How do the ideas from Walter Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" apply to contemporary digital media?
"The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced"
ummm right so basically he calls that Aura. I'm guessing it means that an original piece of art has accumulated many things over the years, it has "witnessed" things it i a part of history. a copy of that piece of art does not hold the same "aura" as that of the original because it has not passed through history.

There was a time when "Art" was made by artists who were skilled professionals. Now that anyone with a computer can create things digitally (music, images, videos, etc), what does that mean for "art"?
I think that digitally created things are still art. you still need some level of skill to create anything 'good' digitally, it's like saying just becauseI have access to a canvas and paint i can create a masterpiece. i think digitalization is a good thing because it is another medium and it broadens the range and possibilities for creation

Is a photoshopped image "authentic"?
it is authentically photoshopped. lol. what i mean is to take a photo and edit it in photoshop and then lie and say it wasn't edited at all and try and pass it off as it is is not authentic. but to photoshop a photo to display the techniques of photoshop and admit that it has been edited it is still authentic. the same can be said of photo that are edited in dark rooms.

Do digital "things" have an "aura" (in Benjamin's terms)?
original digitally created images that are presented as works of art should have an aura because they are created by a person who presents them as art works. just because they were done with a different medium doesn't make them any less arty. but then if it is just a print of some other art work then it would not have an aura

search engines

• How do search engines rank the stuff they find on the internet?
  Web search engines work by storing information about many web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. These pages are retrieved by a Web crawler (sometimes also known as a spider) — an automated Web browser which follows every link it sees. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed (for example, words are extracted from the titles, headings, or special fields called meta tags).

• who, or what, makes one page (that you might get in your search results) more useful than another one, so that it is put at the top of your search results?
  When a user enters a query into a search engine (typically by using key words), the engine examines its index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document's title and sometimes parts of the text. Most search engines support the use of the boolean operators AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query. Some search engines provide an advanced feature called proximity search which allows users to define the distance between keywords.

• what are some of your favourite search engines? why do you like one more than others?
  ask.com, dogpile.com, blackle.com, but usually just google.com I don't really have a preference I don't usually need overly comprehensive internet searches so the formats of the engines don't particularly bother me.