Two days ago, I did a review on IGN, a long-running review site for both games and for other forms of Media.
Giant Bomb is of a somewhat different breed. The focus here is entirely on games, but because of this narrowed focus, they can provide more for their user than just review and news.
Giant Bomb offers a wide variety of services for the user. Along with the reviews and latest game news, it provides a list of new releases, game guides, browsing options ranging from characters to companies, and a great deal more content relating to video games.
The sharper focus provides a closer look at a specific idea, but at the same time takes away from the site the ability to cover a wider range of interests, and thus causes it to be a bit more obscure than more generalized websites.
All the same, the variety and ease of navigation makes it a useful site for those who have an interest in video games, and if that is what they wanted to make, a site to cater to gamers, then they succeeded.
Well, this is it. My last post. I just want to thank everybody who read my blog and posted comments, and I want to thank my professor for introducing me to the Blog. Thank you, and I hope to see you all again soon!
Posted in Uncategorized December 7, 2009
Slight delay due to some server issues with Edublogs, here’s my review of the next site.
People are always looking to simplify their shopping experience for the holidays, and one of the most prominent ways for them to do so is to bargain shop online. Some services, like Amazon.com or Ebay offer a wide variety of products for people looking for a low cost and an easy shipping experience.
Woot has a slightly different approach. The number of products that it sells per day is always consistent: one.
Woot is a bit of an oddity in the internet market. Rather than trying to offer as many products as possible to take advantage of the longtail phenomena, Woot offers one product per day to as many customers as possible. The advantage they gain through this method seems to be that they encourage people to buy the one product on the principle that it will never be available again on Woot.
Though I haven’t personally used Woot, the community seems to be fairly strong. With its own blog and posting forum, it seems to encourage people to share deals with each other, as well as other interesting pieces of news.
While I’m not sure how handy the one-deal-a-day setup is for Woot users, it seems to be somewhat popular, and the community aspect of it ensures that buyers retain an interest beyond their first purchase. Having been around for a surprisingly long time (5 years, according to the copyright at the bottom of the site), it must be doing at least successful enough to continue to operate, so I can only assume that it is a useful tool for at least some shoppers.
Posted in Uncategorized December 7, 2009
IGN is a far more ingrained web site than the previous review: for a game development team, it represents a major group for rating and reviewing their games, and for gamers, it represents a news feed for information on the gaming community.
Founded in 1996, IGN’s major feature is in the game reviews it offers for major working titles, and the news that it brings in from the industry on titles that are in the works.
However, IGN spans beyond just game reports. It also offers updates on Movie, TV, and Comic Book venues, and while the focus is still on games (The name being an acronym for “Imagine Games Network”), and the community forums that it has open largely focus on game reports and rumors.
IGN is a fair bit bigger than Giants in the Playground, but it covers a wide range of topics very effectively, separating the game, movie/tv and comic reviews/news feed into different parts of the site. While the site may seem a bit intimidating in its sheer size, the level of information being offered is enormous, and much of it is of high quality, so it is definitely worth checking out.
Posted in Uncategorized December 5, 2009
Okay, so it’s technically Friday now, but according to my poorly-adjusted internal clock, it’s still Thursday, so like I promised, here’s the write-up for the first page.
Giants in the Playground is to the Dungeons and Dragons community what XKCD is to the rest of the net community. It’s a webcomic at its heart (A stick-figure comic, just to drive my parallel home), but so much more than that.
GitP is run by creative mind Rich Burlew, who writes and illustrates the comic “Order of the Stick”, a satirical webcomic based on the antics of a group of adventurers who follow the rules of 3.5 Dungeons and Dragons. Even before writing this comic, Rich had a strong history of the game, from being a player to actively writing game modules for Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns and sells DnD materials. And that is initially what he posted on his site, for months, without much recognition.
When he started posting his stick-figure comics, however, the site started to grow, and exploded in popularity in 2004. The site became popular enough for him to live off of the income from book and merchandise sales alone.
The site also hosts a wide-sweeping forum, and while the focus is largely on the comic now, there is plenty of discussion going on about DnD, as well as just about everything else, with the post count on the forums soaring well into the millions.
Saying much more about the site could turn into a rant, so let me conclude by saying that the site has a truly interesting history, and a very strong following, all earned by the hard work of one man doing what he does best.
Posted in Uncategorized December 4, 2009
Ah…naturally after missing the deadline I set for myself last week, it would take a few days for me to remember to actually announce which site I was going to review.
Well, it turns out there isn’t quite as much feedback as I would’ve liked. This is a bit disappointing, but nevertheless, I’ll work with what I’ve got.
Since I only received three different sites, I’ll be doing a review on ALL FOUR of the suggested sites. Starting tomorrow, I’ll review all four of the sites that were submitted to me in the previous post, in the following order.
1: Giants In the Playground : A web community based around a pen-and-paper-RPG-inspired Webcomic.
2: IGN : An expansive and well-published Game Review and News site.
3: Woot! : A site that offers cheap deals on a single product every day.
4: Giant Bomb : Another game review and news site, with a more casual and communal feel than IGN.
We’re nearing the end of the year here too, so this may be the closing of this blog. Thank you everyone who’s read and posted.
Posted in Uncategorized December 2, 2009
This week, I’m going to let my blog readers decide what part of the internet I’m going to write about. Because blogs are, after all, an open forum for information exchange, I want to hear from the readers what site they frequent most that leaves a strong impression on their minds.
So this week, I’m asking you to post a comment here, giving me a link to one site that you visit every day. If you don’t visit sites quite that often, choose one that you visit every other day. If you don’t visit sites that often, go for one you visit once a week. If you don’t visit sites that often, how did you get here?
On Friday night, I’ll be going through all the comments I’ve received and finding the one (or ones) that are most frequent, then doing a write-up on that site. I’ll be looking it over on Saturday, and doing the write-up on Sunday.
Feel free to post any type of site, but please only post ONE site. If you post more, only your first URL or site mention will be counted.
Posted in Uncategorized November 24, 2009
Today’s blog post is a bit bare-bones, but relevant to a later blog post. Instead of writing about something I found on the web, I’m simply going to post links to some of my favorite blogs.
Now most of these blogs are for the same class as this blog, and a few of them are just blogs that I happen to like. None of these are major blogs, because I’m not trying to emulate Technorati, but every one of them demonstrates solid blog-writing practice, and I suggest you check each one of them out.
I guess you could say this is my remedy (Or apology!) for never forming a proper blog roll.
At any rate, here are some of the blogs that I like, in no particular order.
Kplano
Our Digital Lives
Digital to what?
New Media and Digital Culture Discussion Board
New Media Theory and Digital Culture Blog
New Media Theory Blog
Knightly Reviews (Warning: Some content not safe for work)
The Cat-Muffinominicon
If your blog wasn’t included in this list, I’m sorry, but it can only be so long.
Come back later tonight (or tomorrow) and I’ll have a more interesting post for you all. : ) I think you’ll like it.
Posted in Uncategorized November 24, 2009
I don’t typically like to copy things, but this being my own work, and it being a pretty relevant bit of info for a blog like this, I’m sharing with you Assignment 11 from my IDT 518 class, which had me trying out a service called “Zotero”. It’s a rather handy citation tool, as you’ll see in this write-up…
(more…)
Posted in Uncategorized November 13, 2009
Well, it has been a full two weeks since I last posted on my blog. But now I’m back! Hope you didn’t miss me too badly! I’ll be trying to catch up on lost time now, so hopefully this week will give me enough time to write a few blog posts, rather than the usual one post.
But tonight’s dinner conversation at my parent’s house brought an interesting topic up; Online Television. Youtube has, for the longest time, provided the internet with a way to view clips from long-lost TV shows at a price of zero dollars, and have even encouraged viewers to catch up on old shows with the recent addition of the Shows category, which provides users with full channels of various TV shows by category. Now, sites like Hulu are providing ways to watch shows without even turning on the TV.
As far as long-term culture goes, the only negative effect I could forsee in this transition is the phasing out of television as the primary source for entertainment, and that has already begun to be a trend with the ever-increasing diversity of online distractions, but the problem with a site like Hulu is that it provides no original content, and limited advertising space, meaning that it essentially only makes money for itself. Television broadcasting, with a network of advertising parties and original content providers has an entire industry backing it, and the loss of livelihood there could prove to be dangerous.
Then again, news print survived the advent of TV, and Broadway survived the advent of the movie theater, so maybe it wont’ be so bad.
Posted in Uncategorized November 12, 2009
Starting tomorrow at 8:30 AM, I will be going down South to Maryland, then to Florida for a trip to visit my girlfriend. I will be keeping up with my regular course work via library computers, but to conserve time for essential work, I will not be doing my usual post next week. I will return on the weekend after next to make a new post, and will be doing a make-up post for the skipped week, but from October 23rd to the end of the month, do not expect to hear from this blog.
For this week, I submit to you a relatively new concept in academia: Electronic Journals. The growth of the web has been making these journals and aggrigators for journals a popular source for students seeking research materials. The only trouble is, if these tools get too popular, they may depopularize the use of physical texts and libraries. Still, it’s good to see knowledge spread.
Posted in Uncategorized October 22, 2009
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