Blogs vs. Wikis

     New media, it can be defined to some people as all the different ways users like you and I communicate through the internet. Information gets to users faster and more efficiently than before. Blogs and Wikis are two examples where users like us can be informed as well as inform others of what is going on.
     In the news article, "Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid", it says "Most neighborhoods in Brooklyn have at least one blog — and in some places, there seems to be one in every house, every bedroom". Blogs are extremely easy and useful to inform the people that view your blog. Anyone that wants to say something on the internet can have one. The owner of the blog is able to create new, edit, and review what they want to say to others. It can be used as sort of a public diary (but of course you have the option to set it to private). There are many different types of blogging. For example, a regular text blog is one like this, where you just input text, there are also video-blogging. "Vlogging" is the term for video-blogging and is mostly uploaded and viewed on YouTube.
     Wikis on the other hand, is not as "creative" or "opinionated" as a blog. One of the most well known wikis is Wikipedia. It is basically a user generated online encyclopedia. At first glance, one may think that since it is user generated, the information on the website will never be accurate. But actually, according to the news article "Wikipedia to Limit Changes to Articles on People", Wikipedia is actually starting to review the information on the website to test the accuracy of it. There is still a chance that the information may be inaccurate, that is probably why most professors will not allow references from Wikipedia. However, there are references listed on the bottom of the Wikipedia page and you can probably use those instead.
     Both Wikis and Blogs create a user friendly and easy environment for people to gather and spread information quickly and effectively. A use for Wiki that has not been done yet may be organizing a company project. There will be different sections created in order to accomplish the project and each section will be needed to update their work at the end of the day on the wiki to let the others know how their end of the project is going. With the help of wikis, it will be much easier to communicate and stay on track of what you are doing.

Social Networking: A purposeful loss of privacy

For the term project, I will be discussing my input on Social Networking: A purposeful loss of privacy. I am sure over 70% off the students in Baruch have their own Facebook page as well as many other new media websites. Many of them contain information that can be bad if it were put in the wrong hands. For example, if someone stole your credit card, they can look up the name on Facebook, get your birthday as well as other important information and will be able to go from there. The privacy issue is very important, especially in this time and age. I hope to give more of my insight for this topic.