b) creating an avatar

My avatar's name is Kaili Xuanzang (Kaili is my Mandarin name), and I found Second Life to be relatively entertaining for a while - once the novelty died down I wasn't too interested but I had fun creating an individual look for my avatar. The main thing I found annoying was that my avatar was bald and only in underwear, and I couldn't change that. It was like in between the weird smoke phase and having an actual avatar. Other than that I found that flying was much harder than I thought it would be - you don't control the avatar very well while flying. But generally speaking I found the program pretty easy to use as long as you're willing to read a few short tips and instructions to start you off (something I find many people don't think to be important ever).

To me this technology would mostly be used for wasting time and messing around in ways that you probably wouldn't in real life. I heard a couple of students in class talking about getting hit on after only being on the program for 10 minutes. However I don't think it offers much more than that since there are other more advanced technologies that we can use more simply for communication and other tools.

There are clearly opportunities to "talk" to people, but I doubt many people would generate any kind of lasting relationship (I say "many people" because I'm sure it's happened regardless of my personal take on the matter). For me it was more a means of entertaining myself for half an hour at a time. Personally I most like the aspect of building your own avatar exactly the way you want it. I made the Asian version of myself, since I was bored of creating similar characters (from when I was younger) that looked exactly like me (i.e. white), and it amused my friends back home in Taiwan.

I think that Second Life isn't really practical, and there isn't enough happening in it for our insanely fast-paced society to be enthralled by it for very long. We're also always expecting more from technology, and I found myself thinking right away "well this isn't very realistic" even though the graphics are pretty impressive overall. I also think that as a society we don't simply want to be cut off from people and live through our computers (most of the time at least). I personally had never heard of Second Life, and I don't think the technology is very widespread anymore.

a) creating a blog

The service I have chosen to use is Blogspot, because I know that it is really easy to set up and use. I don't have lots of time to spend working on it, but if I do want to improve it I know that I can pretty easily, and I also have friends who use it and are very familiar with the tools associated with it - so if I ever needed help I could turn to them really easily.

Setting up the blog was ridiculously easy. I've made blogs before (that pretty much died after about a week) but this program in particular was very user-friendly, and I greatly appreciated that. The one problem I did have was coming up with a name for the blog itself, but other than that it was very simple. To be honest it was almost frighteningly simple, and it just reinforced my knowledge of the fact that anyone can post anything on the internet.

I do feel like I'm talking to the void most of the time when I do use blogs, however there are opportunities for interactions with "real" people - others can make their own posts on your blog or comment on others' and I can do the same on other blogs. I actually like the feature where you can post the blogs that you follow, so that you share the more interesting ones with others.

I guess I would consider using blogs again after this class, but knowing my habit for not following through on these sort of things, I doubt my blogging would go anywhere. However I have friends that are avid bloggers and I really enjoy seeing the fascinating things they find on the internet.

One final thing that I just noticed - blogspot saves your posts as your typing them (every minute or so) in case you navigate away from the page by accident or erase important information!!!