This source is a summary of different studies and papers regarding the VCR’s impact on consumers and media consumption. I will focus on the paper by Lin, 1995. Lin views the VCR in terms of the emerging “home entertainment culture.” The VCR has altered the dynamic between consumers and other types of media because VCRs expanded the possible forms of media use and consumption. These new uses have redefined the “home entertainment culture,” meaning video viewing and the VCR’s capabilities have become substitutes for other “leisurely family activities.” As a result of these new forms of use and increased diversity of content, the VCR causes higher levels of user satisfaction. Specifically the argument is made that VCR users are likely to be more satisfied with their television viewing experience because of their ability to time shift. The other important point that Lin makes is that VCR users represent a different socio-economic segment that normal “heavy television” users.

Importance for thesis:

This source helps me in making the claim that media companies were short sighted in initially fighting the VCR.  There were two benefits from the VCR that media companies overlooked.  First, the VCR resulted in higher user satisfaction, which led to increased media consumption by VCR users.  Second, the VCR allowed access to new market segments, which due to demographics, was a desirable result.  However, these benefits were overlooked while media companies instead tried to defend their business models and the status quo.

"What's Digg? Digg is a technology news website that employs non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do."

I think we should think about allowing users to have the ability to add weight to posts here, in addition to assigning impact based on clicks. For instance, don't we want our important users to be able to tell us that a post represents an article that has a lot of weight.

Especially if we're thinking that people will have weights in addition to posts having weights.

another example of user-defined ranking. As we think about how to measure the impact of particular posts, I think we want to add some user-created aspect, and I think this is a better model than digg for rating items. I'm not sure how many icons Penntags will eventually be able to handle, but I like the simplicity of promoting and demoting sites here. reddit allows users to download bookmarklets so that they can register their like or dislike of a site while they're on it. I think, in the case of Penntags, we might like to have the option, in addition to copying an item, of voting it up or down for usefulness.

A review of reddit, a site that lets you view the web as rated by other people.

Helpful for suggesting 5 measures that can be used to weight the impact of a post:

• recursive - citerank
• use counts
• rating scores
• co-citation & hub-authority scores
• author self citations

While clearly aimed at journal article citation impact rankings, some of this could be useful to determine an impact factor for the tagging system.

In PennTags, I'd like to rate posts on their impact, and extend ratings to authors too. This could build into a matrix that supports 'tribal elders' in a community of learners. I would expect that faculty would be rated high in impact, since many students would copy or follow their posts. As their postings became more impactful, the faculty authors themselves would become more impactful too. But it is a democracy of postings, and students or staff could rise. Some, some kind of hubbing would need to be developed too.

Wow, all I can say is this is very complicated...