Though we’ve talked enough about Habermas and McLuhan, so this course has been refreshing. This course has opened my eyes to exactly how much social medias have a role in our lives. They’re the type of things we use unconsciously (sort of) on a daily basis. I feel still though I am much less consumed with social media then a lot of people my age. This may have changed as a result of this course (lol).

When I first joined facebook I didn’t feel threatened in any way. As I spent more time on the site though I started to realize that almost anybody who had a account could see my profile, and creepy people from different countries began adding me as a friend. After this I changed my privacy setting and filtered out my friends list to make sure only people I wanted seeing my profile were still on there. After a while you forget exactly who is capable of seeing your profile so I think it’s necessary to filter your friends every once in a while.

The only other site I have ever given personal information on is myspace maybe, years ago though I know there is nothing on there about myself as I cleared it out after I stopped using it. I guess some of my personal information is now on LinkedIn as a result of the past assignment, but none of that information seems threatening to me as it is all professional information that I wouldn’t mind sharing with people.

I cant think of any information that I do not have access to about myself that I want, especially that I would get through the internet? I am interested in seeing how other people answer this question.

I guess now that I think about it, this blog is also a source of information back to me but I also think there is little on here that could threaten me… maybe my sharing all my attitudes towards these things would tempt someone to prove me wrong…? (please don’t!)

I always had my privacy setting up high so that only people that are directly friends with me can see my profile. The only things they can see are my photos, favourite books and movies, and some can see certain parts of my wall. Now that I’ve ‘googled’ myself I’m realizing my privacy settings are not up high enough and I may need to change that. I know that I an consciously aware that what I’m putting up there is what people are seeing, so I don’t think there would be too many repercussions on that.

Otherwise I don’t have any stories where my privacy has been infringed nor do I have any friends except a friend of a friend got fired for her job because she wrote rude comments about her boss in her facebook status. Stuff like this is still privacy infringement but I think it is more that persons fault for posting rude comments like that because after all, facebook is still technically a public site. It just makes me more aware and conscious of what I put on my profile and who might see it.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v51/karlaisrealcool/searchsaved.jpg

I don’t really think you could gather much information about me other then the fact that I’m a brock student because most of my other searches are pretty random. Anteana, colour wheel, chief justice taney, cossette communications, boards of canada, benjamin curtis, and back sommi each really have nothing in common. The only links I can think of is if someone reading it had background knowledge in politics and law, because both chief justice taney and benjamin curtis were both supreme court justices in the states. Otherwise… most of these searches are random things I have interest in, or needed to refer to at some point. I don’t see my search words being very valuable to a third party but it is very difficult to make connections between them. Maybe if they chose a different sample, or looked at the entire list of searches which I’m sure are in the thousands (except not anymore because just recently deleted all my cookies ect)

For the next exercise the word I picked was: aloe vera. Randomly….

Google: probably the only search engine I use next to alta vista which I mainly use for picture searches only. Google return the first result – a link to the wikipedia page for aloe vera. Google also returned a result for ‘aloe juice’ which I expected. It’s a new popular drink. Also returned were a bunch of random medical sites discussing the medical uses of aloe. Google also returned a result leading to a youtube video which also doesn’t surprise me and there are often youtube videos in most of the searches I do on google. Maybe they sponsor each other in some way…

Yahoo: also return the wikipedia site as the first result, after two of their sponsored links. Surprisingly there were no links to the drink (aloe juice) as google did. Similarly to google, a bunch of medical sites were also in the results but they were different. There was also no youtube videos in this result.

Live: the live search had more similarities to google then yahoo, (or yahoo to google) though still only return 3 of the same sites including the wikipedia page and interestingly also the aloe juice website I’d been looking for. This really shows me how popular wikipedia is.

To be honest, i’ve been using wikipedia for years without having known exactly what a wiki is. I knew that the information was submited by everyone and anyone who wanted to, but i wasn’t aware that a ‘wiki’ had anything to do with anything outside of wikipedia. Wikis are incredibly useful for group work and sharing research and are an easy way to promote discourse in a large group of people.

I’m not sure if it’s one of those things where you notice that something is EVERYWHERE only after having it pointed out to you specifically because it was always there, or is newly emerging as fast as you’re noticing it. This is twitter for me. Hearing about it in class i was like.. ‘what is this, never heard of it, it has no purpose.’ Then i started seeing posters around the school promoting twitter, and it’s all over the internet now. In my marketing class it’s become another hot topic of conversation. I think if it wasn’t for 2p26, i would have no clue what was going on in regards to twitter.

Another thing, before 2p26 I had no idea about the practical uses of blogs. I thought they were only meant for whiney highschoolers (thats what people used them for when i was in high school!!). But things like corporate blogging showed me the practical uses of blogging. Being very marketing oriented, all these social network sites have opened my eyes up to a worldd for of free marketing on the internet and i love it.

 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/12/527/10

I will make every option public as I believe the purpose of the site is to get noticed but I feel that things like posting a picture of yourself is sort of irrelevant unless you’re looking to work in some area where looks matter? I’m not a model or anything so I don’t think people need to see a picture of me really in order to decide whether or not I’m qualified for a job.

I find it very weird that it asks you to connect with old classmates and co workers ect. If the site is supposed to help search for jobs it’s kind of weird that it incorporates socializing at the same time.

Originally when I first heard about this little assignment I thought it would be really useful because I’m currently looking for a job and having serious difficulty. But now that I’ve been on the site I’m thinking it’s less useful then I originally thought because one, I can’t figure it out, and two, it seems more like a place for socializing then finding a real job.

http://moblog.net/Techcrunch/

This is an example of a Moblog I found by googling ‘moblog’. There is a whole moblog site dedicated to mobile blogging. I searched around the site looking are various blogs and settled on this one. This is a blog for an event in the UK called TechCrunch I believe in order to keep people informed on the process of the event. Most of the blogs I visited on this site were very similar in that they all posted similar material. The majority of the content on this blog and most of the others I saw were short video clips which look like they were taken from cell phones, as well as cell phone pictures. There seems to be very little writing, I assume because there are posting from a cell phone and typing on cell phones is time consuming.

Photoblog

http://www.photoblog.com/storytaylor/

I spent a really long time trying to figure out the photoblog website looking for any blog that had more then one entry until I realized it only shows one per page. Not sure I like this idea but I guess it works better for loading times. I’m not really sure I like the over all concept of a photoblog in general because you can put photos on any blog and it doesn’t make sense to have a single blog devoted to only photos. I’m not sure if they have a limit to how many words you can have in the post, but all the photoblogs I looked at had little to no words except the titles of the photos mostly.

Videoblog

 http://crooksandliars.com/

Voted the best video blog by the weblogawards (http://2007.weblogawards.org/polls/best-video-blog-1.php). This blog is about exactly what the title says, crooks and liars. Mostly are videos from news interviews mostly related to various politicians that the maker seems to thing are crooks and liars. I found it difficult to find a strictly video blog though, this is the first type of blog I’ve searched from the list that does not have its own site devoted to that style of blogging. Another one I found was more of a personal style video blog in which the making took videos of themselves and their daily or weekly outings which I thought was a nice idea. I wont post the link though because it froze my computer L. Video Blogs are a good idea and I can see them becoming more popular with the rise of youtube. People can now become even more lazy without having to even read the blogs as they can simply watch blogs now.

Audioblog

http://nickbrendon.com/category/audioblog/

I also struggled to find an audio blog… this is about all I could find  that actually worked for me. It is the blog of some loser commenting on various movies I think and anything else he feels like commenting on. Though he will type most of what he has said also so you can read along with what he is saying. I’m not sure if my difficulty is because there are more technical difficulties involved in posting audio links or they’re just not very popular. With this and the video blog I think you need to have some sort of flash player or media player in order for it to work, which I know some people are very sketchy on downloading these type of applications; I for one am a little hesitant because the majority of them require frequent updates and downloading new versions that they seem to come out with every other week.

Corporate Blogging

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/08/08/15-companies-that-really-get-corporate-blogging/

This site Lists 15 companies that ‘really get’ corporate blogging and also has an article describing corporate blogs that are ‘doing it wrong

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/12/12/corporate-blogging-youre-doing-it-wrong/

The two corporate blogs I chose to look in to were the blog for Dell, (http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/direct2dell/) and the blog for Lenovo (http://lenovoblogs.com/).

The Dell blog, updated frequently, sometimes even multiple times per days offers multiple different blogs depending on a users interest or need. Their main page focuses on Dell and society and how Dell interacts with or effects society. They mostly post on things such as how they are becoming more green and environmentally friendly. Their categories range from Support, to events, to hot topics. Dell has found a way to really involve their customers and provide them with a huge range of options and content on their blogs, posting videos, articles and allowing their customers to ask questions and actually receive responses. It is formatted very simply and effectively showing all their topics in a list making it easy to navigate around the blog.

The Lenovo blog is a little bit more confusing though follows along the same line in terms of content. My only criticism is that it is a little more difficult to navigate as there is no clear list of categories. One thing I thought was innovative of them that I did not see on most other blogs is that they posted various links along the side of the blog where they have been mentioned on delicious. They also have an account with flickr which is also along the side of the blog making good use of other popular networking and bookmarking sites.

Corporate blogs are a great idea as it is one of the cheapest forms of marketing a company could use. With increasing internet usage every day it has the possibility to reach a huge amount and variety of people, though I think is most convenience with younger, technically knowledgeable people. Another benefit is that a  corporate blog lets you speak to customers directly and is much more personal then mass marketing and advertising and may actually allow companies to develop life long customers and close relationships with them by building their trust through communication.

I commented on Laura’s blog today as she was below my name on the list. I commented on her post about Wikis and social bookmarking sites. I have absolutely no idea how to use a track back but maybe I will fiddle with this later. http://lauraw89.wordpress.com/2009/02/03/wikis/#comment-3 this is the plain old regular link to her post and my comment.

The style and tone of her blog seems to be very relaxed as if she was speaking naturally in a conversation, which I think is similar to mine. I think this is how most blogs are and should be unless they were intended to be more profession, but in either case I think this is a good way to be more personal with those that are reading it. A little more detail and personal insight on the topics at hand may have made her blog more interesting to read.

Marshall Mcluhan on YouTube???

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7GvQdDQv8g

Old recording of Mcluhan discussing media extensions and the information age. Died in 1980. Interesting how he discusses and predicts the effects of information and communication media to a T. I first started studying him in highschool for a media class and since then have been discussing his concepts and related issues in basically all my comm classes. I especially like his concept of a Global Village.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/

This site is very similar to Digg. People post links, comment on them and rate them like they do in Digg. They have most of the same search fields and also have useful information as well as time wasting tools like Digg as well. I like stumbleupon better though because you don’t have to leave the site to view the posted content which is safer, and also faster.

http://xkcd.com/256/

Love this comic sometimes. It’s a map of the internet and the different groups that are on it. Though I don’t understand/ haven’t heard of half of the things/sites labeled on it, it’s pretty funny. Though I think it might a little outdated because facebook should probably be the size of Russia by now. Also where is google??? Rated second most innovative company (after apple of course) by businessweek. (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_17/b3981401.htm)

http://www.pcworld.com/article/159279/skype_growing.html?tk=rss_news

SKYPE is taking over apparently. My cousin told my family about it at least a year ago. We have family over in Germany who we attempted to communicate with through skype but we could not figure out how it works… maybe it’s less complicated now if 380 000 people are figuring it out every day.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/connectu-facebo.html

ConnectU sues facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg for stealing their idea? 65 million apparently. I think that’s absolutely ridiculous because to me all those social networking sites run off the same basic concepts… Though there are very few details released, I can’t imagine what kind of ideas Zuckerberg would have had to steal for it to be worth 65 million since those ideas seemed to be shared by all the other social networking sites I can think of…

The tag I searched for on all three sites was ‘Marshall Mcluhan’ First, Digg came up with 0 results, which doesn’t surprise me too much because I feel digg is more of a time waster sort of website. Just for kicks I tried to search the same thing on stumbleupon and it actually returned with far more results then I had expected, but am not surprised that it returned with more results then Digg… I guess stumbleupon is bigger and better then Digg, at least in the sense of useful and organized information as opposed to containing mostly garbage news stories, and random time wasting websites. Both Delicious and google returned with very similar results. Diigo added terms to my search that I had not entered such as ‘media’ which made a large majority of the results return many links that were not immediately related to Mcluhan.

One thing I dislike and find very frightening about wikis is how easily people can contribute. Though this is supposed to be one of the advantages of them, it is not very assuring of that all or any of the information is accurate. Also, I read on one of the websites that the LA times attempted to create a wiki but shortly had to be removed because it was defaced. I’m not sure what sort of precautionary measures can be taken to prevent or correct this when it happens but clearly it poses a threat. Also, in class Professor Kennedy was telling us about her friend in the states who purposefully incorrectly edited a page on wikipedia in order to research how long it would take for moderators to find and correct it and found that it was caught much quicker then they had expected. This is a little bit reassuring, though wikipedia is probably much more moderated then other wikis.

I don’t think I would ever create one, at least not anytime soon because I cannot think of any reason or use I would have to create one. I probably visit wikipedia everyday at least once. I find it extremely useful as most of the stuff on it is written in simple, very readable terms because it really isn’t meant for academic purposes, and also is written by people probably just like me! I know they say in school that wikipedia is not a valid source, but I often start off any research topic by exploring wikipedia 1, because of it’s simplicity and readability, but 2, also because it often provides useful links to other information on the topic as it encourages people to source their contributions.

For some reason neither of the business wiki articles would open for me so I could not have a chance to read those, but speaking from personal opinion, I can see potential useful traits in using wikis for business. Since regular people are the ones adding and editing information, a wiki for a business would be very useful for testimonial purposes. It would allow people to comment on the success or failings of a business and allow others to read information coming from others just like them. It would also allow people to contribute the latest news on the business or industry to expand people’s resources on the topic.

Tweeting has gone fairly well for me though I cannot figure out the hashtags application! One thing I found very interesting about twitter was that other people can track my tweets and search for key words. WhistlerBlackcomb added me very shortly after I posted about going snowboarding. I guess, like Professor Kennedy said in class about Gmail tracking your messages, WhistlerBlackcomb tracked my tweets! This introduced me to new ways to use twitter as they mainly commented on the conditions of the mountain and provided valuable information about the resort. From what I’ve seen so far most people including myself use it to comment in their activities, opinions and occasionally throw in a link to an article or piece of news.

According to the activity and also my own personal awareness, I have a medium sized network. The role that comes up most often in within my networks, are friends. This is probably because I have a very small family. I can generally reach all of my close ties and somewhat close ties through Instant Messaging, but find that there are still a large portion of my friends whom my main communication method is F2F. These are people such as my roommates, and a few of my friends from home who I only speak to when I am in town, as we rarely have time for chatting on msn with each other. All of the people in my VC and SC ties have a facebook account except one (my mom). Even my dad has facebook. I noticed though that very few of my close ties are people I often communicate with as I see them in person more often. Physical distance seems to be a determining factor in how frequently I use ICTs to contact my VC and SC ties. To me very close means people I attempt to keep in contact with regardless of distance, or people I see on a regular basis. I would also include people that I do not regularly see, though keep them in my thoughts and know they are doing the same, due to physical location and distance. Included in the somewhat close category were friends I see occasionally and are in my larger group of friends. Also included are more distant family members who I see very infrequently.

Part 2 – (I cannot figure out how to post a photo.. so heres the link to my prnt scrn on photobucket!)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v51/karlaisrealcool/socialnetwork.jpg

This was a really cool application! My graph turned out pretty much how I planned it, with a large cluster for my high school friends, a large cluster for my university friends, and multiple clusters for my other groups of friends. There were also quite a few random people off in either direction with very few links to them. When looking at our similar keywords, and interests etc, I realized I have very few similarities with any of my friends, though this may be because I have very little personal information about myself on facebook. My biggest area with similarities is in the groups I join, mainly because the majority were recommended to me by friends. From this application I learned that I have less in common with certain people that I though. Though I already knew I have multiple circles of close friends, it was very interesting to see them all laid out, though this graph is not the most accurate, as I would have placed some people in different places (plus people lie on facebook.) Social networking sites are important to everyone in order to keep in touch. My dad recently got a facebook account and has found many people he went to university with, and even high school! Seeing as my dad is nearly 60 I think he will not find it very useful as it is more a networking site for a younger generation. I do not use facebook as much as most people, and do not search for people very often though it is nice when you come back into contact with an old friend. Facebook has also been useful for in business (actually) as many of my co workers are members of facebook. The company I worked for is going to be closing and outsourcing their work and therefore people will likely lose contact with each other, bus facebook has helped me to keep in touch with many of them (most importantly it has helped me connect with people who will like help get me a job in the future.)