What's to come in Week 14: Mobile, Gaming and Location-based apps.

This weeks topic in our Intro to Online Communities class is, “New Developments: Mobile, Gaming, Location-based apps, etc.” Our guest speaker will be Josh Lovison who is the Practice Lead for Mobile and Gaming at IPG Emerging Media Lab and is a contributing writer for the Lab and MediaPost blogs.

Week 13 Overview: The Social Strip

Just this las week the APOC class had the pleasure of hearing two local online community heroes, Alf Lamont (Director of Marketing and Development for the Comedy Store) and Majorie Kase (Co-founder of MarKyr Media), discuss how "The Social Strip" came to be what it is today. Here are some key points I gleaned from their discussion:

Marketing Chatroulette

Chatroulette’s creator, 17 year-old Andrey Ternovskiy, has received offers from web industry giants like Facebook and Google for his site but is shopping around before saying yes to anyone. Ternovskiy could easily sell Chatroulette today for $1 million if he so desired. Since its inception, Chatroulette has spawned dozens of similar anonymous video chat sites but in Jennifer Van Grove’s post, “Why Chatroulette Is More than Just Penises,” she touches upon several reasons why companies like Facebook and Google have their eyes specifically on Chatroulette:

The Secret to My Succe$$...APOC!!!

My year-long goal is to get the local VA site's user interface friendlier and functional. I have yet to get access into it's CMS, but have a good idea of what to start on. First of all, design. The site feels static. No, excuse me, it IS static. I want my eyes to tear up upon loading onto my screen. Much like the White House site...*drool (ok, maybe not that nice, I've got be realistic here).

snapshot of me (without a snapshot)

I'm currently working in the Office of External Affairs (Public Affairs) with the Department of Veterans Affairs in WLA negotiating and overseeing filming contracts with studios interested in filming on federally owned land. I have recently been tasked to revamp the GLA VA website and establish the agency's social networking presence. I graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a dual BA in Theatre and Digital Media Production and am currently working toward a MA in Communication Management from USC’s Charles Annenberg Weingarten Program on Online Communities (APOC).