2P26

I thought that 2P26 was a great class! I really enjoyed being able to experience all the different social medias. I must say, at first it was really frustrating signing up for all of them but in the end I loved being able to use all the sites and learning how people use them and why. I also really enjoyed posting blogs because it gave me an opportunity to reflect upon various things in the course. Until this course I never realized how big the information society was. I guess it could be because I refrain from using a lot of sites unless I have to because I really find it a hassle to sign up and learn how to use them on my own. Overall, this course was very enjoyable and this is probably because we had an amazing prof who made it enjoyable!

Commodifying Personal Information

To maintain my privacy online I usually put restrictions to accounts that I create. For example, my Facebook account I restrict my page to only people that I know. I do this because I don’t like the idea of having people that I don’t know to know things about me. My only concern is allowing people to have access to this information whenever they would like. I don’t really mind allowing marketers and people of such to have information about what I’m interested in and what my likes are dislikes are because I see this kind of being a good thing because if they know I like something then I may see more advertisements pertaining to my likes and interests which I don’t mind. What I do mind is receiving junk mail about these things. I prefer to see and choose what I look into rather than receiving an email or something, I don’t like being contacted or bothered. 

Privacy

The privacy issues that are most important to me are the ones that allow me to limit my profile to people that I only accept as friends and personal information. I don’t like to share things with random people so I prefer to be able to control who I accept as friends and what they can view on my profile. I really wouldn’t like if someone that I didn’t know was snooping around n my profile. I feel that whatever I decide to post should be only accessible to certain people which I know. I also don’t like random people reading my personal information like my email address and my birthday.

On Facebook I share my birthday without the year, pictures of events and things of such that I have been to, my wall and my networks with my friends. I share these things because I feel like I have control over what pictures I put up and which I don’t. With people who search me I share my name, my display picture and my networks but nothing else. On Facebook I don’t share my tagged photos because I want control over what is displayed on my profile. I don’t share the year I was born because I feel like that is personal information. I also don’t share any contact information such as an address to where I live or a phone number where I can be reached because I don’t want everyone knowing those things, I feel like my email is good enough if they feel the need to contact me.

I find with Facebook in general it’s really hard to keep things private. If you limit your profile to someone they can always see your profile through someone else’s account. Personally, I don’t care about Facebook but the only reason that I don’t want to take down my profile is because there are so many people that I randomly talk to that is my friend on Facebook that I wouldn’t be able to have contact with if I took down my account. I think many people are in the same position as me but I guess to keep everything private you would just have to have a “boring” profile.

Search Engines

All the searches that I do are though Google. I find that I tend to search things school related for instance, things that we talk about in class that I need or want to know more about or things that I need to search for an assignment. The other few things that are there are different sites that I know are out there but I just don’t know the correct URL.

If an outsider was to look at all the words that I have searched I think they may be really confused as to who I am, most things don’t even relate. I have searched things such as “Bell”, weather network” and “Coca-cola”. It’s really hard to develop a profile of someone when just looking at the things that they search. I noticed that my searches are really random that it would be hard to develop a profile of me based on my search words.

To a third party my searches could possibly be useful. I find that I search a lot of companies and that’s mostly because of school but there are a few companies that I do search on my own. I think it the companies that I search could possibly market their products to me because they could think that I’m interested in their product rather than thinking that I’m just searching their company for information on their company and not necessarily their products. Other than marketing products to me I don’t really see how my searches would be useful to others.

The word that I chose to search on Live, Google and Yahoo was the word “government”. With Google I found that most of my results were international and American except for the last one on the first page. With Live I found that there were mostly links for me to find the definition of the word and with Yahoo I found that most of it had to do with the Canadian government. Both Google and Live had Wikipedia results. I find it strange that there weren’t a lot of Canadian related results for my Google search because I do have a Gmail and I use Google a lot so I just thought most of my searches would end up being Canadian.

Update on Bookmarking

So I’ve decided to use a bookmarking system to organize all the sites that I need to visit on a weekly or day to day basis. The bookmarking system is through Google. The sites that I chose to bookmark were the different emails that I use and the different social networking sites that I am a part of, and of course my blog J I didn’t really find it necessary before to bookmark sites but because I find that there are so many things that I am a part of now that to keep track of all of them I need to bookmark the site. It’s soooo much eaiser this way!

What I Have Learnt So Far In COMM2P26

There are so many things that I have learnt it this class so far. I find this course to be very helpful when it comes to exploring what is on the internet and it is also helpful to see the different ways in which people communicate on the internet. Three things in particular that I have learnt in this course so far are how to use the internet in so many different way that I never thought was possible, the use of blogs and the amount of social networking sites that are out there.

There are so many things in this course that I have learnt to do on the internet that I didn’t even know was out there. The amount of social networking site, blogs, wikis and things as such are overwhelming. In this course I was really able to experience a whole different world of the internet that I didn’t know was out there.

Before this course I never understood the purpose of a blog and I also never knew how to produce a blog. I think it’ such a great idea for people who want their voice heard on certain topics and issues to create a blog. Also, I find that it’s really great to have a personal blog because it gives people a chance to rant about things and receive feedback. Kind of like a journal but online and able to get feedback about things. I also find blogs a great way for businesses to cheaply talk about products and promotions and receive free feedback to better their company or products. Before this class I only knew that blogs existed but it never occurred to me to read any or even write my own.

The amount of social networking sites out there was a big surprise to me. Before this class I have only ever joined two social networking sites, Facebook and Hi5. I never even knew Twitter existed until now. I think Twitter is a good site to use when people have something to say but not have a lot to say to make a blog. It was amazing to see all the different social networking sites that people are associated with. There’s something that fits everyone’s personality type! The site that we looked at where people know where you are at all times was a bit scary for me. Personally, I don’t think anyone needs to know where someone is at all times…I find that I bit creepy!

LinkedIn

I found LinkedIn very easy to use. My only problem was figuring out what I felt comfortable posting. For now I just listed my prior work experience because I figured that, that kind of information is not really confidential anyways. I think that this site is an excellent way to get a job. It’s easy for employer to search potential employees and it’s easy for someone looking for a job to be found. My only concern with this site is how much of your work information is appropriate to post on the internet?

http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=41754340&locale=en_US&trk=tab_pro

Blogs

One of the sites that I had a look at that was a moblogging site was moblogs.com.au. There are many pictures that people upload from their phone of regular people doing everyday things like on a bus or at work. A photo blog that I checked out was “vfxy photoblogs” and on that blog I found that there were more vacation pictures that people would post and special events that they attended. On the video blogging site “LiveVideo” I found that people would post random things that they would post on a regular blog but instead of writing it they would video themselves saying whatever they needed to say.

I took a look at Coca-Cola’s blog and Starbucks. The Starbucks blog seem to have a combination of people blogging about several things such as Starbucks and the environment and different products that Starbucks introduces. Whereas, Coca-Cola includes things such as contests and things that happened in the company’s history. I believe that Coca-Cola’s blog is more successful because it has a variety of topics and includes videos.

I took a look at Peter’s blog and I found that our blogs were a bit different. I found mine to be somewhat more formal than mine. I made a comment on his nexus graph. When I did my graph I saw that the people that I had the most connection with were the people who I was the most closest with and so did he. It does make sense for that to happen because I mean we tend to be closer to people who share the same interests.

Social Bookmarking

Right now I don’t have anything to organize my bookmarks or favourites. I started to explore the Delicious site and I find it a bit more difficult to use than what I thought. However, the site does appear to be a great way to organize bookmarks. After exploring Digg and Diigo I would say that they are much easier to use than Delicious. The way that the sites are organized makes it easy for a new user to use. Personally, I don’t find these sites useful for me.

Twitter

I haven’t done much “tweeting” because this is really new for me. I usually don’t post anything thing as my status on Facebook or have a message on MSN. Sometimes I would randomly put something up but generally it’s not my thing. I haven’t really found anything interesting because I’m just getting use to the site.