Scavenger hunt

The scavenger hunt we had to do was actually not as easy as I thought and I'm sure a lot of the other students can agree with me with on that one. Because we've been searching for information online pretty much our whole school career, we would automatically think that we're competent enough to find all the questions in a matter of minutes, but we were dead wrong. I remember on one question i had to do, it took me around 15 minutes to find the answer for it. I tried using yahoo for one question, but had no luck finding it until i searched for it on google and because of that reason, I always still hate yahoo. Overall, I actually thought the assignment was engaging and a good break from the traditional lectures we normally have.

Concept of Convergence

Nowadays, we use the internet without much thought about the term "convergence." When you think of the word "convergence," technology doesn't exactly come to mind, at least not for me anyway. This term actually has a lot to do with technology. According to freedictionary.com, convergence is the combining of different forms of electronic technology, such as data processing and word processing converging into information processing The internet was created simply as a means for communication amongst computers at various universities and laboratories. As you already know, the internet nowadays does a lot more than that. With the internet now, anybody that has access to a computer and internet can read the news because all three of those mediums has been converged into one. Cell phones are good examples of technological convergence. Most cell phones today comes equipped with a camera, internet, mp3 player, etc. Games consoles today, such as the playstation 3 can also play DVDs, so you won't be needing to shell out that extra 50 bucks for a dvd player if you already have playstation 3 or planning on buying one. Companies want to be able to make technology more efficient, and that in turn, makes it more marketable meaning you will see many different companies work together to make a good product to sell such as microsoft and apple working together to create itunes.

Physical and Virtual Documentation

A majority of the population today has a computer, whether it's an old outdated computer or a new apple macbook. With the convenience of being able to save pretty much anything onto the hard drive including photos, important documents, videos, etc we become dependent on this technology to keep everything important to us safe. The problem with saving important documents in digital format is that it's not foolproof against keeping important photos, documents, videos safe. At any moment our computer could fail. We could be surfing the internent one day, and catch a virus that won't even let us access our computer without having to reformat the hard drive, meaning everything on the hard drive will be gone. Of course we can save photos, documents, and whatnot on some kind of cloud storage system, but that is not foolproof either. That business/website could go out of business any day, and when that happens, you'll be left with nothing. I went on a trip to Vietnam during the summer, and took a lot of pictures. When I got back to the states, I transferred all of the pictures onto my laptop, and deleted all the pictures on the memory card so there's enough space to take new pictures. If my laptop was to get stolen or break, all those precious pictures will be gone. Now that I'm writing about it, I'm going to make sure to burn all those pictures onto a cd to be on the safer side. All course physical documents does have its place, but it will cost you. If its an important document, you can always print it out which will require a printer and ink. If there are meaningful photos, you can always go develop them, which costs money. Like I said though, a lot of people have become dependent with the computer that they won't bother printing out important documents or go develop their photos as a backup. For me, I don't remember the last time i went to go develop photos that i've taken or printed out any essays that didn't require it to be turned in to the teacher.

Vanity search

I've actually never thought of searching my name on Google simply because I know there's nothing on the web about me. After my professor swore that there IS something about everyone, I actually became a little interested. I searched my name on Peekyou.com, but actually had no luck. I then searched my name on google with no lucky until I added "olympia" then there it was, my facebook as the first result. Because I have nothing embarrassing or personal on the internet, I'm not really bothered if people were to search my name, but I know there are people out there that would have an issue with it. There was actually a woman who tried to sue Yahoo because she had a problem with how her name showed up in the results. Her case was dismissed.

Guest speaker Mark Briggs

We had the pleasure of having Mark Briggs as a guest speaker on October 19th, 2009. Mark is the former editor at The Tacoma News tribune and current CEO of Serra Media. The newspaper industry seems to be going downhill now that online publication has become more popular, but despite the downturn, Mark sees an opportunity. This is why he decided to start up Serra Media so editors/readers can plot news stories and photos on neighborhood maps online. Mark talked to us a little about Serra Media's first product called, Newsgarden. This application is essentially news on a map and can filter news to the neighborhood level. He also talked about another called product, Townluxe, which was made for the Bargain Babe LA website. This product will allow people to share good deals to other bargain hunters. Especially in this tough economic time, more and more people are trying putting in a little extra to find good deals on stuff like clothes, food, electronics, etc. so I don’t see why this product wouldn’t be a big hit. Mark Briggs is an intelligent person, and a lot of the stuff he talked about was insightful. I hope his company becomes a success and best of luck to him.

Newspaper going online

I believe that reading news on paper is a thing of the past. Yes, there are certainly still people out there who still pay monthly subscriptions to be able to physically hold a newspaper, but in this day and age, I think reading the news online has become much more favored. It's convenient and it's free! Why pay for news when you can get the same exact news on the internet? People are always on the internet for hours everyday anyways so why not stop by at say, "The Olympian," to read through a couple articles? I personally read the news online only simply because it's more convenient for me. I'm always online so why not stay updated with what is going around in my community and our country and spend 15 minutes reading through a few articles. The newspaper it seems like is hanging on by a thread. It's slowly becoming extinct, and as time pass and more people are resorting to the internet for news, sadly newspaper companies will inevitably be out of business so that means more jobs will be lost. Well... look on the the bright side, we're saving a lot of trees?

Experience with html

My first experience with html was good. HTML can definitely look confusing at first, but once you learn some of the codes, it all seems to make better sense. After playing around with html, and following the very detailed instructions from the packet, I definitely got a better understanding of what happens "behind the scenes" of a website. The only problem is trying to remember where all the brackets, commas, spaces etc. go. Overall, html seems really interesting and I will definitely try to learn more of it.