Today I became reacquainted with html. I've been here before. I used Dreamweaver and Flash to create my own webspace in college and used html to add text to it. However it didn't seem so complicated back then.

First task of the day.

A brief tutorial on the basic html commands and how to insert an image into a body of text.

We have a projector in our teaching room now. So no more squinting for me, thank goodness.
Nigel said people are impressed when they see how easy it is to create text for a webpage using html. Hmm...I'm not so sure about that.

Last week my comments on blogging were probably not justified and I soon realised that there are plenty of blogs out there that I enjoy myself.

My favourites are www.gofugyourself.typepad.com, which I didn't even realise was a blog, and www.lunchinabox.net

Gofugyourself takes an irreverent look at the fashion faux pas of celebrities. With the tagline 'Fugly is the new pretty', it is unforgiving and hilarious. No celebrity escapes the wrath of the fugly girls, every inch of their look is dissected. Fugly stands for fantastically ugly. It features a section titled 'Frequent offenders' where celebs renowned for their style misdemeanours have their catalogue of errors analysed. The site was created by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan in 2004 who have now quit their jobs in the TV industry because of the overwhelming success of the site and the ad revenue it generates.

Lunchinabox is a blog written by Biggie a work at home mum and former expat, fluent in Japanese who lives in San Francisco.

The title of her blog refers to the Japanese cuisine of home packed meals called bento boxes which consist of rice. meat or fish and vegetables, presented in not so ordinary tupperware.

She is 'obsessed with cooking and building a faster, better packed lunch' and on her blog shares with readers the colourful and elaborate lunches she creates for her 3 year old.

The pictures look so delectable and good enough to eat, probably not the best thing to look at when you're hungry or if you're a foodie like me.

As a group we had a brief meeting last week Thursday to agree on a topic for our web resource. We have chosen to focus on virtual communities.

We are considering creating and maintaining an experimental or 'fake' MySpace page.

We are in agreement that is essential to define what is meant by the term 'community' before we proceed. Below are the definitions of community and virtual community. I will explore these in detail at a later stage.

A community is a social group of organisms sharing an environment, normally with shared interests. In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community#Location

A virtual community, e-community or online community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as letters, telephone, email or Usenet rather than face to face. If the mechanism is a computer network, it is called an online community. Virtual and online communities have also become a supplemental form of communication between people who know each other primarily in real life. Many means are used in social software separately or in combination, including text-based chatrooms and forums that use voice, video text or avatars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_communities

At the end of the lesson we came together as a group to discuss any ideas we had ruminated on during the past week.

Questions that emerged where how do artists create a fanbase or a buzz on MySpace?
Why are some artists more successful than others? How much of it is exploited by PR's and record companies?

We also seek to discover why individuals join other online communities, in particular Facebook, is it for narcissistic reasons or confirmation?

One thing I've observed is that we're thinking too much like cultural studies students which isn't necessarily a bad thing, however I think it may hinder our progress.

We are continuously trying to draw links between the topic of our project and new media theory, rather than concentrating on whether it will appeal to our peers for whom it is meant to inform.

We consulted Nigel, just to confirm we are on the right track. The response we received didn't exactly assuage any reservations we had about the idea for our project.

Nevertheless we are going to revise our idea and come up with some sort of structure for the content on our wiki by next week.