E-Fame and Internet Celebrities

The internet has opened up a world of instant communication opportunities, and these opportunities can have both positive and negative consequences.

To begin with, what is E-Fame? E-Fame is basically internet celebrity status. A person or event can become popular or notorious across the web in a matter of days. YouTube and other social media and networking outlets open the doors for internet users to voice their various talents or opinions. Specifically, weblogs, viral videos, and internet community interactions are the most prevalent routes to E-Fame.

In some cases, this can lead to amazing results and a league of dedicated internet fans. We can look to Justin Bieber's rise to fame as an example: his music career began with YouTube videos being posted for family members. Random internet users stumbled across his work and he grew a fan base. The popularity of his videos caused Scooter Braun, a former marketing executive of So So Def, to click on one of Bieber's 2007 YouTube videos. At this point, Justin Bieber's E-Fame turned into into real-life fame, as Scooter Braun introduced Bieber to Usher, leading to Bieber's current successful celebrity status.

Unfortunately, Justin Bieber's situation is less likely than the typical notoriety that bloggers and musicians experience on the world wide web (as we all know, bad news travels faster than good news). Let's look to another musician's experience with E-Fame: Rebecca Black.

Rebecca Black's E-Fame spurred from a single video. Let's take a look...

OK. So it is pretty annoyingly catchy, but I'm sure there are tons of videos just as confusing starring awkward teenagers and random rappers... but this video went viral and now Rebecca Black's name is known across millions of internet users. Some people are fans, but most people cringe at the mention of her name. With 375,683 likes and 2,706,251 dislikes, the criticism of her song "Friday" has led Ms. Black to E-Fame status. Her E-Fame has led to hate mail and death threats. Unfortunately, this is the reality for most E-Famous people.

Social posting sites such as myspace or 4chan can allow many misguided users to embarrass themselves or open themselves up to attack from other users. One myspace user's E-Fame has completely destroyed her life.

Kirsten Ostrenga became E-Famous under the alias of Kiki Kannibal. She began as a teenager in South Florida who posted edgy photos of herself on Myspace. The results were statutory rape, the suicide of her ex-boyfriend, death threats, vandalism, and online stalking. RollingStone Magazine posted an article on her tragic story five years after she earned this "internet celebrity" status.

All-in-all, the world of the wide web, and all of the social and media interactions that have spurred forth, can lead to fame and notoriety outside of newspapers and movies. E-Fame is a new class of fame; a person doesn't need to have money or even have a decent set of talents or knowledge. Internet users can choose to plaster their own names and faces all over the place, or post a video or two for friends and family, but both of these scenarios open the doors for adoration or abuse by other internet users.

Peer to Peer Networking

Peer-to-peer networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks between users, who are granted equal privilege within the network (thus the title ‘peers’), and who require no stable host or central server. Whereas in the client-server model there is a distinction between the one who supplies and the one who consumes, in a peer-to-peer network both peers in any given interaction are seen as both a supplier and a consumer. One of the great sources of publicity for peer-to-peer networking is due to the proliferation of peer-to-peer file sharing networks.

Peer-to-peer systems utilize abstract overlay networks on top of the native topology, rendering the network independent of the system’s physical topology. In structured P2P networks, peers are organized according to specific criteria, usually using distributed hash table-based (DHT) indexing. Unstructured P2P networks, however, do not provide an algorithm to organize network connections.

The peer-to-peer overlay network consists of each participating peer as a network node. Any two nodes that ‘know each other’ are linked, which is to say that a directed edge is formed between one node and another if the first peer knows the location of the other within the overlay network. The classification of a P2P system as structured or structured has to do with the way in which the nodes in the network are linked to one another.

There are several pros and cons to the use of such a network. On the plus side, within a given P2P network, each peer provides resources, including but not limited to bandwidth, computing power, storage space, etc. In a traditional client-server model each client presents only demands, which do nothing to improve the capacity of the network, whereas in P2P networks the system will grow with more interactions between peers. However, there is always the risk that non-secure codes could allow remote access to data on a user’s computer or even compromise the security of the entire P2P network. Measures can, of course, be taken (and today often are) in order to enforce file verification for security purposes on many networks; among these security measures are more advanced encryption methods, chunk verification and newer hashing methods. Internet service providers also tend to come down heavily on P2P networks, given their relatively heavy bandwidth use as compared to the most common browser activities (e-mail, etc.)

As much controversy as the illegal dissemination of protected content on P2P nations has aroused, this genre of network has also inspired some to view other topics on a peer-to-peer rather than server-client basis. Examples include the projected ideas of peer distribution, peer governance and peer property.

3D on the internet

3D is huge today. With the overwhelming influx of 3D movies in the past few years, and now the growing numbers of 3D enabled televisions and home video cameras, everybody wants 3D. It seems, the last frontier for this is the internet, and the ball is already rolling and we may soon have websites in 3D.

3D on the internet is not a new initiative. In the mid 90s a markup language called VRML (virtual reality markup language) was created to try and bring 3d to the web. Only surface colors could be defined, and it was relatively low fidelity in regard to the realism of rendered objects and environments. For it’s time it was a powerful tool, but ultimately did not succeed. It was used very sparingly, mostly due to long load times due to the bandwidth it required. It was succeeded by another language, X3D

X3D replaced VRML, it is XML based and an ISO standard formatting language. X3D supports more refined rendering quality than VRML, as well as shading and texturing of the 3D files. It also supports open source standards like XML, DOM and XPath, which allow for the inclusion of tools like an exporter and an editor. X3D has many applications, many of which are based in open source software. One such application is the program Blender which is a free open source 3D graphics application.

Google is also on point with the development of a functional 3D internet, as they are with most cutting edge web technology and applications,. They released a web based 3D api, called O3D which allows web developers to add 3D content to web pages. Developers can embed a regular obj file in a web site, and users can articulate and explore the 3D element right on the page. The beta was released in 2009, and while not many developers have taken advantage of it as yet, Google has been updating and expanding it since then, and it is now out of beta. Currently it is a plug-in which users must download in order to view the 3D content, but eventually the software will be built into browsers.

We are just in the infancy of the practical implementation of 3D on the internet. With the gradual release of HTML5, which will support more advanced 3D capabilities we will be seeing much more of this in the future. Some of the most obvious applications for 3D on the internet are games and advertisements, already two of the biggest online areas. Being able to manipulate and game in 3D environments, as simulated in the O3D video above, would completely revolutionize the online gaming industry.

This past summer I worked at a company called Direct Dimensions, who deal in the scanning and 3D digitizing of all kinds of objects and environments, from buildings and airplanes, to crime scenes and jewelry. I worked on a project called ShapeShot, which, using software from a company called Dimensional Imaging, digitizes faces in full color using a regular digital camera.

The video above shows the same system, but using video camera to capture 3d facial movies instead of images. The possible applications for having a 3D avatar of yourself for use on the web could prove interesting. It allows you to have a personalized avatar for that 3D game you will play on the internet in the future, or buy a bobblehead of yourself from an online retailer, or try on glasses or a hat from an online store, before you put in on at home to see how it looks.

We are just on the edge of the possible practical applications for a 3D enabled internet, and it will be very interesting to watch this new technology take hold in the coming decade.

sources:

http://news.cnet.com/google-tries-jump-starting-3d-web-with-o3d/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X3D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O3D

http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/