The Future

I was very excited to see one of my favourite news outlets on our suggested reading Vice Media, I am a huge Vice fan and also the man behind it Shane Smith https://twitter.com/shanesmith30, So where did Vice see the future of Social Media heading. http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/the-future-of-social-media-121
An interesting facts from the article, Between February 2005 and August 2006, the use of social networking sites by young people jumped form 9% to 49%; today FaceBook says it has more than 1.35 billion active users.
One of the most interesting facets of this article was this opinion of the future "In ten or 15 years social media will probably just be a 3D hologram of a Coca-Cola bottle angrily shouting at us to buy Coca-Cola, then rewarding us with a meme .GIF if we buy Coca-Cola, or shocking us with a high-voltage electrical current if we don't." This made LoL and in this day and age that means something!
I also watched the video form the web summit that Steven Johnson released called "where good ideas come from" http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from?language=en he has a book of the same name http://www.amazon.com/Where-Good-Ideas-Come-From/dp/1594485380 which I had previously read and highly recommend. He takes you on a journey through the modern hubs of advanced technology trying to pinpoint where these flashes of brilliance and genius ideas come from. The video is very interesting and I am now looking into ordering another one of Johnson's book to read over the summer.

#trending

This week was again a very interesting week for me, I had long been meaning to explore how the Google Trends function worked and this week I got a chance to do just that. I have been an avid user since, it's helped me gain information for certain projects that I had undertaken and it has also helped me waste loads of time browsing through the most popular trends :)

 

 

We also looked at Twitter and it's trending topics function which I was already well aware of but it was nice to get some good insight on the topic.

 

We also looked at a very interesting article http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2185738/Wikipedia-LOCKS-editing-access-Stephen-Colbert-tells-followers-mess-Mitt-Romneys-VP-hopefuls-pages.html

Which was about how Wikipedia had to take the drastic step of locking Mitt Romney's page as there were so many edits occurring thanks to comedian Stephen Colbert announcing on his show for his fans to make as many edits as possible the reasoning behind this was because recently political bloggers noted the trend that the number of recent edits made to the pages of potential nominees could be used to gauge how likely it is that said candidate will be Romney's choice. This was fascinating to me, how someone could use recent Wikipedia editing trends to that extent really surprised and impressed me!

Black Mirror?

This week we used flickr

 

I was certain that I was not going to enjoy using Flickr but the simplicity of it and the ease of use has really grown on me. Its also a great way to store your photos which I am currently in the process of doing.

 

 

Our reading for the week was to watch the very interesting TED Talk http://www.ted.com/talks/alessandro_acquisti_why_privacy_matters on why privacy matters.

It is quite a chilling talk and made me quite concerned! What does a future without secrets look like. Straight away I thought of the Black Mirror episode "The Entire History of You" which is similar in it's thought process, all in all a very enjoyable talk and week.

Screen Casting

In Week 6, we investigated communication via social computing and media. In particular we explored some useful tools for your team projects like Screen casting and how to create and edit videos using Youtube. I took some liberties with the homework we were given because when I first used the screen casting software I knew straight away that I wanted to use it to commentate on BJJ videos, so that's what I did.
http://youtu.be/fZ5U2w_OeMs?hd=1
After I finish up my exams I plan on commentating on a few more videos and sharing them with my friends and hopefully get a few followers :)

In the lecture we talked about Podcasts I would be an avid listener of many Podcasts, so this topic was of great interest to me. Some of my favourite Podcast channels include Dan Carlin Hardcore History, The Joe Rogan Experience, The Fighter and The Kid and last but not least The Church Of What's Happening Now.

Prezi

This week we learnt how to use prezi and if I could choose just one thing to take away form this module it would be the ability to use prezi to  a high standard of have used it now numerous times both in college and in my job outside of college it really is very handy and in my opinion looks so much better than a PowerPoint presentation.

As you can see I have numerous prezis on my account a really handy website and software that I will continue to use.

 

 

 

Social Bookmarking

Well everyone has heard of Pintrest and I myself have used it before, however I wasn't really a fan so to start this week I was immediately unenthusiastic but that changed when we got to look at Diigo which was very interesting to me an easy way to bookmark and share links and build a large library of sites and links that are of interest to you.
Before

 After

As you can see I have added a few of my favourite sites Diigo has become very handy for me to use instead of just bookmarking sites. On the other side of things I honestly did not use Pintrest that much I have friends who use it quite a lot and get great enjoyment out of it but it just does not appeal to me! :(

Magic 8 Ball

This week we were delving further into the MIT app inventor software I won't bore you with the details but we made a working magic 8 ball, I always wanted one of those!
some screenshots of our work.

I also explored some of the TED Talk videos on collaboration, two of the videos were very appealing to me and gave me a lot to think about the first a talk on 'cognitive surplus' how our online presence is helping us a build a better more cooperative world:http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_change_the_world

The other talk which piqued my interest was the birth of Wikipedia the never finished online encyclopaedia.http://www.ted.com/talks/jimmy_wales_on_the_birth_of_wikipedia