Never Too Old for a PJ Party

Well as my winter break from school is fast approaching its end, I have collected a great many pictures and videos to share with my vast* blog audience. For this particular post, I have a video taken from the pajama party thrown by my good friend Tyler Glass (with help from his friends and family, of course). It should be noted that this video was taken close to the end of the night (somewhere around 2:00am, as far as anyone knows). After many hours of too much fun, this is what becomes of my friends and me. Enjoy!

Anyway, thanks for watching. I'm gonna get back to making other videos that I have recently taken so be sure to stop back soon and check them out!
*The term "vast" is an exaggeration and in no way is a true descriptor for this blog's audience. 

A few of my favorite things.

Well, Christmas time is upon us (it's actually Christmas Eve right now as I type this) and that means I am not in school at the moment which also means that I am back in my hometown of Sheldon, Iowa. This also means that Christmas music is constantly played on the radio, which is how I chose the title to this particular blog post because I heard this song twice today. Although, I will say I never knew that song from The Sound of Music was considered a Christmas tune until today, but that's beside the point.

Anyway, to further the chain, this means that the couple of weeks surrounding Christmas will be full of eating, drinking, and general merriment. For me, one facet of the general merriment is the sport of airsoft. For those of you who don't know, airsoft is a game similar to paintball in which players on opposite teams use "toy" guns to eliminate each other from the game (the term "toy" being used very loosely). The basic differences between the two sports are that airsoft guns are much more realistic looking than painball markers and shoot plastic BBs instead of paintballs. My friends and I enjoy playing airsoft very much and plan on having our first ever "snowy battle" in the next week.

To get myself even more pumped for the upcoming battle, I decided to do a little project to make myself some "snow camo." I bought a cheap, white, twin sized bed sheet, sewed and cut it to fit my needs, and then used spray paint to make it awesome. Below are progression pictures as well as the final product being worn by yours truly:

Fighting Carp Rugby Website

Hey everyone, welcome back to my blog. Since I'm done with my mass communications class for which I had this blog, I've decided to keep it going as my own personal blog. So, for my first post since the class ended, I decided I would promote the new website for the SCSU Men's Rugby team.

As a 4th year member of the team, it is exciting to finally see some work being done to the website which has not been updated since my freshman year. With the recently elected webmaster Kent Schaefer at the helm of the website building, the Carp finally have a good looking site to promote the team. I encourage all of you (the one or two that end up reading this) to take a look at the new and improved website and maybe we'll see you at a game or two this coming spring. Visit the site here.

That's it for now. Thanks for reading and I'll catch you all next time on The Chris Wagner Blog.

Looking Back...

Here we are at the end of the semester after what seems like a very short few months. I have written a lot about all kinds of things relating to media convergence and I hope my audience and fellow classmates have learned as much as I have. This week, with my final blog for my Comm 404 class, I am going to run through the semester and revisit our journey through the wonderful world of media convergence.

One of the first things we talked about was Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody. The most interesting part of Shirky’s book, for me, was this quote:

My Favorite Holiday: Black Friday

Welcome back everyone to a special edition blog post. I would write more but writing isn't as much fun as telling you myself in yet another edition of the Chris Wagner Blog Show! Enjoy!



And the main event:

Same Concept, Larger Scale

This week we continued reading The Whuffie Factor and this time the topic was community marketing. This part of the book was really another take on word-of-mouth marketing and the simplicity of it is really just that, simple. One line stuck out to me that really sums up the power and ease of community marketing, “140-character plain-text messages can be so much more powerful than million-dollar ads.”

The power of community marketing is not a new concept. People trust people they know and there is nothing new about that.

Is My Whuffie Showing?

I surely hope so! This week, we began reading The Whuffie Factor by Tara Hunt. This book is quite a refreshing change from the more text-book-oriented readings we have previously had. In The Whuffie Factor, Hunt talks about how using social networks, especially online, can help to build your social capital—known as whuffie—which is basically the culmination of all the relationships one has built over time in social networks.

To start off, I will go a little farther in depth about what whuffie is exactly.

The Power of Interactivity

Hello again everyone and welcome back to my blog on media convergence. This week we are wrapping up both Briggs’ Journalism Next and Grant and Meadows’ Communication Technology Update and Fundamentals. Today’s topic, you ask? We’ll be talking about the interactive audience in both journalism and advertising.

The Digital Future...Is Now!

Hello loyal fans (laughing to self), and welcome back to everyone’s favorite blog about media convergence (or at least everyone’s favorite blog about media convergence written by me). This week, we are talking about this mobile universe we are living in and how to better organize our digital lives. In a world where we rely on technology for nearly everything, this week’s readings proved to be very interesting.

There was a quote by New York Times writer John Markoff that really stuck out to me. He said, “The cell phone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer.”

Still images, audio, and video in mass communications

Here we are again, another week, another blog post. However, today this blog post has an extra special treat for all of you fans (the 2 or 3 classmates that might choose my blog to read). That treat is VIDEO! Yes, you read that right, this blog has a video of me explaining my thoughts on this week’s class readings. For those of you who dislike reading or are illiterate, you can simply watch the video as it will contain mostly the same information as this post you are about to read.



For those of you who chose to continue reading, this week’s blog topic is going to concentrate on the use of images, audio, and video in mass communications. I feel that this topic is only fitting for this week as we are using all three components in addition to the usual written blog.

IKEA: A model of media convergence

IKEA is an international home products Swedish corporation that designs and sells ready to assemble furniture, appliances and home accessories. It is the world’s largest furniture retailer (Wikipedia). In becoming the world’s largest furniture retailer, IKEA has utilized the mass media to reach its target audiences. The most extensively used mass medium has been the Internet. IKEA's website and social media are highly interactive which allows their target audiences to be active. Thus, IKEA has done something right. The following paragraphs discuss this “something right” with some suggestions on how to improve on it.

IKEA’s website (ww.ikea.com) is interactive from the moment the audience enters it. The audience must select which country or location they are in; Europe, North America, Middle East, Asia Pacific and Caribbean. For our purposes, the United States website will be discussed. When the audience selects the United States, they are overwhelmed by the wealth of information and interactivity that displays.

Presentation Overviews

The exciting world of media convergence is always in motion and for this week’s blog post, I am going to reflect on the convergence topics touched on by my class mates from the past couple weeks. Each one of the topics covered was very interesting and the fact that there were no repeating topics or articles throughout the whole class just proves how diverse and extensive the world of media convergence is.

My topic being word-of-mouth advertising in online communities, I felt I needed to checkout a fellow classmate’s blog about word-of-mouth advertising in microblogs. Both the blog post and in-class presentation were very interesting and showed some key differences between WOM advertising in microblogs and that in more intimate online communities.

Word-of-Web: Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Online Communities

For this week’s blog post, I chose to evaluate an article that I found to be very interesting. The article is titled “Networked Narratives: Understanding Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Online Communities” and is a research study done by Rober t V. Kozinets, Kristine de Valck, Andrea C. Wojnicki, and Sarah J.S. Wilner. This study evaluated the impact of seeded word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing in online blogging communities and how WOM marketing can be used and improved in similar communities.

First of all, the article gave a bit of WOM marketing history. The first WOM model, developed in the 1940’s, was called the “Organic Interconsumer Influence Model.” This model said that the buyer-to-buyer conversations were more influential than marketing communications when it came to influencing adoption of a product. It occurred one consumer and another without direct influence of the marketer and was motivated by a consumer’s desire to help, warn, or inform another buyer.

Translating from journalism to advertising

This week's readings were all about the uses of online technology--blogs, websites, RSS feeds, etc.--in the field of mass communications.  An interesting point that I have noticed in these readings, as well as readings for other classes, is that in many texts for mass communications classes, the emphasis is usually put on the career of journalism. As a student of advertising, this adds another element to my analysis of these readings.  Not only must i consider the ideas presented in the text, but I must also translate these ideas into a format more suitable for advertising, and I have tried to do this as well as I could for this week's post.

Here Comes Everybody

In Clay Shirky's book, Here Comes Everybody, he shows how the connection between different types of online social tools such as blogging, file sharing, etc. are used together for improved group interaction in a way that could never have been achieved before these technologies existed. Shirky's opening case about the stolen/lost cell phone is an extreme, yet incredibly vivid example of the power that these online social tools have when it comes to organizing group conversation and even action.

This first example that Shirky gives is quite interesting to me. Not only because I had not heard of it before, but also because of his presentation of how none of it would have been possible just years before it happened. Until very recently, only very wealthy people or institutions had the means to reach an audience of millions or even thousands.If something of value were lost by someone just ten or fifteen years ago, it would be highly unlikely that they would be able to get it back at all, let alone in a manner as dramatic as Shirky's example. However, with the convergence of different online social tools that are available to many people, not to mention at a much more affordable price, it was possible to recover the stolen phone.

My First Blog Post: Changing Times

When I first began this short write-up for class, I was a bit unsure of where to start. I had never written a blog before, much less a blog for a class. After going through the readings, ideas began trickling into my mind so here is my first blog post.

As I began reading, one of the first things that I began to think about was the fact that technologies--namely the technologies involved with mass media--are changing faster today than they have ever before. I think about my great grandparents who have been around since the early 1900's and even thought I have only been around for a small portion of their lifetime, I feel that I have seen nearly as many advances in technology. I also thought about a video I had once seen on Youtube titled "Did You Know? 'We are living in exponential times,'" and you can watch it here. The video basically gives statistics about the growth of both modern technology and society in general and it provokes much thought about both of those topics.

Another thing that the readings made me think about, as I am sure many of my classmates will agree, was the future of careers in mass media industry. As a student in my last year of school, and with a less than ideal economy, I find myself thinking about my future career with some concern. However, something about the readings in the Briggs book put my mind at ease (at least a little bit). There is always talk about how digital media and the Internet are causing conventional forms of media to "die," but there was one quote in the book that really spoke to me. It said, "The canal system was decommissioned by the advent of railroads. But it wasn't the end of transportation." It reassured me that, even though many of the careers in my field may be on their way out, there will always be something to be done in the field of mass communications.