13th Day of Class: Search Tools

Today we covered bulletin boards, first search tools, Yahoo (now powered by Bing), Google (pagerank, ads), MSN Search (now Bing), Baidu (in China),

Watched YouTube video "Microsoft Bing #2 Commercial (Cure for Search Overload Syndrome)"

Next assignment will be to put some search terms, Kale will provide, in multiple search engines and report results, ads, etc... differences.

Assignment 10: Delicious

I have created a Delicious account. =)

Flickr.com images ( Search Criteria )
1. A Hawaiian sunrise ( Turtle Bay, Hawaii )
2. A pumpkin bigger than a person ( Giant Pumpkin )
3. Canadian farm? ( Kallie Sophie )

digg.com high score that doesn't deserve it
Title: (307 diggs today) How are you? You know... just hangin
It's a picture of a goat hanging from a telephone wire. It's a crude picture, somewhat strange, which is why it is getting diggs, probably by a lot of kids.

What are some pros and cons of social bookmarking?
Pro's: Easily share websites and interesting information with people who have similar interests.
Con's: There's too many links sometimes and there are times they don't work because a change in a page.

12th Day of Class

Talked about PodCasts (iPod Broadcasting), Audacity (audio editing), Lame (codec for Audacity to convert to mp3), Adobe Premier (video editing, expensive), iTunes, PodBean.com, Podcast.com, and various videos.

11th Day of Class

(Lost the data, will restore later.)

10th Day of Class

Today we're listening to Marika, who is focusing on library use and copyright infringement. She also brought several books in as references or ideas for blogging. She talked about who owns content published on the Internet, intellectual property, copyright, library website at LCC, etc...

Books:
- No One Cares What You Had for Lunch, 100 Ideas for Your Blog
- Blogging for Fame and Fortune
- Clear Blogging
- Pirates of the Digital Millenium
- The Huffington Complete Guide to Blogging
- Unleashing Web 2.0
- How to Do Everything with Your Web 2.0 Blog

Resources which have a good amount of images you can legally use in your blog:
(see Kale's blog for a list of links to sites where you can use images for free)

9th Day of Class

2045 => technological singularity
wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PPTMASSuseInventionsLogPRINT.jpg

talked about collective intelligence...

ants, birds, bees, fish..

3 common things: maintain personal space (around), alignment, cohesion (certain distance)

5% of ring leaders can control the other 95% of people...

Wikipedia, swarm intelligence... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence)

"group think" - consensus fast but not optimal (not necesarrily good)
example, lemmings jump into the ocean and die...

Leslie White, 5 stages/levels of energy development:
- We use our own muscles, we have to do everything ourselves
- Domesticated animals, use others to assist us.
- Agriculture, we grow food in one place, reduce hunting & build cities
- Natural resources, oil, gas, extracting energy from the Earth
- Nuclear energy,

* Kardashev_scale on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale) for future

development [planet, space(sun), galactic]

* Autonomous cruise control system

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_cruise_control_system)

Books: By Neal Stephenson "Snow Crash" & "The Diamond Age"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Stephenson)

Will edit a little more ...

8th Day of Class

Today we talked about Twitter, created accounts for Twitter, watched a Twitter in Plain English video, watched a female comedian video about being a "Twitter Whore", talked about a NYC girl who Tweet'd after a bank robbery... (there might have been more, maybe I'll add it later).

Assignment 9: Facebook & Ning

I already have a Facebook account and I've joined the Ning network. =)

7th Day of Class

I was not present for this class... Scott took some notes for me... I'll update it later. =)

Assignment 8: Google Wave

I think Google Wave looks to be very interesting and have a lot of potential. I was curious about the developers access to Sandbox and sent a message directly to Lars Rasmussen on Facebook. I was curious to know if they had an official page on Facebook and if we might be able to gain access. This was his response, which was pretty fast I might add:

Hey John,

We don't have an official facebook page.

if you sign up here: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/ you'll get an account later in the year when things start being stable, fast, usable.

If you sign up here: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignupfordev/ you'll get a real early, buggy, slow, hard-to-use account within days or weeks.

Happy waving!
Lars

So, now you're in the "know" ... Enjoy and maybe we'll see you in Waveland!

Assignment 7: Wiki Page Editing

For this assignment, I chose to edit the Graphic Design wiki. I chose this because growing up I was aspiring to be a Graphic Designer, instead I joined the Navy and married a Graphic Designer from SDSU.

Assignment 6: Wiki Page

http://kaleweb2.pbworks.com/Mangosteen-{-the-whole-fruit-}

6th Day of Class

Well, today was very interesting, especially relating to advances in Web 2.0 technology. Anyway, we started off talking about today's Wiki page being due, he recommended not editing you page for the next week since the assignment will be to have others edit and add content to your page.

Next week we will be having a guest speaker, Marika Pineda, who has done a lot of interesting research related to Web 2.0, she was going to teach the class but was hired on full-time in the library.

The interesting topic we covered today was Google Wave, which is still in Beta testing and is said to be coming out later this year. Wave was created by Lars and Jens Rasmussen, along with their engineering team, who also created Google Maps. We also watched a video about Wave, which you can see below.

(keywords from the video: forum, conference, open-source, developer preview, orkut)

5th Day of Class

Today, we started off talking about how credible stuff actually is on the Internet. Does the information you're reading come from a credible source or not? Wikipedia has a "paper trail" in that you can see how the topic evolved. Also, I hope this comes out to be understandable since I'm running on empty today (2hrs of sleep).

Examples in Wikipedia of controversies related to credibility:
- Essjay Controversy: Person said they were a teacher and had a Phd but he didn't (they also worked for Wikipedia and were fired).
- Wikipedia Biography Controversy: Person said another person was involved in the assassination of JFK.
- Scientology Controversies: Various information was posted from a certain area and they banned the IP Addresses from that area from being able to edit topics.

We also talked about misinformation, how some things look logically correct but if you break it down piece by piece it can mostly be garbage.

*Teaser: There may be extra credit available... if Kale says something in class that is clearly wrong (misinformation), you can research it, and e-mail him to let him know that you figured it out. Keep this in mind when listening in class over the next couple of weeks.

We need to post a page on the wiki on a topic of our choosing... Assignment 6.

Random Chatter: Talked about people with the power of influence, power of suggestion, sales & advertising tactics, robots, cloning, etc...

4th Day of Class

We started off talking about World of Warcraft (WoW). There are people, mostly in China, that play the game and know how to make a lot of money. Then they turn around and sell that in game money for real money. But very recently, China is heavily cracking down on people doing this, they are essentially being cutoff from themselves. Figure that one out...

He created a Wiki using PBWorks.com that we all will end up using, we don't need to create an account there. Check your e-mail for an invitation e-mail (check spam if you use MSN or Hotmail) and add your own password to sign in.

We will be adding our own page with a topic of our choosing and the stage two portion in the following weeks will be us adding data to other people's pages (collaboration). Wiki's will end up being worth more points in class than a blog post, mostly because research will be needed.

Random chatter was about robotics, big dog, big dog parody, and we saw a robotic helicopter that Kale worked on which can fly on its own. More about NASA, classified employees, military funding, weaponized technology, etc...

Assignment 5: See Poll & Vote!

I created a poll about basic computer classes. I wanted to know if people without basic computer skills were in our class, as I know they get into other classes where these skills are vital. Enjoy!

Assignment 4: See 2nd Day of Class Post

Scroll down or click the following link:

http://web2withjohn.blogspot.com/2009/06/2nd-day-of-class.html

3rd Day of Class

Wow, talk about a cool website... If you weren't in class, you're outta luck because I'm not going to give it to you. Haha! I'm kidding. We went to WolframAlpha.com which is based on a "new type of math" by a guy who wrote a really big book (and Kale read it). We searched for various things and had multiple examples which I couldn't begin to remember them all.

Then we went into Google Maps, put in a location, viewed it, and then clicked the street view. We looked at Google Earth, looked in at NY, the city building, changed day/night view, looked at planets, and various other things.

Random room chatter, we talked about iPhones, apps that have the ability to hear music, tell you who it is singing, the name of the song, and the album, then take you to iTunes where you can buy it. Going to talk about Twitter later on in the term and Kale is open to suggestions for the class.

Assignment 3: Facebook Security

I came across something in the news that is an interesting subject and may very well pertain to you, if you a Facebook user. The default settings for Facebook (FB) when you create your account are being changed so that it is available to the public; it's known as the "everyone" setting.

I'm okay with this because I always modify my settings to ensure that some "pervert" out there can't easily figure out where I live and put my family at risk. Not everyone is as computer-savvy I am though... so you may not be okay with this but it can be changed.

With that being said, more security settings are also being made available and it's up to you to figure it all out. Let me know what your thoughts on this are...

This article will help get you started in the right direction:

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/more-privacy-controls-coming-to-facebook/

2nd Day of Class

We went over the formatting options available within our Dashboard when creating a post. We downloaded files from the book off of a link on Kale's blog. We unzipped the chapter 3 files, uploaded, and posted an image, as shown here.

The next part requires Adobe Flash Player, so we downloaded it, and installed it. (close your browsers during installation)

Then we went over embedding a video into a post, using YouTube, searching for "In Plain English" for example. Video can be seen below:



To make posts easier for users to search through; we added labels to the posts. We covered gadgets, Kale enabled labels on his blog, he had us add subscription links using Google aggregator and selected "Add to Google Reader." Next, we went over creating a poll, which is part of our next assignment.

Assignment 2

Well, I chose to go with option A, which was describe what Web 2.0 means to me.

From my current knowledge and from what I've heard. The Internet has basically been called The Web, aka Web 1.0, for a long time now and has essentially been a place to find information. You interact with the computer and computer displays the information you are looking for. It's somewhat of a static interface.

With Web 2.0 the interaction is being incorporated into the websites. You interact with the websites, still using your computer, and other people are able to interact with you as well. It's more of a dynamic interface.

I'm sure I'll learn more as the term continues. What do you think?

2nd Day of Class

Today was pretty basic from my perspective. We setup Gmail accounts through Google Groups for those who didn't have them already (to avoid cell phone confirmation), we then went right into creating Blogger accounts, e-mailed a link to our blog to our instructor (Kale), and posted our first post... Clearly, this is post for me! After that, we navigated to his blog and became followers in order to better track our assignments. He then explained our first assignments, 1 through 3, and posted them on his blog. In the end, we were left with some time to finish up the first assignments. That's all...