Week 6 Participation - The End

Wow, I can’t believe it is the end of the semester and graduation is here!

This class has been very insightful and it has been a pleasure learning along with my classmates who all had valuable input. I wish the best of luck to everyone in their future endeavors! You can always reach me at ada03d@fsu.edu or through my produsage blog at http://tallahassee365.wordpress.com.

This week I completed the following tasks for class participation:

• Posted four blog entries (this makes five).
• Read all my classmates' blogs and the official class blog, and posted comments on six separate entries.
• Read week six discussion board content and contributed 22 comments.
• Looked at all my classmates produsage projects (we are an impressive bunch!)
• Checked out suggested Web 2.0 tools: CiteULike, Stumbleupon, and Technorati. (Even referred CiteULike to some of my coworkers because I liked it so much!)
• I also checked out some other Web 2.0 tools that were not suggested but that I wanted to know more about, such as Tumblr and Skout.
• Worked more on my produsage project, as it will continue beyond this class, including daily blog posts, Facebook posts, and research into local events and activities. Today is day 10 – only 355 more days to go, LOL!

Mobile Phone GPS Dating Apps

This morning I found this article on CNN, "With new GPS dating apps, it's love the one you're near," which talks about a new class of GPS-enabled smartphone apps based on connecting single people for dating through proximity and location. These apps seem to echo some of the same basic concepts of Foursquare which we discussed last week.

There are now at least three phone apps (Skout, Grindr, and StreetSpark) that provide you with a menu of singles who are registered on the app that are close to you at any given point in time. Each single person provides a picture of themselves to help other singles identify them. The idea is to send messages back and forth to break the ice, or you can just walk up to that person and see if you click.

In my personal opinion, this seems dangerous and scary for the fact that you don't know what other kinds of people are using the app. But, on the other hand, everyone says in order to find a love match you have to "put yourself out there." I'd like to hear others thoughts on these kinds of applications.

Tumblr

One Web 2.0 tool that we haven’t talked about yet but which I am seeing catch on in popularity is Tumblr. From what I understand, Tumblr is a micro-blogging platform that allows users to post text, images, links, quotes, audio and video.

Like Twitter, you can “follow” other tumblelogs and their updates appear in a real-time stream on your Dashboard. You can also “like” or “re-blog” posts.

Tumblr really seems to stress their ease of use and claims to be the “easiest way to blog,” but I’m not really clear on what the major differences are between Tumblr and other blog sites yet.

Check it out!

FBI Threatens Wikipedia with Legal Action

According to the CNN article "FBI to Wikipedia: Remove Our Seal," the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has threatened Wikipedia with legal action if they don't remove the FBI seal from their site. The seal is featured in an article about the FBI.

The FBI says that Wikipedia must remove the bureau's seal because the FBI had not approved use of the image. They claim that "the inclusion of a high quality graphic of the FBI seal on Wikipedia is particularly problematic because it facilitates both deliberate and unwitting copying and reprinting of the seal's image."

Wikipedia has responded to the FBI with what has been called a "whimsical letter" telling them that they are "off their rocker" and that Wikipedia is prepared to argue their case in court.

What do you think? Should Wikipedia take down the seal?

Week 6 Prompt Response

Wow, I can't believe in just a few short days this class will be over and I will be graduating from Florida State University. I feel like I just got acclimated to being a student again and now it's all over.

In response to the prompt, I have learned a lot in just a few short weeks. When we started, I felt like I was pretty well-versed in social networking utilities, but this class has really expanded my horizon to include tools that aren't completely "social" per se, but are still based on user-generated content.

Just to name a few tools that I've now added into my repertoire are CiteULike, Diigo, Librarything, Ning, Technorati, Second Life and Wikispaces. Through our class produsage projects I also got to see a wide variety of the application of these tools.

I had the most fun creating my own produsage: The Tallahassee 365 Project. I find myself daily looking for things to add, events to post, etc. I'm sure the novelty will wear off at some point but so far I've really enjoyed the project. This was a good way for me to end my master's degree--doing something I liked, rather than a project I hated.

Professionally, I'd really like to starting creating a statewide wiki that can be used by people working in the suicide prevention field to report to my office what kinds of activities are going on in their local communities. I know this seems like something that could be done via email, but a wiki could aggregate the data, be updated all the time, and generally save me a lot of time and effort.

I look forward to learning about even more Web 2.0 tools and how I can integrate them into my daily life in the future.

Week 5 Participation

This week I completed the following tasks for class participation:

• Completed all week five assigned readings.
• Posted three blog entries (this makes four).
• Read all my classmates' blogs and the official class blog, and posted comments on eight separate entries.
• Read week five discussion board content, contributed eight comments, and posted my produsage project.
• Listened to class WebEx recorded session since I couldn’t make the actual meeting.
• Experimented a little with suggested tools: Librarything and Second Life.
• Created produsage project and wrote accompanying paper.
  

The Facebook Data Torrent Debacle

As I logged on to Yahoo this morning to check my email, this little ditty was displayed front and center on my homepage.

A security consultant, Ron Bowes, collected the names and profile URLs for 171 MILLION Facebook accounts (which is a little over a third of total Facebook users), then uploaded the data as a torrent file allowing anyone with a computer connection to download the data. This article provides Q&A for those who may be concerned about their privacy and security risks.

If you’re a Facebook user, does this make you nervous? Are you likely to alter your privacy settings as a result of this data mining?