Wesnoth Game Documentation - Storyline [explicit lyrics, not for kids] - Red Team

The story was created by story managers, and is the following:

Introduction

Rocco lives in a muddy village which is a very cool place for spending time, chatting and drinking coffee, but one can never become wealthy enough, that is at least what Rocco thinks. A nearby city has everything necessary to have fun with, and to do nice business. Rocco loves coffee and has proper knowldedge about running a cafeteria, but in the village called Pärnartu, people rather need bread and butter and have no means for spending time in cafeterias. As Rocco has no money for opening even a kiosk where he could sell coffee, and as he is a man of big business, it is 100% clear that he has to move over to a more urbanized area.
The closest urbanized area is a city of Bruzzano, where a spoiled son of Bernhard, Eduard, runs the chain of Cafeterias "Wobernard". Rocco applies for the position of the Chief Paristant of the "Wobernard" chain, but he is forced to sing and dance on the table. As he refuses to do it, he does not get the desired job. Being offended by arrogant urban bitch-asses, he decides to take some of "Wobernard" cafes by force. It is simple - you have to beat the shit out of the managers of the cafes, and then you can run the cafes as you wish. Having a terrible day full of blood and screaming is better than whole life without work in this god forsaken place.

E-Learning Week 3 - Tasks and Reflection

The first task was to create a group environment for our study group. 
First, I managed to gather the group in Skype for a conversation, and I also created a group environment in PBWorks.

For the first task we created a group conversation in Skype, after which we moved to Google Docs for some collaborative effort. This collaborative effort was fixed into a nice task 1. This task would need some feedback in order to see if it is done correctly or is there something more that needs to be added. [This point was already written on week 4]

The second task was to read and reflect on the following:

1. Which principles of groupwork, communities of practice and collaborative learning should a distributed group consider, when planning the design of an e-learning course?

Concerning groupwork, one should consider the following points (according to the reading material):

1. Distribute roles, and shift them if necessary.
2. Meet the deadlines and make sure everyone has done their jobs in the group.
3. Make sure everyone has the information that is necessary for the next tasks.
4. Encourage peer collaboration and ask others to remind of the work to be done.
5. Encourage and give peer feedback in order to feel good about the job that has been done and give courage for the next steps.
6. Use a collaborative environment in order to participate fully in groupwork.
7. Use an agregator in order to follow others' posts and try to make the most out of the information you get from there.

2. What was the most important thing you learned this week? What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?

Concerning groupwork, the experience was great. I was able to gather a group and make them participate as well. Everyone was very willing to join and had their spirits up, which was a good sign. To be honest, I considered that the group would be more passive, but I was positively surprised that I worked with such a great team. Even Alice, who joined the group later, was very positive and got her hands on the project.


3. What is your evaluation of this week's groupwork? (What went well and what did not? How did groupwork influence fulfilling your personal learning contract?)

I would evaluate our groupwork the following way:
First I managed to add every member to my Skype account and start an individual conversation with them, then we managed to fix (using Doodle) a common time when we should meet all together. I was very positive with the

4. Describe what has changed in your personal learning environment and in group environment?

My personal learning environment consists of the usual means, because this is a kind of system I have used during the whole IMKE learning period. On week 3 nothing changed in our group learning environment yet. A PbWiki environment was created in order to collaborate with the groupwork tasks. I created an introduction of all members as well as put some vital information to the environment.

Long Tail Model in New Media

The Long Tail marketing model enables to sell different goods which are covering a niche for a small number of people, in other words these are not mainstream products. As the lecture talked about selling books and audio, the other multimedia formats can be sold the same way. For example online movie renting is a great solution to engage lots of films which would be hidden or not present at all in the movie shops, can hold a perfect choice of older and newer, and perhaps even the worst films ever created. Usually there is interest in all kinds of films, and through online renting service a person would be able to get his or her favourite genres and enjoy them whenever he or she wants.

The long tail model is applied through selling content via Internet, thus not taking any physical space. People have to download content in order to watch it, and are asked to pay for watching the content. Now it does not really matter if the film itself is a niche product or a big hit, every person can find the film he or she likes, and watch it for a small fee. This model also keeps the maintenance costs low.

Another possibility to engage long tail model would be in selling information. News, blogs, podcasts, e-books, etc. can be a valuable source for anyone, but as there is not enough room for information in the libraries, it is a great opportunity to keep things on the “shelves” of online repositories for people to enjoy. Here the long tail model would be applied in form of an online repository and delivered to people through registered usage and/or payment. People now would be able to find even old and outdated information in any media format to
listen to, read or watch. I think such models make information available for all kinds of crowds. Digital information is a better source for all kinds of materials than analogue information. It is stored better, accessed more easily, and longer preserved than the original sources. This covers the need for every single person’s information need as well, and that is why this kind of model is valuable for present and future consumers.

Thoughts on Generating Revenue in New and Interactive Media.

Introduction

Interactive media is developing very fast, so that there are quite a number of changes happening every now and then. It is necessary to use creativity and some background research in order to define peoples’ interests in getting them addicted in something, and therefore getting a grip of a large amount of people to cleverly ask for revenue for the services they are willing to pay for. Although nowadays it is difficult to distinguish between
new and improved versions of making money through Internet, people are still making innovations in revenue making models.

Online communities

Since online communities are developing very fast, my guess is that a lot of the future models for generating revenue could come from these sites, including Twitter, Orkut or Facebook, where it is possible to get people hooked in many different actions. I think it is easily possible to gather a group of people through these websites, and through some kind of addictive action develop a further plan for gathering revenue for that. One can agitate a fund raising event or an auction widget. There is another possibility to make money, that is
playing online games in Facebook. These attract people easily, because they are simple and logical games. Through playing people buy virtual goods and in order to get more exclusive items, and pay for virtual money exchanged for real money. I believe that many kinds of events are possible revenue collectors as long as these actions keep people hooked up. For the latter people need to think of new ways to keep money coming in, because people tend to get bored with one thing.

Revenue Sharing Model in New Media

Participatory new media makes it possible to make profit through various channels where participation can be fun and engaging, making it even more valuable for the users. We have all become used that there is advertising flashing everywhere over the internet, either spam or something of interest, but earning revenue makes an ad more tempting for the user of the service. A service provider gets a higher sum of money and a lot of profit through such revenue system, but it is equally valuable for the service user, clients and the main company.
Not only ads are being sold this way, there is a possibility to sell different goods and get paid
by clicks from your site. In the following paragraphs I would like to describe three examples of participatory media revenue sharing models of Google AdSense, Qinteractive, and Amazon.com.