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...