Seminar 3 involved looking at our topic area and deciding what we want to look into further. I found a colleague's project quite interesting and such spent a fair amount of time discussing that.
In seminar four we were divided into groups looking into similar subject areas, we had quite an interesting discussion particularly as one group member was very anti-facebook and his project is to create a new social network that doesn't collect much personal information on people, another member of the group was studying privacy issues and raised the point that facebook liase with police enforcement in certain countries. The question then becomes how much information do they share and do they willingly give up information on all of their members? Has the internet in fact made it easier to spy and police people rather than being the home of free speech as it is so often championed to be. There are many high profile cases of the police using social media to catch and prosecute people at the moment that It seems that is indeed becoming easier for people to get hold of information about you. One particularly interesting debate that came up was that the mega upload owners were being extradited to the US of A because their website had a .com domain name and as such was controlled under US law which I was unaware of. The owner's are in trouble for facilitating copyright infringement rather than actually carrying it out ( some more on that here http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/16855279) , in another high profile case a UK student is being extradited over his website that shared links to TV and Movies online. How can it be that our government is allowing the USA to extradite our citizens that haven't broken the law in our country, surely this is wrong. In addition to this discussion we raised the point of why youtube and facebook have not faced similar action when they allow members to upload when there are often copyright infringing videos on youtube.
I have just finished 5,500 words on online collaboration so I want to focus my research in this area. My research will be a look into what makes people sign up for a website, this will be useful for my final project but also beyond that when I move into industry after. I have several potential membership site clients and this information would be invaluable to help build lucrative online communities. My experiment will therefore focus on the major social networks and on a few smaller networks and will take into account HCI factors with the end result being several web page designs. I will then ask users to sign up to one of the three but not explain why, once inside users will be presented with a short questionnaire and on filling this in an explanation of my research will be shown . I will then seek to analyse the results and test whether the page design that I predicted would be most popular was indeed the most popular.
