Blog 1

Introducing me, Alyce Jayne Elliott. I am a 21 year old Journalism student at Griffith University and I am a casual news presenter for 105.7 Radio Metro. You can listen in every Wednesday at 4 O'clock to hear my news bulletin. For this week’s blog I will endeavour to explain the world of ‘Second Life’ and examine email phishing. I will also analyse blogging and if it is journalism?

So what is this ‘Second Life’ we learnt about in our first lecture? For those of you who don’t know, Second Life is an internet based virtual world, it enables users to interact with each other. Residents can explore, meet each other, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade items and services from one another, buy, sell and develop property and many more ‘real’ life like activities. It was launched in 2003 by Linden Research Inc. Since then approximately 13 million accounts have been registered, although a lot of them are inactive and some users have multiple accounts. In the lecture we watched a video clip which portrayed the great debate surrounding Second Life. It displayed the opinions of people for and against the idea of this ‘second life’. One main point being that chronic users of Second Life, should try getting a first life. Ideally it is up to the individual how much time and effort they want to spend in front of a computer screen.

In our second lecture we touched on this subject of ‘Email Phishing’Email phishing is when bulk email is sent to get money out of the receivers, other wise known as spam. We learnt that a lot of these types of emails appear to be from well known banks such as Commonwealth and Westpac. The sender uses the banks logo and requests the details of the receivers bank accounts. From a show of hands it was evident that almost everyone in the lecture theatre had received one of these emails at least once in there emailing life. Although, there were a handful of people who have never received a phishing email. Maybe those of us who are getting these emails daily, need to find out what spam filter thoes people are using.

Other than the lectures we had tutorials and readings which extended our understanding of blogging. Before New Communication Technologies, I thought blogging was just used as an online diary. Now I have a greater understand of blogging and how much it can impact readers. We even come across the debate ‘is blogging journalism?’ or are ‘bloggers, journalist?’ This is still an ongoing debate and honestly I believe it comes down to your own individual understanding and opinion. Either way, journalists and bloggers inform their audience on what they feel are important issues. Essentially blogging offers an ideal format for some aspects of the craft of Journalism. It can be seen as journalism in the form of entertainment.

That’s it for week two. I wonder what I will learn in week three?

Alyce Elliott
S2638654