The photoshop assignment we’ve got was the following: we had to photoshop our own head into a famous picture.
The picture I chose is actually a picture of Oprah Winfrey, playing Sophia in the hitmovie “The Colour Purple”.
Ladies and gentlemen: the results.
It is with great pride that I present to you: the suckiest slideshow in the history of mankind. A bad fadout, nineties music and drunken pictures. The result of me fumbling around with so called Idiotproof Windows Moviemaker. As one can obviously tell, I’m so bad at this that I can’t even seem to be able to make it work with this drag-and-click kind of software. I’m very sorry, but it’s the best I could do.
Everyone knows what it feels like to want to be someone else. We all long to look different, act different, and be surrounded by different people, every now and then.
The Internet has made all of this possible. Online, anyone can be who they want to be, who they feel they should be in real life, or just someone they admire.
People are now able to reinvent themselves, anyway they seem fit. All thanks so a phenomenon called the Online Identity.Online Identities are most commonly used by network users, displaying themselves on forums, RPG’s or even online messengers. Though some people use their real name, most choose a different title, a pseudonym.
Usually, users can pick a visual representative of themselves, known as an avatar. This small picture is usually shown next to the chosen screen name.Online Identities are more then simply a name, it can go as far as people trusting the person behind it, making the user important to other people.
To lots of people, their online ID is more ‘real’ then their real life identity. Online there are no rules, or only the ones you’ve made up yourself. We’re no longer restricted by social codes or peer-pressure, lots of people using an online ID feel that they can finally be themselves and open up to all the things they keep inside most of the time.One of these people is a friend of mine, known online as DFX. He chose his name simply to hide himself while he posted his writings (short stories and some poetry) online. This way it was easy to hide from criticism, since it wasn’t really him, but DFX, who wrote them.
Currently, he’s known in several internet communities by his screen name. People ask him for advice, and are exited that he want’s to talk to them “In a way” he says “DFX is both someone to hide behind, as someone who’s more ‘me’ then me, all because there’s no direct physical contact between me and the other users.”
Online Identities can be used for various purposes. People may be looking for affection, for a way to express their sexuality, or simply to make friends. Online, anyone can choose to be anyone, but even though that may seem as a way to escape from everyday life, most people represent themselves in a way that is rather similar to their real life identity.
One way or another, the anonymity that the online world provides is not being used fully.
It seems as though most users of the World Wide Web are simply looking for another form of acknowledgement of their social skills, just like in our day to day reality.
Another blog about Online ID can be found here.
February 2005, two random guys thought it would be a nice idea to create an online community where whoever felt like it could upload and view video content.
By October 2006 Google paid $1.65 billion dollars for the company. Hurray! Success!YouTube works in a relatively simple way: register and you can upload as many video’s as you want, stay unregistered and you can pretty much watch all the video’s you want, except the ones who have been ‘flagged’ by the YouTube community, which means they contain content that some people may find shocking or offensive. These video’s can only be viewed by people over 18. Also, if the content of the video in question is against the YouTube rules, it will be removed.The founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim where all early employees of PayPal. They started YouTube in a garage, with just a few computers and Internet access. That was all it took.
By 2005, YouTube was founded one of the fastest growing websites and was rated 5th most popular website on Alexa, something even fast-growing MySpace couldn’t keep up with.One thing that YouTube unfortunatly had to deal with we’re copyright-lawsuits. Even though it’s official policy is to not show copyrighted content, ofcourse users all over the world uploaded videomaterial that did in fact had copyright on it, by example, the popular Saturday Night Live short Lazy Sunday and clips of the 2006 Olympics. NBC Universal took action against this by asking for the removal of some of its copyrighted content.
YouTube agreed with NBC and solved the problem by removing video’s, making agreements with three different media companies and by setting a new rule for uploaded video’s: none could be longer than ten minutes each.
Whether the latter is effective is rather questionable, users simply cut their video’s into pieces just under 10 minutes.Obviously, a succesful site like YouTube cannot stay unnoticed for long. The buzz around it consisted mostly of online word-of-mouth, but the incident involving NBC made the news. Soon, NBC realized the great possibilties of a videocommunity as YouTube and made an advertising deal. Now YouTube promotes NBC video’s.
CBS quickly followed NBC’s example.Several other sites have been released in order to compete with YouTube, such as Google Video and Yahoo Video, none of which have managed to fill YouTubes enormous shoes.
As said on this blog, the competition makes a huge effort in order to give their users as much freedom as YouTube does.
One of Youtubes relatively new tricks is the localization system. Several countries have their very own YouTube website, among which The Netherlands.
Another good thing to come from The Netherlands is YouTube phenomenon Esmee Denters, an 18 year old girl who started posting video’s on YouTube about a year ago. Now, her channel has 7.3 million views and over 82.000 subscribers. Her huge, mostly American fanbase attracted the attention of several American recordcompanies, among them Sony BMG.
In little over a year the young Ducth girl landed herself a recorddeal with Tenman Records, the new label of no one less than Justin Timberlake himself. He also took her on the European part of his world tour to open for him.
Esmee’s story is the absolute proof of the power of YouTube, reaching everyone from all over the world with video’s for everyone to see.
