Reflection on Wiki&Blogging&Researching

I've been so busy with editing the wiki and researching that I almost forgot the blog! but I will make it up now.

Okay, I will start with the technical stuff.....I've been editing the group wiki for a while now and sometimes I get really annoyed because it just does not want to do what I want!!:(( I know we should be happy that we don't need use Dreamweaver because that would take a long time for us..but sometimes I find the wiki too 'elementary': for ex. I can just write a text next to an image if I put both of them into a table...I mean I am getting better now but it takes much more time to design as I thought it would be..That's the BAD thing!

The GOOD thing is that the group project goes really well, we already have loads of things on our wiki, we just need to make it more user friendly: get some more pics also get some more theory but I think we are over the hardest bit as we have the basic structure of the site and now we know how we will realize our plan:))

BUT I am bit worried about the referencing!

• For example if I use a pic, that I found on yahoo, but I just use as an icon, to link to another wiki page do I need to include that in the bibliography??
  
• Should we put a separate bibliography in the end of each page (I did it that way) or should we have a bibliography in a separate page where we list all the books, pics etc. we used on the site??( I think the last year they did it like that)

Theoretical part of the wiki: My main problem is that I want to include everything:)..and as I am doing more and more research I have more and more material (so I need to stop now) and it's really hard not to get carried away and talk about things that are really interesting but actually does not fit into the 'online identity' theme. For example when I was doing the case study for the online vs. offline identity I found a really good article: a sex offender who has a Myspace page. The article (Jenn Shreve 2006) compared what he says about himself on his Myspace page and what is written on the Californian state sex offender list.

This case study not just raises the question of online/online identity but also:

• What rights criminals/sex offenders have?
  
• Do they have a right to have a Myspace page??
  

Jenn Shreve (2006) investigates these issues: I added the full article to the related links. It is called: MySpace Faces a Perp Problem if you want to read it.

But the main point is that it is not against to be on the site itself! According to Myspace terms the only people who can’t have a Myspace account: are people under the age of 14, those who provide false information or fail to maintain the accuracy of their profile, or people who use the service unlawfully. (Jenn Shreve 2006)
Of course it's not just sex offenders who gave fake details, but the Networking sites cannot oblige people to identify themselves for ex. with credit card numbers because it would make it difficult for bands, teenagers to use the site.

So it's not against the law if a sex offender is on the site, but it is against the law if the sex offender is using the site to 'paedophilic', ‘sex offending’ purposes. Anyways, check out the article if you want to get more info.

My other worry is coming from the credibility of the online sources! We talked about this issue at the New Technology class with Chris Sams when we had seminars on News online:the blogs and the ‘democratising tendency of the internet’ (what a big worldJ) that how nowadays all kind of people write all kind of stuff on the internet. and now I can really feel how hard is to filter out which are the reliable ones. Personally before I only relied on sites like: economist.com, guardian.co.uk but the problem is that there are not many articles about online identity on these sites..

Finally, Yes, it's a good thing to have this blog!! as the wiki and the blog complement each other..what we can't put on the wiki we can put it here!! It also gives us a space where we can write about our own experience, worries during the class and the group project and if we look back in our blog we can refresh what we have learned during the class.