Week 2 blog

One website that uses interactivity as its main source of information input is www.koptalk.com. This is a totally interactive site that allows for people who are signed up to express opinions and to share their views with other people about Liverpool Football Club. This is usually in the form of posts in threads that follow on from each other. There are various roles people play on this site. The creator of the site, ‘Dunk’, creates most of the threads for people to comment on. He is in charge of the site and mediates what is allowed to be said. The rest of us just post our thoughts and look for people to comment back. We try to engage in lots of conversations about many different things. There are certain people who have major links with the club who can give us, the fans, certain inside information around transfers, finances or player habits for example.

 There is also a new form of interactivity on this site. It is called a ‘shout box’. This is available for all members to interact in a more colloquial chat situation.

 This interactivity with the website allows us to change the direction or face of the site with our input. It allows us to see what we want to see and read what we want to read. This is what in Lister’s book is called ‘registrational interactivity’. Whereby a certain amount of personal detail has to be included before the opportunity for interactivity can occur. This is very typical of bulletin boards, which is essentially what koptalk is.

 Hypertext is very much a part of this website. There are links everywhere to different sites and to access different parts of the very same site. For example in a normal thread, anyone can post a link to an outside website, or even embed a video into the thread. This normally happens the day after match days, where the goals [if any] are posted online in the form of a video.

 This use of hypertext is used everywhere on the Internet. As ‘surfers’ of the net now, we have come to know that websites are not linear. They do not read like a book, but more like a multi channel domain. You can pick and choose which link you want to click on and, Internet providing, you will get there. You do not need to go through 30 odd pages before you get to something you like.

 There are also adverts seeping into almost every site on the net now. These are also a form of hypertext, as you can then go onto those particular sites and branch out on a tangent from the original source.