Don’t call me an immature college student for this. Perhaps it was too many cups of coffee between morning classes or simply a random thought racing through the mind while walking through buildings, but I found myself thinking today that flatulence–or farts–were probably never a problem until the construction of buildings or the use of caves.

Literarily, farting first appeared in works such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales–more specifically in Miller’s Tale–and in Dante’s Divine Comedy according to Wikipedia. Both of these take place long after humans started residing inside structures.

The only way to know would be if we found cave drawings depicting gas release, but I would imagine there were much more important things to paint on the walls of caves than Blue Collar comedy.

Googling farting finds some interesting sites like this one, but not much academic study of the history of farting.

Maybe I will just have to buy the book, and stop blogging this before you really consider me immature.

Technorati tag: farts, flatulence, immaturity.

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Apparently, some media has talked up Street Wars as a violent and dangerous game. If you haven’t heard of it, Street Wars is a real life game of water gun assassin where contestants enter online and get assigned targets by the organizing body, the Shadow Government. Violent and a bad influence on young minds. Really?

I think it is pretty refreshing to hear about a game that gives you a bit of excitement without alcohol or drugs involved. While water guns technically involve shooting someone, it’s more like a game of tag than a mercenary battle. It’s just a little competition. At the same time, how sane is it to await your target inside apartments and in cars outside buildings for hours at a time? Regardless, the idea is great. I just wish they ran them in more cities.

Reminds me of the movie The Game from 1997.

Technorati tag: streetwars, media, violence, watergun.

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Quoted below is my online journalism coverage from the 7th International Symposium on Online Journalism. You can see the story online for right now at the symposium’s site or go to the story directly.

Looking at it now, there are some corrections I would make if I was editing this, but for writing it in less than half and hour and sending it in to get online right after the panel, I think it is pretty solid.

A New Digital Divide: Web 2.0 Leaves Society Behind
By Jacob Sloan
Multimedia journalism student at UT Austin

As the Web brings more community journalism and interactivity onto the Web, society leaves entire groups of citizens on the outside. Web 2.0 can only be utilized by those citizens who have the tools and know-how.

“The evacuees in Austin were forced to learn on the fly how to use these sorts of tools,” said Lou Rutigliano, a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin currently working with Austin Free-Net. “For many of them, they were signing up for email for the first time.”

Even current community journalism options such as EastAustin.com do not offer citizens much opportunity for feedback. With a great deal of advertising and only a link to send email feedback to the site, EastAustin.com does not give much of a chance for citizens to view each others comments or interact.

The Web 2.0 experience could offer a great deal for citizens in these situations or even the homeless outside of disasters. Similar to “hobo codes,” a type of urban tagging done by the homeless to identify locations where free meals or clothing can be obtained, the Web could be an incredibly powerful communication resource.

The difficulty in getting these citizens to use the Web comes from lack of computers available combined with language or knowledge barriers or simply a resistance to the Internet.

“A lot of people are just resistant to the idea of even getting online,” Rutigliano said.

Austin Free-Net tries to involve computers in the everyday lives of these citizens. Through showing them how to look up bus schedules, use email or even research potential employers, Free-Net integrates the Web into their lives.

“Matching up offline and online behaviors,” Rutigliano said. “That is how you are going to get people in there.”

Austin Free-Net is attempting to arrange classes on using the Web and software while people wait in line each week at the food pantry in hopes that more disadvantaged members of society will get online.

These concerns come at a time when many companies are concerned about leaving people and countries behind on the Web. AMD has created the PIC, or Personal Internet Communicator, in order to provide a low-cost Internet ready device for first-time technology users in high-growth markets like India, Brazil, Mexico and China.

April 8, 2006

Technorati tag: journalism, multimedia, Web 2.0, AMD, digitaldivide.

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