Reflection on Zazengo

1. As part of the Zazengo CyberARTS team I was a member of the recycling group. I helped come up with the name and logo for our group, Re(Use-Duce-Cycle). All of our group members did their part and so did I. I have done a recycling poster to help conserve the environment. All of our group members thought of the idea for making a video about recycling. Gal and a few technical supporters, have made this recycling video, where we showed how recycling can be used to restore used items. Roger and Reza were the main technical supporters who helped Gal filming and editing. I also contributed to the creation of this recycling video; I helped out with technical difficulties a few times. Remona was the team leader of our group and she had made several stories on Zazengo for our group. Maxim has also posted a story about residential metals recycling. Aftab has also created a story about recycling at our school, Northview. And our other group members helped out along the way, jobs such as researching information about what can be recycled, and other sorts of different recycling facts. I was also one of the people who did and helped out with research. I was more of a technical advisor and supporter in my group and in the class.
We created our Re(Duce-Use-Cycle) group on Zazengo, and everyone in my group joined and that’s where we created all of our stories and fact sheets about recycling. Zazengo has made it easy to find out what my other teammates were doing and creating. I could just go to stories and view what everyone has found and done.
Besides the group project I also had a few more jobs contributing to Zazengo. Maxim, Vlad, and I were making a tutorial of the site made in flash. Vlad and I were also the technical supporters for communication with Mr. Ford, with the whole video conference that we always had problems with because of the school network and their firewalls. And our whole class had a role to play in the “Inconvenient Truth” presentation, and the whole contest was made on Zazengo, people posted their work on the site and so on. And so the Zazengo website has made all of that possible.

2. When Zazengo started out, it was a very difficult and confusing site. If I look at it now I can definitely see that it’s much better and easier to navigate. As for the future of Zazengo; I think that it needs a bit more advertisement around the internet, so that people would be aware of it. If I could change a few things about this website it would be to make communication with other people, even if you never saw them in your life, easier. By that I mean to have a noticeable box at the start page with messages from other people, even though there is a box like that on the left side, I would arrange it differently; put it in the middle instead of the “project highlights”.
As for Zazengo being the next Facebook, I think there would need to be a lot more different things going-on on the start page. If you look at Facebook, their very first page has so many different options and invitations. And so, when people log on they don’t even have to look for anything to do on the site, they see the things right in front of them. People are lazy these days, and so they don’t want to look for anything, they want it to be given to them. And so to conclude I think the main objective for Zazengo to make it the next Facebook, is to make the start page more appealing and creative, with different kinds of options right there in front of the person.

3. Portfolio Screen picture above...

(Story converted to an Impact Story by Zazengo) 237