Last blog...for now

To finish of this blog (sort of), I am posting a video for my assignment. Mind you, this is something that I have never done before and I spent all day just trying to figure out what the *bleep* the embedded code was. But I discovered from my source that there are many college students like myself that are loading videos like this every single day. However, it did not surprise me to learn that there are many people that are more technologically savvy than i am in this computer-reliant world we live in, and I did find the information to be accurate based simply on the fact that I go on YouTube every day and simply don't know how to do many of the functions that are available on the site.

In case you're wondering, I chose to use this video because it was easy to find and it is a movie I plan to go see in the near future. Other than YouTube, I don't usually look videos on any other site. Refering back on a previous post that I made, which regarded the concept of Web 2.0, it is quite apparent to me that YouTube is one of the most popular Web 2.0 applications on the internet because anyone can post a video on YouTube.

Alright, this is Soneji and I will probably not post another blog for a long time. But I hope that I can find an excuse to type up my thoughts and not just type about an assignment. Ja.

Tired and Aggrevated

This has not been a kind week for me. I am broke, I've gotten three hours of sleep each night for most of the week, and I'm still trying, without much success, to get every to do with school taken care of on time. Oh! And I feel like I'm going to die of a stroke any day now. Enough said.
Anyhow, the discussion today is a thing called "Wikis," which is essentially a web site that any user(s) can create and edit to serve a certain purpose. Most of us are familiar with Wikipedia and maybe Scholarpedia. Back in high school many people that I knew used Wikipedia very frequently to do projects, something that is almost always unacceptable in college. But in those days I had never seen anyone use Scholarpedia. The two wikis come from a program called MediaWiki, both can be edited/reviewed by outside users and they look almost identical. However, unlike Wikipedia, Scholarpedia has experts that are selected by its respective editors. Also the articles written by such authors have people responsible for the article called curators, from whom an outside user would need permission to edit the article.
Wikis are interesting because it allow viewers to find opinions and/or facts about a subject in a convenient way, if not always a reliable way. As I mentioned before it is quite often unacceptable to use Wikipedia for college projects, but that is not to say that all wikis are unreliable information sources. Scholarpedia seems to be a more reliable source based simply on the editing criteria and as I also said before, wikis can be very convenient. This is Soneji, signing out.

religion and collaboration

I had a very interesting night tonight. I got into a religious debate with one of my co-workers. Now, when I say this I mean to say that we were arguing about the Darwin and Biblical versions of history. Which, I know, is a pointless debate but this co-worker of mine kept thinking that there was no possible way that Darwin's theory was correct. He was way too high strung where God and Creation were concerned if you ask me, but I realize that there are these respectable reverent types in the world and it is perfectly okay for people to feel that way. I just feel that people should be able to believe what they want to believe in terms of religion. Heck, that's the reason there are so many different religions in the world.
Anyhoo...getting on to my assignment: collaboration tools. The use of collaboration tools is to make a website out of a document of some sort instead of making different copies of the same document and send it to others. The collaboration tool that I used is called Google Docs and one of the best advantages of this site is to be able to make a document into a website that you can have easy access to and can restrict others from viewing it, making it much different from a blog. A collaboration tool such as Google Docs can be very helpful in do projects for school, since you can put presentations and powerpoints on Google Docs as well. So instead of giving your professor a copy of your presentation in the old-fashioned way, you could just give them a site and password and they would be on their way. I suppose you could use this feature if you were writing a book and didn't want everyone to see it and only wanted a couple close friends to see the site. That should cover things for now. This is Soneji, and I'll post again in a week.

podcasts

I'll try to make this one fast, since I'm cutting it a little too close for comfort. But these days, I just seem to be in a perpetual state of being tired and it's hard to concentrate on much of anything.
So, about today's topic: podcasts. I must say this was one of the more interesting and...fun topics to cover in my class. It was a more entertaining subject than most of the stuff I have done so far this year, considering that I spend the majority of my time on the computer with a pair of headphones in my ears. Looking at podcast.com and podcastalley.com made me think that I really need to get an MP3 player because of the qualities of podcasts. It was so easy to use and I found some really interesting podcasts.
Part of the assignment was to look up some podcasts by a man named Dr. Henry Oertelt, who is a holocaust survivor, and listen to the first two parts of his book: "An Unbroken Chain." There was a lot of quality to the podcast and I found it to be exceptional; this coming from a guy who listens to audio books on a weekly basis. But it felt like Oertelt was right in front of me the entire time that I was listening to his podcasts and it was hard for me to switch to another tab during them. I know that this guy is the real deal because I have several friends taking a course about the holocaust and they have read or listened to the book. Before doing this assignment, I had heard of his book but had not actually read or listened to it.
When I think about it, I think that at least one of my other professors on my college campus uses podcasts and it would not surprise me one bit if the professor who made this assignment uses it for her lectures. That should wrap things up for now. This is Soneji, signing out.

Acceptance

omg. I have finally accepted the fact that I need to write these postings and they are unavoidable, no matter how aggravated I am with them. I feel that I am cutting things down to the wire this week with the posting, but I was doing too many things at once and ended up saving this to the last minute. Sorry-_-.
Anyway, I am here to talk about Share tools and my opinions that go along with them. I find that tools such as Digg, Reddit, and Newsvine are very similar to Del.icio.us in terms of use and can be used as such and for more specific topics. Before this assignment I had never heard of these sites and as such have not read about a story or topic through these links, but I feel that they could be useful if you wanted to "reserve" topics for different sites. For instance, you could look for political articles and stories on Digg, and use Reddit to find more personal interest articles.
However, I think that any given person could find most of what they are looking for on just one of these sites, so having all of these different sites to look for different subjects can become rather clustered, which would make them pretty inconvenient. For me, I barely use Del.icio.us, so it becomes rather pointless to create accounts on other Share tool sites.

tried of work

*sigh* I can never seem to get ahead of my assignments. It's ridiculous. I'm completely up to date in every class but this one. I've been having a few personal dilemmas as of late and I can say this: "I am tired of work." It is biggest time vaccum in my college life and it is aggrevating. If it wasn't painstakingly obvious at this point, "aggrevation," or some word derived from "aggrevation," will show up the most on the personal parts of the blogs I write.
Moving right aloug...the photo that you see in this blog is likely going to be what I see tomorrow in the time that I'm writing my midterm. It is a photo taken from Flickr.com and uses the tags: millercenter, library, and SCSU-books. I'm not sure if I would have found a better photo on a different site since Flickr.com is the only site that I use to get my photos from. I don't have a Facebook account, so I obviously don't use it. Regardless, I only use Flickr.com because I only need one photo search website.
Getting back to the subject of tags, I feel that the tags that are assigned to the picture are good, but I think that tags such as "reference" or "research" would be words that the general public would use to find pictures like this. Speaking of the general public, a question came up in discussion a while back: "Are you okay with your photos being available to the public?" My own, personal answer is "no" because anyone could look up the photos and use them for ways not intended. Of course on Flickr.com you can set your photos for "private use only," so in that regard I would have no qualms. From your aggrevated blogger: Soneji.

Another Aggrevation

Hello again, this is Soneji, and I am here to talk about tagging a website. Let me put it this way: IT IS DRIVING ME CRAZY! I'm sorry but it's the same as that bloglines crap that I had to do last week. Yes, I see the potential this computer function has in regards to keeping everything social and organized on the web, but it becomes rather useless when it's more trouble than it's worth. There is a point to setting up these tags and labels if you actually use them in your studies. I know I'm being a bit old-fashioned, but I have never needed to use bookmarks or the like and I have never failed a class in my life.
Outside of my opinions, social bookmarking would definitly make things easier to look up on the web, if you could use it, because it lets everyone have access to tags that relate to different sites and webpages. Also, it would be useful to look up more specific URLs from any given location. If I have to work with these tags, fine, but that doesn't mean that I have to rely on them.