I know what you are thinking…How could a guy who really seems like more of a fairy be a vampire? I mean REALLY?

Let me point out first that the above statement and some more of this article may be considered offensive to some people. Oh, and let me point out that I really don’t care. I actually will make a solid point and connection to this whole thing at some point here trust me.

Journalistic Integrity: Anyone Can Write Anything

We have been discussing in class how important information is to human culture and how the way it is being transferred is being revolutionized. Sometimes in the news it is better to be first than right. It also seems that sometimes in the news people do not care about the concept that an opinion without factual support is not fact and does not mean much.

Back in the beginning of last December, an article was published in the Washington Pennsylvania Observer-Reporter by a “journalist” named John Steigerwald that caused a bit of controversy. Steigerwald wrote about how he believed that Alexander Ovechkin (a hockey player for the Washington Capitals) was having a bad year statistically because he had previously been on steroids and stopped which caused his drop off. He claimed that a doctor who was recently busted for giving steroids to athletes, who did have a connection to the Washington Capitals at some point, had been supplying Ovechkin with performance enhancing drugs. He published this article with no evidence. He had no proof of any sort and later claimed he wrote the article based on hearsay. This article blew up the Hockey blogosphere with excitement because it was utterly ridiculous.

The point I am making with this, is that even people who are seen as credible make terrible and frankly stupid decisions. I think that this is important to think about when considering a wikipedia page. It is possible that even the articles used as sources on wikipedia cannot always be fully trusted. When using wikipedia it is always best to fact check.

Ryan Lambert from the Yahoo! Sports blog Puckdaddy, went on the radio with John Steigerwald to talk about how ridiculous these claims were. In this radio interview (which the majority of is a trainwreck) Lambert points out that he has just as much evidence to say that Sidney Crosby is a vampire as Steigerwald has to say Ovechkin used steroids and honestly, he has some really solid points.

If you want to listen to the vampire part go to the 17:45 mark into this video as well as the last 5 seconds :

Let me point out that this was the talk of the Hockey world for at least a week. Hockey fans happen to be very in tune with social media including blogs and twitter.

So now that all of that is out of the way, I want to look at Sidney Crosby’s Wikipedia page and Alex Ovechkin’s at the time of this. I went ahead and looked at the editing as well as the discussion for both of these players at this time and guess what???

NOTHING

There isn’t a single case of someone editing in that Crosby is a Vampire or that Ovechkin used steroids. There is also no discussion on it. To me this was really strange. When I started to look into what I wanted to do for this blog post I wanted to write about how I assumed people chose to edit Crosby’s or Ovechkin’s pages during all of this and there is nothing. Even to this day there is no mention of anything. This is fascinating to me.

Even though all this is true, if you go to their pages, you will see that they are cited very well.

The Audience

In the end I really think the reason for the lack of mention of all of this is the audience involved. Looking at the wikipedia pages of these two athletes it becomes clear that there is never much activity on the editing side or discussion side.  If you go back about 8 years ago, you can see that there were many more revisions of insults for both players and that it has been declining as the years passed.  I think it shows possibly that Hockey fans don’t care as much or maybe it says that the world doesn’t care enough about hockey. Considering the pages are also not updated with statistics as regularly as someone might assume, I guess I can assume that the world is just less interested in the sport. Which makes me sad.

I really do hope this was helpful to someone. I hope that someone else can see that the amount of editing or even insulting on a wikipedia page is largely due to how much people care about the subject. And also that wikipedia has the ability to be edited and fixed unlike a newspaper article or radio interview. Yes, you can go back and look at the changes people have made to a wikipedia page over time but I don’t think the majority of people take that as seriously as something printed.

If you want to learn more about Crosby the Vampire or Ovechkin the steroid user, Google it. There are discussions about it all over the internet.

I honestly cannot believe I just did this blog post on all of this but I stuck with it.

I really did like this little tutorial on the wikipedia page of the heavy metal umlaut and how pages on wikipedia are formed over time. The first thing I have to point out is the format of the video. I honestly love it. When I have been given the oppurtunity to learn like this, I can retain information much better but that is just me personally.

It is important to realize that anyone can edit a wikipedia page. Udell shows this by going over the history of this specific page and how it changes over time. Seeing the page undergo editing is interesting especially when someone decides to post something that has nothing to do with the subject matter. I really do think it is fascinating that there is a sort of wiki police out there making sure that the integrity of the pages is kept. The fact that this page had a back and forth between someone who thought they were a comedian and someone who wanted to keep the page in tact was made even better when I realized the date was 2004. It just goes to show that there have been people trying to help wikipedia and the way it spreads knowledge for a very long time.

I’ve decided that I want to do my research paper on the History of Apple. I am going to go back and look at how the company shaped the consumer world of technology and try and make sense of why they are now a 700 billion (and yes thats billion with a “B”) company.

LC 575 and LC 550

I found an article in Proquest by a woman named Holly Brady where she discusses the launch of two Apple computers- the LC 575 and the LC 550. The article is “Apple introduces two new education computers” from March of 1994 and goes on to explain in a good amount of detail the basics of the two computers.

Macintosh LC 575

At the time Brady believed that these two computers were on the forefront of technology for educational purposes. She goes on to describe the LC 575′s aspects saying it has a “ built-in CD-ROM drive, 160Mb hard drive, 14-inch Sony Trinitron color monitor, stereo speakers, and an internal microphone.”

160 MB hard drive- that is what this computer had. Its CRAZY to think about that. If you were to go and browse a consumer website to check and see what sort of hard drives are out there nowadays, you would see how drastic these numbers have changed in 18 years. Here is a good website to take a look at  http://www.newegg.com/Store/Category.aspx?Category=228&name=Desktop-PCs

If you scroll down you can see that a few computers have 500 GB hard disk drives and some have 1 to 2 terabytes. To put something like that into perspective just know that 1 TB is equal to 1,048,576 MB. That is a bit of an increase.

These two computers also had ethernet slots which could be used to network computers together. Not to say Apple invented this but the innovation was crucial to the shaping of the technology world.

The LC 550 at the time was priced around $1,199 which is a hefty sum of money if you take into account two things: 1. inflation 2. With increased technology $1,199 today will give you a much better bang for your buck.

The next part of the research shoudl be to figure out the hardware competitors to Apple. I would be curious to know what this company was doing at the time:

Yeah, Microsoft was a software company, but they did have a connection to these LC 550 and LC 575 computers. Microsoft was also into marketing to the educational world. More to come on that later…

Talking Hockey History: Wayne Gretzky

It is impossible to talk about the history of hockey without mentioning Wayne Gretzky. There’s a reason he is known as “The Great One.” At the time of his retirement, Gretzky held 61 NHL records. He played 20 years in the NHL (from 1979-1999) and amassed 2,857 points which included 894 goals. The next best statistical leader to ever play is Mark Messier, who has almost 1,000 fewer points and 200 fewer goals. This makes his records pretty much untouchable and with highlights like these it isn’t a wonder why:

Why Was He So Important?

Gretzky was important to the sport because he helped make people fans on the NHL. He was an unbelievable talent and people tuned in to watch him dominate. On August 9, 1988 he was traded from Edmonton to the L.A. Kings and that day will forever be considered one of the most important dates in NHL history. The trade would be comparable to the Chicago Bulls trading Michael Jordan midway through his career. Gretzky being traded was just unprecedented. Los Angeles was certainly not a hockey town before “The Great One” arrived, but after he did the Kings were instantly the talk of the town. His move also helped make more Americans aware and interested in the sport. The NHL was forever changed.

If you are still wondering how legendary Wayne Gretzky is to the sport of hockey, try to think of who in the league wears #99. No one does and no player ever will again.

History

The video “” talked about how the internet was slowly formed over time and this was really eye opening to me. I was unaware that the internet was formed through a series of countries having completely different intentions but all wanted to make communication easier in some way. The fact that the U.S. advanced the concept of a network like the internet because of Cold War is interesting as well as the fact that France had a major part in it because they experimented with it.

Things I learned in this video:

1. The beginning of the internet started in 1957
2. Sputnik was launched in 1957
3. DARPA was instrumental in conceptualizing the internet
4. Ther internet was created through a combination of the military, government, and commercial industries

Basic Technology

• Url stands for “uniform resource locator”
• HTML stands for ” HyperText Markup Language”

Those two bullet points are things that I did not know before reading the article about basic technologies behind the web. I have heard the terms before and probably even heard what they are abbreviated for but I always forget and it always interests me what they mean. To me, both URL and HTML don’t really make sense for what they are for but I suppose the definitions were created a long time ago. Besides that, I liked how the article pointed out the uniqueness of each website. I thought it was interesting that they pointed out how websites can constantly be changed unlike books. That’s an interesting concept to think about especially if you are of the belief that websites can constantly be changed for the better.

Well, I’m exhausted and this is how I feel right now.