Related Web Sites & Online Activities

Well then, part of the criteria that I thought I would struggle with might not be so bad after all. Related web sites I will leave till last as I want to cover one main subject that I am personally involved with, and many other users. How many? How does over 1 billion internet users world wide sound? A lot huh!

Online gaming! Ever since the dawn of the internet, we had speeds which were extremely slow compared with today’s connections. With technology revolutionising every year, computers becoming an everyday use; both within the office at work and at home during leisure time, it wouldn’t be a surprise that you would expect such big numbers of users being involved in such a wide range and complex social network.

From strategy games, to first person shooters, every second of the day a few users across the world will be involved in an online game of some sort. I personally am hooked to two games. One being www.americasarmy.com and the other being my Virtual Airline activities (Flight Simulator, of which is a simulation game). Onwards from this, they can then create more communities online.

Using the examples above, the game Americas Army allowed for a new type of community; clans! What is a clan? Simple answer, it is a group of users who play a similar game who join together as a group to play that game. Some even get involved in competitions (making it a real world event at the same time as still being online). With Flight Simulator members came together on a social network called VATSIM. This allowed flight simulator enthusiasts to come together and fly like real plots do in the real world. It is solely based around trying to make it as real as real life; but you carry this experience out in virtual worlds with the aid of the game and other software. I have personally experiecenced this, if you wish to read how I got on then you can find it here.

Web sites I would relate to the module are the following:

http://www.eurolinkva.co.nr > this is my virtual airline community.

http://news.bbc.co.uk > BBC News has blogs on uploaded articles.

http://www.technewsworld.com > News about how the world of Web2

http://forum.justflight.com/forum > A forum I am a part of (active full time)

One more I came across recently which surprised me was the channel 4 forums for ER. I recently looked at this forum to find out when the new series was to start. When I joined I realised that there was only two men including myself (might be more), and the rest were all female. It would seem there are communities out there which only have one dominant sex; in this case the dominant sex would be female. This isn’t such a surprise to me but evidence that it is on the internet (kind of like groups forming). You can find the ER forum here:

http://community.channel4.com/6/ubb.x?a=frm&s=162603557&f=9086031851

I will try and get my link for my post, but it was a while ago and may be archived. If you wish to search for it my name will be either ‘tall_guy_pete’ or ‘tallguypete’.