Privacy & Confidentiality

With so many new medias out there especially social networking site like Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace, of course privacy will eventually become a huge issue. If you're not careful with your privacy settings, pictures and private information will end up going where you don't want it to. Cases have happen in the past where pictures on someone's Myspace costs them a job when the employer sees it or your family portrait becomes a billboard in Europe promoting some local business. Worse things can happen in the future if they haven't happen yet such as identity theft or even stalkers following you easily because you twitter every 5 minutes. There are though times when these things can be a good thing such as the cases where criminals get caught because they updated their Facebook and the authorities find out and track their location.

Advice

Finally I can put what I've learn in college to use!
IF Baruch asked me to help, the simplest thing would be a Wiki. There is always a line at to see a counselor, the questions these counselors asked are sometimes found on the Baruch website but its not that students are lazy but the websites are hard to navigate and information is harder to find than Waldo. If we had a wiki, information can be easily accessible. Time can be wasted less at the counselor and instead be spent deciding what is the right major or how i can fit these classes into my schedule. The addition of classes for the coming semester can also mean less time spent going back and forth on esims. While we are on the topic of esims, why not also put up a real-time counter for class availability instead of getting frustrated when a class is full yet it still says 10 seats open.

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds are fun but the most common ones to come to mind are video games like MMORPGs. MMORPGs presented a new way of gaming when it first came out, instead of playing by yourself or with a friend, you can now play with literally tens of thousands of other people at the same time. The virtual world is massive and lets many users explore things unimagined in the world. Creativity blooms and new thoughts and ideas are invented. Take Saki Knafo's article "In Room 100, It's Sid and Nancy All Over Again," where Michael Brown remakes the hotel Chelsea back in its glory day when it was a haven for artists. To remake such a famous hotel in a virtual world takes so much creativity as well as time. Now users in second life can walk through the hotel like it was the real thing...sorta. Although there is the fun and social aspect of it, there is also a dark side to virtual worlds. Some people can substitute virtual worlds with their own real worlds and become addicted to it. These situations are depicted alot in a comical way in TV shows like in an episode of The Office when Dwight starts playing Second life to get away from detach himself from the real world and even worse when he starts paying Second life on his Second Life so he becomes twice removed from the real world. Another example was from "The Big Bang Theory" when penny, unsatisfied with her life becomes addicted to an MMORPG becomes the accomplishments in the game fill the lack of achievement she had in real life. These may all be shows and are funny but there are cases of this happening in the real world, maybe not as extreme but there are a lot of them. Thinking about this makes me worried about our future and the virtual world. What if everyone becomes so addicted to the virtual world that it sorta becomes a real world like in the case of the movie "Surrogates" where everyone is gonna sit at home and have their Avatars do everything for them, is that the future of the virtual world?

Twitter Discussion

Wow, twitter discussions are hard.
It is so difficult on so many different levels especially if you're following more and more people. pretty soon, you get lost between different topics. In classroom discussions, there is a flow and interruptions are limited but there are just too many tweets on twitter that whatever you tweet gets drown in a pool of tweets. Blogs aren't as bad either as there it is pretty well structure with a discussions and comments to follow in order. Bb discussions are pretty good too with almost the same structure as blogs except its all on the same page.

Social Networking

Somedays...i can be a real facebook addict. I would check facebook every 15 minutes and look at the same things i did 15 minutes ago. Some of my friends are even worse, they would update their facebook statues every 5 minutes just to let everyone know what they were feeling. That's one thing great about social networking sites, we can still connect easily with hundreds of people even though they're so far away. In Virginia Heffernan's "Being there: The Subtle Art of the Facebook update," she shows us how facebook updates have become not what they are doing at the moment but an artform and a declaration of the mood the person is in. Instead of asking "how are you" to all of your friends, they have now told you every minute how they feel should they update their statuses and if you care enough to check. There are however problems with so many people knowing your status. Opposite to Frank Langfitt's "Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting" where Alfred LaSpina got offered a job through LinkedIn, employers can also be divert from you because of what you post. Many cases have happen in which someone was not offered a job because of what employers found on their facebook or myspace. It would'nt be a surprise if employers start using social networking websites as their main source of background checks in the future.


Sources:
Heffernan, Virginia. Being There: The subtle art of the Facebook update. The New York Times Magazine, Feb 15, 2009, p. 25.
Langfitt, Frank. Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting. NPR, March 16, 2008.

Check Out Social Networking Sites

Social Networks might feel like any new technology whether they are digital cameras, mp3 players, netbooks, etc, once the first one comes out, there are gonna be imitations. They might all be social networking websites but they generally have something big to differentiated themselves from the pool. Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, LinkedIn are all social networking sites but all have different functions. Friendster might be a good site for someone who is new to social websites and just uses it to network as it is sort of a slimdown version of facebook. Myspace feels more catered to musicians or someone who is creative since the site is open source so if you're not creative, you're gonna end up with a boring profile. LinkedIn is more for the professional so you wont find drunk pictures there. Facebook is well rounded and feels like it caters to all individuals. It wont hurt however for someone to join different websites as a musician might join myspace to promote his music but also join facebook to connect to friends.

Blogs vs. Wikis

Whats the difference? Who uses what?
Wikis tend to be crowd source meaning that multiple users can edit and post new topics on the site whereas Blogs are generally like a journal written by one person. There are however blogs that are run by multiple people. One such blog is Gizmodo.com which is a blog about new and upcoming electronics and anything that may appeal to techies. It is updated constantly by different writers that work on the site. Each writer offers their own unique touch and identity to the blog.
The biggest difference between wikis and blogs is that wikis are meant to have factual information posted while blogs can have opinions and emotions attached.

That might be one of the reasons companies would want to have their own corporate wikis than blogs. I doubt managers and executives would want to know what an analyst in the tax department thinks about James Cameron's "Avatar" but they might be interest in knowing when their company is expecting to file their tax returns. In Gardiner Morse's article "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on making the most of company wikis" in the Harvard Business Review, Jimmy wales talks about how more and more companies are starting to use wikis but many lower level employees are afraid to edit postings from managers. Transparency is important in companies and it would be very helpful to the company if all post were as correct as they could be. One way they could resolve this problem is to just let a couple of lower level employees write the wikis for the company with the information past down from higher-ups. This way, the employees could correct each other while having their correct information from Managers.

Wikis are constantly growing and there is always a new type everyday but they can also learn alot from blogs if they haven't already. Many blogs have post about How-to's and Recipes for cooking, etc and wikipedia has copied them and created wiki-how-to's, etc. One thing i haven't seen wikis developed yet from blogs is tourism. Many people post pictures and reviews on their blogs about vacations they went on and local specialties they can visit. A wiki can be created to have a where to visit in a city.

Gardiner, Morse. "A conversation with Jimmy Wales." Harvard Business Review (April 2008): 26 Feb, 2009.