue for the music industry per user can only be quite small."

1.how is the institution going to be affected by this change?
2.how are music sales represented at this moment in time?
3.how will this affect how the audience buys and listens to music?
4.how has this change started?

another iphone related post :D

It is just a matter 0f days until the i phone is released, and so i thought i should make a blog post about the i phone. As you can tell from the picture the i phone is not only a very highly sophisticated piece of technology but is also a very stylish fashion accessory,with its sleek black finish and ever so crisp details, some say that this phone was created by god himself (well maybe not god but im sure it was someone important)

I posted a video ( \/see below) showing a advert from the apple website about how the i phone can be used, this really shows how the media is converging with technology such as phones. The i phone seems to be deleting things that we have been using for hundreds of years like the map,a example is showed below:

friend:'Oh no it seems as though we're lost, and we don't have a map....we are going to die i just know it....and im so hungry(looks at me licking lips)

me: ah you need not worry my dear chum, because i have the i phone!

friend: hows that going to help us!?!

me: well, with its gps we have no need for barbaric inventions such as the map, and we can search for a restaurant so you need not look at me with such hungry lips

friend:all hail the i phone!

a future insight? who knows......lol

IPHONE......heres a little advert for the iphone to let you see what the hype is all about :)