I've been on the Internet for a very long time. Since 1995/6, when I was 12. I'm now 27; that's 15 years and large portion of my life that has been spent and sent through the millions of tubes on the Web. If anyone should be afraid of being hacked, I'd think I could have valid reasons. Internet and its privacy options have changed drastically since those early days of AOL chat rooms and the age-old: "a/s/l?" conversations. Yet, today, many people still feel threatened by the idea of putting their information on the Internet. From something as simple as creating an e-mail address to the more encrypted process of online banking and the likes, users around the globe are still frightened of the "Hackers" that had their high point during the mid to late '90s. I think during my research of Internet politics within social media, it will be useful to see how those participating view their privacy. Hopefully, I'll be able to convincingly debunk this unjustified myth that the Internet is unsafe. The fact of the matter is - we are our own worst enemy when it comes to our own privacy. Users must learn how to protect themselves, as those who are hacked are normally the ones that have a target, neon light and flailing wacky-arm tube guy guiding those to take whatever they can from their profiles.
Stay tuned for my findings and arguments on Internet Privacy.
08 June 2010
07 June 2010
The Curious Case of The Huffington Post
Surely I'm not the only one who is wondering 'WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED TO THE HUFFINGTON POST?!'
I feel as if it wasn't very long ago, where the majority of the updates on this site were intelligible and had real substance. Now I only see headlines proclaiming "Justin Long: I love performing oral sex" or "Christina Aguilera wears light-up heart on her crotch". Really HuffPo??? Really??! Are you that desperate for an audience that you need to bring yourself to Perez Hilton's domain? I was following @huffingtonpost on Twitter, but I've had to unfollow and move them just to a list... my news list, so I could have my Twitter timeline back. Although, I'm thinking they aren't even deserving of this category! Occasionally I'll get an update that sounds like news. People following the oil spill (we should just call this an oil dumping by the way, there was no 'spill'...but that's another blog) will definitely be intrigued by the "Dead, oiled birds reported for the first time in Texas" headline. But if that doesn't catch your attention, the following tweet about a couple getting married in a shark tank, must!
Now I'm the last person to knock the efforts of social media, HuffPo is classified as a blog at the end of the day. However, I'm having a hard time seeing them as a credible source of information when they share breaking news with TMZ.
All is not sour with HuffPo - you are able to connect with your Facebook, Yahoo!, Google or Twitter accounts without having to make an additional HuffPo account. On top of being able to comment, you can also "like" and/or share the article through one simple click - and even retweet on Twitter. And of course, the other "share' familiars are there, with Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon and the likes. These are all great tools to engage the reader with your site.
Having said that, Arianna Huffington has a great sense of connecting with the audience through social media. Yet, it would be nice for the "Internet Newspaper" to report and highlight a bit more news-worthy topics more often.
I feel as if it wasn't very long ago, where the majority of the updates on this site were intelligible and had real substance. Now I only see headlines proclaiming "Justin Long: I love performing oral sex" or "Christina Aguilera wears light-up heart on her crotch". Really HuffPo??? Really??! Are you that desperate for an audience that you need to bring yourself to Perez Hilton's domain? I was following @huffingtonpost on Twitter, but I've had to unfollow and move them just to a list... my news list, so I could have my Twitter timeline back. Although, I'm thinking they aren't even deserving of this category! Occasionally I'll get an update that sounds like news. People following the oil spill (we should just call this an oil dumping by the way, there was no 'spill'...but that's another blog) will definitely be intrigued by the "Dead, oiled birds reported for the first time in Texas" headline. But if that doesn't catch your attention, the following tweet about a couple getting married in a shark tank, must!
Now I'm the last person to knock the efforts of social media, HuffPo is classified as a blog at the end of the day. However, I'm having a hard time seeing them as a credible source of information when they share breaking news with TMZ.
All is not sour with HuffPo - you are able to connect with your Facebook, Yahoo!, Google or Twitter accounts without having to make an additional HuffPo account. On top of being able to comment, you can also "like" and/or share the article through one simple click - and even retweet on Twitter. And of course, the other "share' familiars are there, with Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon and the likes. These are all great tools to engage the reader with your site.
Having said that, Arianna Huffington has a great sense of connecting with the audience through social media. Yet, it would be nice for the "Internet Newspaper" to report and highlight a bit more news-worthy topics more often.
06 June 2010
Chicken Soup for the Hay Fever
I don't really have anything that intelligent to blog about today, but I figured if I want to get back into the habit of blogging I should do it everyday.
London weather thought it would be a great idea to bring my allergies on at full force, so my brain hasn't been function too well. So for the past two days, I've been lain in bed, alone, putting as much anti-histamine in my system that my body will take. Today I finally got up and made a meal later in the afternoon, the classic: Chicken Soup. I'm sure everyone has a variant on how to make it, and it's quite easy to just buy it straight from the can. I haven't gone grocery shopping in ages, so i pretty much looked to whatever my fridge had to offer. If you're like me, and strapped for cash, it can be useful to find that everything is right in your home. If you're home alone, knowing a meal that doesn't take much effort but also makes you feel better is nice as well!
The recipe is quite basic: chicken, water, veggies - but I figured I'd post what I put in today anyhow.
1 package of diced chicken breast (about 2 cups?)
1 white onion wedged
3 peeled and chopped carrots
2 diced cloves of garlic
1 can of sweet corn kernels
1/2 green bell pepper
1 peeled and diced potato
1 small tomato, quartered
2 bay leaves
salt, black ground pepper, thyme, chicken cubes for added flavour
I didn't set the heat any higher than medium while cooking this. 1. the meat cooks better when it's done slowly and 2. I wanted to lay down or take a shower at the same time
Place the diced chicken, onions and salt in 2 cups of water. Cover, and let it cook until the chicken turns white. Add the garlic, green pepper, corn and tomato and carrots and 1 cup of water stir and cover. When it starts boiling add a chicken cube. If you've diced the potato earlier, place it in cold water while you wate to add this. The potato should go in last, along with the bay leaves, black pepper and thyme. Depending on how you would like the broth to taste add another chicken cube. Stir, cover and put on simmer. If you have some spaghetti or rice already made add that to your bowl. Or if you don't feel like making those put in more potatoes so it can be more filling. I added a lot of black pepper to mine, sometimes it makes my sneezy-nose or itchy throat feel better. When's it done? When it tastes like soup. It all depends on how fast you tried to cook it.
Enjoy!! Drink lots of fluids, take lots of Benadryl and go to sleep! That's where I'm heading now.
[UPDATED 04 June 2011] - a year later and I'm sick again. Earlier in the week I made a roast chicken. When I got sick I cut that up and had chicken soup for days!
Added bonus to this recipe; boil some rice with spinach and mushrooms in the water. SO good!
London weather thought it would be a great idea to bring my allergies on at full force, so my brain hasn't been function too well. So for the past two days, I've been lain in bed, alone, putting as much anti-histamine in my system that my body will take. Today I finally got up and made a meal later in the afternoon, the classic: Chicken Soup. I'm sure everyone has a variant on how to make it, and it's quite easy to just buy it straight from the can. I haven't gone grocery shopping in ages, so i pretty much looked to whatever my fridge had to offer. If you're like me, and strapped for cash, it can be useful to find that everything is right in your home. If you're home alone, knowing a meal that doesn't take much effort but also makes you feel better is nice as well!
The recipe is quite basic: chicken, water, veggies - but I figured I'd post what I put in today anyhow.
1 package of diced chicken breast (about 2 cups?)
1 white onion wedged
3 peeled and chopped carrots
2 diced cloves of garlic
1 can of sweet corn kernels
1/2 green bell pepper
1 peeled and diced potato
1 small tomato, quartered
2 bay leaves
salt, black ground pepper, thyme, chicken cubes for added flavour
I didn't set the heat any higher than medium while cooking this. 1. the meat cooks better when it's done slowly and 2. I wanted to lay down or take a shower at the same time
Place the diced chicken, onions and salt in 2 cups of water. Cover, and let it cook until the chicken turns white. Add the garlic, green pepper, corn and tomato and carrots and 1 cup of water stir and cover. When it starts boiling add a chicken cube. If you've diced the potato earlier, place it in cold water while you wate to add this. The potato should go in last, along with the bay leaves, black pepper and thyme. Depending on how you would like the broth to taste add another chicken cube. Stir, cover and put on simmer. If you have some spaghetti or rice already made add that to your bowl. Or if you don't feel like making those put in more potatoes so it can be more filling. I added a lot of black pepper to mine, sometimes it makes my sneezy-nose or itchy throat feel better. When's it done? When it tastes like soup. It all depends on how fast you tried to cook it.
Enjoy!! Drink lots of fluids, take lots of Benadryl and go to sleep! That's where I'm heading now.
[UPDATED 04 June 2011] - a year later and I'm sick again. Earlier in the week I made a roast chicken. When I got sick I cut that up and had chicken soup for days!
Added bonus to this recipe; boil some rice with spinach and mushrooms in the water. SO good!
04 June 2010
Book Review: The Myth of Digital Democracy by Matthew Hindman
It's well known by now that I am currently working on my dissertation and researching the influence of social media in politics. The working title is: "Democracy in the Blogosphere", but after reading this book I feel I should make a change to the title. Blogging, as I am now, is one thing and doesn't fully grasp the meaning of social media. But micro-blogging and using Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, LinkedIn etc...that's an entirely different category.
I think when I purchased this book, I had the high hopes of it at least mentioning some Web 2.0/micro-blogging actors, after all it was published in 2009. Unfortunately, I was only left with rants about a "Googlearchy", poorly used data and no solid argument for why there is a myth to digital democracy. There were so many conflicting statements in this book, I nearly couldn't finish! As a Master's student I feel maybe Hindman, academically, has more knowledge than myself. I mean, there's an entire chapter on statistics and economics and an appendix attached at the end as well! But as an Average Joella, that's spent the past 15 years online, in chatrooms, learning HTML, discovering messaging clients, building websites, designing blogs, creating profiles etc, his work trivialises the user and the potential of the Internet.
He opens with a recount of the Howard Dean campaign in 2004, with which I can agree, brought a momentous change in US political history. It provided better avenues for fund-raising, and campaign volunteering and became a template for the 2008 election season. Hindman then moves on to show that more liberals visit what he sees as 'political websites' than conservatives in the US. This can also be understandable as most political activists come from the liberal viewpoint. Where I begin to disagree with Hindman starts with his assumption of a "Googlearchy."
This Googlearchy, basically states that the more hits/views/visits a site receives, the higher it will show on a google search. This is also determined by how many other sites have posted links to that site. This makes sense. If I search for "Ohio Universities" I expect Ohio University in Athens, Ohio to show up as it's closest to my word search, and most likely is linked to by several other websites. I also expect a Wikipedia article to show up if I search for Vietnam War as many people use Wikipedia for basic information. Hindman uses this same understanding to explain how an average user finds a political website. This brings me to my second problem: the data.
Firstly, he assumes that as the average user searches with only one to three words the same will apply for political topics and navigate no further than the first page. The latter is true, we more often than not stick to the first 10 findings on Google. However, to say that a user searching for information on a political topic will only use one to three words, is demeaning to the user. He uses sample searches such as "abortion", "gun control" and "the death penalty" to form his argument and show that you don't get the information you want through a search. Sure if you wanted a basic definition of those topics you would only search a few words - but if you're a pregnant Christian teen in Tennessee I could imagine your search about abortion would be a bit more elaborate.
Secondly, I also find the dates of his data collection in comparison to his publication date troubling. There were a few moments where statistics from 1997 were used to argue a case for a book published in 2009. If this were a subject on chemistry, perhaps this would be ok - but we're talking about the INTERNET! Information from 2006 can even be seen as obsolete today. I would expect a book about the "myth" of digital anything, to keep current with the rapidly changing digital times. There was a section where Hidman uses data from a 2003 publication to strengthen his argument that showed users had a hard time finding a website of any political candidate. I think anyone would have a hard time linking to a political candidate's website in 2003 as it was quite scarce for them to exist! He opens his argument stating that it all begins with Dean in 2004, but uses data from a publication in 2003 (which probably collected their data in 2001/02) to make an argument in 2009. The way we used the internet 3 years ago has changed - and Hindman needs to focus more on HOW we use it and not WHAT we are using.
Lastly, there is a great devotion of pages to the phenomenon of blogging and political websites. I found it hard to see any of his data reliable at this point, not only because it was outdated but because he was searching the wrong websites. Hindman found that there was little to no traffic to political websites and blogs, and of the blogs that were heard by the public, it was by elite, educated, white male professionals that created them - not the average citizen. He used Hitwise, a website visitor tracker, to determine what was classified as "political" or "news" websites and N.Z. Bear (now called The Truth Laid Bear) Bloggosphere Ecosystem to determine blog traffic. Perhaps this information would have been relevant a few years ago, but with the advent of Facebook's Open Graph, Twitter (neither of which were discussed in the book), the ability to comment, like and share on most websites - there is a lot left to be said. For the top 10 blogs that he researched, today some of them no longer even reach the top 250.
I began to wonder if Hindman even had an interest in social media, and if so - how this was so deliberately misplaced from his book. The video posted below shows Hindman in September 2009 on a panel for a discussion titled "Social Media, So What?"
I suggest you watch the vid and/or read his book for yourself to decide where you stand. I expected more from this title, so my understanding of a "myth" in his terms is still left blank. I don't believe blogging or social media is about how many people hear you - but about who hears you. Even if the top 10 bloggers are the 10 most read 'political' blogs, the comment box invites any citizen to join in the conversation. For what was phrased as 'political' websites he only focused on traffic to those that were instert-your-party-here.org or something. However facebook pages for political leaders were not even considered. Social Media is about HOW we use it not what we use, and there is a reality to our participation in the online world of politics.
This Googlearchy, basically states that the more hits/views/visits a site receives, the higher it will show on a google search. This is also determined by how many other sites have posted links to that site. This makes sense. If I search for "Ohio Universities" I expect Ohio University in Athens, Ohio to show up as it's closest to my word search, and most likely is linked to by several other websites. I also expect a Wikipedia article to show up if I search for Vietnam War as many people use Wikipedia for basic information. Hindman uses this same understanding to explain how an average user finds a political website. This brings me to my second problem: the data.
Firstly, he assumes that as the average user searches with only one to three words the same will apply for political topics and navigate no further than the first page. The latter is true, we more often than not stick to the first 10 findings on Google. However, to say that a user searching for information on a political topic will only use one to three words, is demeaning to the user. He uses sample searches such as "abortion", "gun control" and "the death penalty" to form his argument and show that you don't get the information you want through a search. Sure if you wanted a basic definition of those topics you would only search a few words - but if you're a pregnant Christian teen in Tennessee I could imagine your search about abortion would be a bit more elaborate.
Secondly, I also find the dates of his data collection in comparison to his publication date troubling. There were a few moments where statistics from 1997 were used to argue a case for a book published in 2009. If this were a subject on chemistry, perhaps this would be ok - but we're talking about the INTERNET! Information from 2006 can even be seen as obsolete today. I would expect a book about the "myth" of digital anything, to keep current with the rapidly changing digital times. There was a section where Hidman uses data from a 2003 publication to strengthen his argument that showed users had a hard time finding a website of any political candidate. I think anyone would have a hard time linking to a political candidate's website in 2003 as it was quite scarce for them to exist! He opens his argument stating that it all begins with Dean in 2004, but uses data from a publication in 2003 (which probably collected their data in 2001/02) to make an argument in 2009. The way we used the internet 3 years ago has changed - and Hindman needs to focus more on HOW we use it and not WHAT we are using.
Lastly, there is a great devotion of pages to the phenomenon of blogging and political websites. I found it hard to see any of his data reliable at this point, not only because it was outdated but because he was searching the wrong websites. Hindman found that there was little to no traffic to political websites and blogs, and of the blogs that were heard by the public, it was by elite, educated, white male professionals that created them - not the average citizen. He used Hitwise, a website visitor tracker, to determine what was classified as "political" or "news" websites and N.Z. Bear (now called The Truth Laid Bear) Bloggosphere Ecosystem to determine blog traffic. Perhaps this information would have been relevant a few years ago, but with the advent of Facebook's Open Graph, Twitter (neither of which were discussed in the book), the ability to comment, like and share on most websites - there is a lot left to be said. For the top 10 blogs that he researched, today some of them no longer even reach the top 250.
I began to wonder if Hindman even had an interest in social media, and if so - how this was so deliberately misplaced from his book. The video posted below shows Hindman in September 2009 on a panel for a discussion titled "Social Media, So What?"
I suggest you watch the vid and/or read his book for yourself to decide where you stand. I expected more from this title, so my understanding of a "myth" in his terms is still left blank. I don't believe blogging or social media is about how many people hear you - but about who hears you. Even if the top 10 bloggers are the 10 most read 'political' blogs, the comment box invites any citizen to join in the conversation. For what was phrased as 'political' websites he only focused on traffic to those that were instert-your-party-here.org or something. However facebook pages for political leaders were not even considered. Social Media is about HOW we use it not what we use, and there is a reality to our participation in the online world of politics.
19 April 2010
Following the Trend
Well, it's been a long time since this was last updated. Many reasons for that: nothing I felt I was worthy to blog about, moving to a new country, starting my Masters etc...
I've recently decided what direction I'd like to see this blog move in the future. As my dissertation will be focusing on the role of Social Media in politics - particularly citizen empowerment and participatory democracy - in the coming months, keep a look out for some entries on my findings. I'll post and review some of my 'favourite' (hey, I'm in the UK now, gotta blend) sites from Web 2.0 and see how YOU are using them.
In the meantime, I've got some major essays to submit within the next week, so, no post just yet.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)