Post for Week of 10/27

This week was incredibly interesting in Dissecting the Internet.
On Tuesday we had a very special visitor, a serial entrepreneur who came to speak about digital marketing. I can tell you, my jaw was pretty much unhinged just after the first little intro video he showed us. I had no idea about some of those statistics he used, especially how much money Google makes off of paid advertisements. I really hand't thought that much about the ads before, usually just ignored them unless I was searching for a site that happened to have a paid ad. Also, on the subject of peer reviewed products/services, I wholeheartedly agree with our guest's statement that people would rather hear from people like them than a business. Everyone can sympathise with trying to be sold a product that they don't want by a person they don't want to hear from. If someone is pushing something that hard, they obviously have ulterior motives for telling you about it. When a consumer seeks a product themselves, they want to hear from people like themselves, not salesmen who just want to make money.

Thursday was the last of the book presentations. Good job, guys!!!

Peace, Love, and Happy Halloween,
Z

Post for Week of 10/20

Book report week started off with a bang! We learned first that we are The Dumbest Generation. My group presented next on The Overflowing Brain. Basically, the author thought that we could be perceived as The Dumbest Generation because of the limits of our brains' working memory. However, we can get better at multitasking and retaining information with special training. On Thursday, the groups for Distracted and Against the Machine presented. Distracted has thus far been my favorite presentation because of the way the group members illustrated what it is like to be distracted on the internet. They all read different things at once and asked us what each person was talking about. Not only was it comical, it proved an important point.
Looking forward to the rest of the presentations, and good job classmates who have already presented.

Post for Week of 10/10

I wish that all of my classes had fun activities planned for the week of fall break like Dissecting the Internet. In our one class of the week, we learned all about cryptography from hands-on activities. What I found the most interesting was that the methods used thousands of years ago to encode messages apply the same concepts that encrypt data today. Though ye olde cyphers take only a little while to decode by hand and milliseconds to decode by computer, they still proved effective for the times in which they were used (usually).
Something I always like about this seminar is the amount of hands-on activities we do. It's fun and incredibly helpful in learning, especially when dealing with difficult concepts like computer science.

Happy fall break, everyone!

Post for Week of 10/6

Oh, 4chan... It brings back memories of me sitting by my one of my best friends with an incredibly puzzled look on my face while she looked through 4chan. Chris Poole seems like a cool dude, for one thing. I think 4chan is cool, if you're into it. Anonymity is so seldom found in todays internet culture that I think Anonymous, the group, is fascinating. Though they are capable of bad (and have probably done it many times), the stories of good things are just too cool to ignore. 4chan may be mostly porn and "bumps" and silliness, but it's out there for those who want to use it, and obviously, people want to use it.

Perhaps the greatest debate is not one of Democrats vs. Republicans or evolution vs. creation... This week in class, it was Facebook vs. no Facebook.

Both sides had excellent points and argued passionately in this battle of wits, statistics, and popularity.

I am on the pro-Facebook side, personally. Yes, it can be a great distraction, but it is fun and nice. The privacy policy is a bit daunting, but I don't have things on Facebook that I don't want to share. I don't care if advertisements are tailored to fit my interests. I prefer it, especially when they get the ads SO WRONG. I think it's funny. I'll see ads for bands that I like that have shows nearby, and then one for "Modest Prom Dresses." 1. I am not modest, 2. I don't wear dresses, 3... Why on earth did you think that I'd be interested in this? 

Facebook vs. Google +

Post for Week of 9/29

This week, HON 1515 gets sketchy.
I had a lot of fun digging up dirt on the lovely Ms. Sydney Jones for our class assignment this week. I wished I was able to find as much stuff as some of my other classmates, but I think home address, home phone number, and similar things was quite sufficient. It was really cool to find out that Sydney's dad knows my stepdad and her little brother is good friends with one of my step-cousins. Canton is a pretty small town so I'm not surprised about this at all. Facebook was probably my best tool when I started research, but I was able to find things from a lot of other sources. It made me think about what I put on Facebook and who is able to see it. I put my cell phone number up so that only my friends can see it because it's really nice to be able to find the phone numbers of people with whom I am working in groups. I've been super thankful for that in the past and I'm not taking down my number. Something that is a bit unrelated is my default username. I use the same thing, iamnosamurai, for just about every social networking/email/chat account I create. It's a matter of convenience, though it does make everything I post on the web a little easy to find. I don't care if people see my tumblr or my twitter accounts. It's no big deal, as far as I'm concerned. Anyway, happy creepin'.