Ashley's blog

My teammate, Ashley, commented on an article from Global Neighbourhoods about some major TV conglomerates getting together to create "micro online television networks." Like my teammate, I think this would be a great idea. With TV on Demand and TiVo, its great to be able to watch TV when you want and this also holds true for tv shows on the internet. If this is what the online TV network would be like then it could definitely be successful.

Boston Ballet reflection

The final Wiki page I edited was for the Boston Ballet. When I started I was surprised to see that the info that existed on the page was taken directly from the Boston Ballet website and that was all. Later I came to realize that info on the company was hard to come by except in the form of reviews. Again, the site wasn't updated much by anybody other than me for the period of time we worked on it but maybe my edits will be changed later once someone else like me comes along. I found some more info on the website to add and a couple of news articles were also used but for the most part I didn't know what to add. That is probably why for the final edit I mainly just reformatted the site. It became pretty clear to me that this project was a challenge when it came to these sort of articles because I have in interest in many topics however not enough knowledge to change what is already out there.

AHS reflection

The page for Andover High School actually did receive some edits during my experience with it however it was probably by some unhappy student who wanted to bad mouth the school. The site also is pretty boring compared to many other school pages. It seems like it was made by a teacher who was doing some pr for the school but does little for providing insight into the student life which I tried to do. Since my additions are still there, they must have been well received or maybe nobody has seen them.

Taggart edits

The Taggart page was challenging in a different way because I started with no base or experience in Wikipedia. It was good to learn how to start a page and adding written content was really pretty easy. I had trouble with pictures though and I think they ultimately got removed for some sort of copyright issue even though I had taken the picture myself. Anyways I figure the experience of starting something myself was good. I don't know why anybody would really want to read the site so it also received no traffic except from the wikibots but oh well.

Fitzroy Island reflection

So the end of the year has come and it is now time to reflect on all of the wiki edits we made over the course of the semester. I think my edits for Fitzroy Island were the most interesting and difficult because the site was already pretty well developed. It was laid out well, had good info, and some pictures. I added more pictures to the site and some more information about the walking trails on the island. I thought that the site might get more traffic than it did because it was so well made however nobody has edited it except for me since the project started. I guess I had good edits or at least none that offended any members of the wiki community.

wiki edits

I finished up with my wiki edits today. I added information about student life to the AHS page which highlights a couple clubs and the sports.

I also changed the format of the Boston Ballet page. Instead of being just one section with lots of information I divided it into sections with headers.

personalized computers

We talked in class a few days ago about an article from CNN Money. The article itself was mainly about Digg.com but the thing that caught my eye was the name Nick Negroponte. A while ago my dad had mentioned him so I asked him what he knew about the guy and about the concept mentioned in the article, some sort of newspaper called Daily Me. Turns out Negroponte was my Dad's thesis adviser back at MIT and he had some knowledge of the Daily Me. It sounds kind of like the Amazon.com of the newspaper world in that you tell it what you're interested in or looking for and it will gather articles that are relevant to your interests and also suggests articles that it suspects you would be interested in. With sites like Digg.com, Amazon, and even Google's history program, the world wide web is becoming more personalized every day. My dad said that Negroponte was a big fan of personalizing computers (he gave me the example of a computer advising you to grab an umbrella as you left for work because rain was coming). Personalizing the net also seems like a good way to travel such a huge network with billions of different pages. The only downside I guess is that when it comes to trying to find something completely off the wall, it may be harder to search for unusual things when Google keeps kicking back things it expects you to be interested in and gives you a filtered result of the world. Kind of like living in the Emerald City where everything was green...

news article

So with the end of the year coming up and projects due left and right I've kind of been slacking in the blog department so for the next few days I'll be playing some catch up. Anyways I was reading on Slashdot today that Newscorp, the proud new owners of MySpace, is looking to invest in another internet company. According to the article, Photobucket and MySpace may soon be under the same owner which means that all of their disagreements in the past will have to be put behind them as their technology gets combined. Frankly I still cant believe the price tag that comes along with these popular websites. Photobucket is being quoted between 250 and 300 million dollars. The internet itself is a fairly new technology and this whole blogging trend with MySpace and Facebook selling for millions of dollars seems pretty crazy. Sure the stuff is popular now but will it last into the future or will it just be another trend that passes as the target market outgrows the concept?

Wikipedia

I added the school webpage to the Andover High School page on wikipedia

I also categorized the Taggart page. That can be seen here.

Finally I added a picture of the coral beaches to the Fitzroy Island page

Host My Site

We had the CEO of hostmysite.com come in today to talk to us about the business and the evolution of internet websites. It was cool to hear about the evolution of websites from somebody who experienced it all first hand. It's amazing to see how they've evolved from basically a brochure with spinning dollars signs to an interactive expanse of information. As the internet evolves we get a better understanding of its true ability, the ideas of limitless information (the only trouble of course being how to find it but google has made that much easier). It seems every company has a website now with valuable information beyond who they are and what they do.


On a completely different subject I just have to have a little rant about academics today and the internet. For one of my classes I have to do this project and part of it includes writing a paper. Like so many papers do, it requires some research. And like so many papers before it, our reference/citation sheet has to have more than just internet websites on it. Now I know that there is a lot of information to be found in the library, actual books and magazines and all, however when doing a project on a rather new form of technology (for my group, it's about the iPod) there aren't a whole lot of books out. 3 in fact, in the whole library. So where else are we to get our info? I know we shouldn't look past the valuable resource that is the library but in today's day and in my generation where many of our textbooks are not only offered in online stores but also word for word on some publishers websites it seems fairly ridiculous that teachers still insist we visit the library. What is so horrible about citing websites as long as they are credible ones? When will that day come when teachers don't specify how many books must be cited and just accept that the internet is there filled with more and more valid information everyday? But most annoyingly why isn't citing wsj.com as good as citing a printed article from The Wall Street Journal?

Micorosoft Zune

I read an article on our Slashdot feed about the new Zune coming out soon. You can read about it here. I guess I'm not really surprised that Microsoft is making changes to their Zune since technology is always changing, but I am surprised that they are doing it so soon. Their product didn't hit the market till fairly recently but against the iPod I doubt it has been doing very well. Apple took the first mover advantage and ran with it with very little competition. It seems a little late in the game for Microsoft to even bother with their own version. I do like how the Zune can share music wirelessly but that would require having a fellow user nearby and with so few around that feature is basically useless. We kind of talked about it in class a couple days ago, how networks are more valuable when more people are involved in it and that holds true for the main feature of the Zune player. Microsoft is going to have to work a lot harder to get a decent market share and I doubt a newly sized model will do the trick without a heavy advertising campaign.

Taggart Crest

I had some time to waste so I just added a picture of my family crest to the Taggart Wikipedia page. It's kind of blurry but its good enough and certainly better than nothing. Now I gotta run to dinner but at least I did something kind of productive with my evening.

stiuqxela

Back from spring break and we have our first assignment: to blog the key word stiuqxela. The link leads to the Packers webpage but as a Pats fan, having a link to the Packers site on my blog just seems wrong. Nonetheless I suppose this could prove to be a good experiment since clearly stiuqxela has nothing to do with football but it will be interesting to see how google works and what it takes to get a higher rating.

Finally it's Spring Break but I have one last post before I am free. I was reading the blog of my teammate Mike and I thought this one was pretty interesting. I read the article about the YouTube awards as well and was surprised that such a new industry has made so many advancements in such a short span of time. The awards just prove how big YouTube has become.

Wiki edit

I had some time to kill between dinner and dance so I figured I would be productive just one more time before spring break. I added more information about the outreach programs available through the Boston Ballet on their Wikipedia page. The programs were mentioned in the old version but I though more information would be useful to anybody reading the site and may bring a program into consideration. You can read my update here or by clicking on the link to the Boston Ballet on the left of my blog.

VALS from class

Since we talked about the survey some in class and it just may be on the exam I figured I would learn more about it by taking the survey. According the online version I am an experiencer with some underlying achiever aspect. I never really believe in these personality survey things because the descriptions are vague to include a large amount of people. Whether it be the VALS survey, my horoscope, or a myers-briggs test I'll take them because its required or just for fun but for the most part I doubt that information will ever become incredibly important

Light Computers

I've been catching up on the articles in our required blogs and I came across this one in Slashdot about a computer that would run off of light energy instead of electrical. If they could actually make this computer that would be really cool. It would be a great way to save on the electric bill but it would also have huge implications in terms of energy conservation and alternative forms. It's just amazing how far technology has gotten us and there is still so much more out there.

P&G blogs

To be completely honest I never really thought I would get into this whole blogging thing. Its pretty clear that I don't post often and even then it's because we're required to. But the thing is, blogging really is a pretty valuable resource. We were told to do a search of something we're interested in and I chose Proctor and Gamble (I wrote about it in my last post) Since I've started following the company, P&G had a huge recall of their pet food products. The company that makes the food sold under P&G's Eukanuba and Iams names have recently been found to cause kidney failure. You can read an article about it here. This story would probably be of interest to anybody who buys these products but the RSS feed I've been getting should be important to the PR people at P&G. I have seen this story duplicated in nearly a hundred posts. This just proves the viral nature of blogs and how important they are in a marketers eyes.

class discussion

So we talked a lot yesterday about researching on the internet and on blogs. It was suggested (or assigned I'm not sure which) that we should do a search in a blog engine to find peoples opinions of something we're interested in like a band or internship or something. I don't really know where I want to work but I thought an large international firm would be pretty cool. We have some family friends who used to work at P&G so I did a search for Proctor and Gamble on Technorati and added the results to my blogline page. I wonder if I will get any good info out of it. It seems like a good idea for somebody involved in the company to keep track of the publics opinions on various products or new releases.

I added a little information to the wikipedia page on Fitzroy Island. I took the walking path when I was there so I added a little more information about the lighthouse hike. It was a lot steeper than we anticipated it to be and there wasn't as much coverage so I was really glad I brought water and sunscreen.

google clicks

I had no idea that the advertisements on the right in Google were such a big deal. After learning about the whole pay per click advertising thing it became clear that those links are a real business opportunity for the companies being promoted. I thought this article from our required ClickZ feed was pretty interesting. It talks about the different ways that Google protects the companies from click fraud and the new methods they plan to implement to improve protection and make the process easier for the clients. This new method would have a form that businesses can fill out in more detail. I thought this article showed that Google is taking great initiative to maintain a good relationship with the people that advertise on the search page. We've always been told that a current client is more valuable than a new one and this proves that theory.

Wikipedia (again)

I added a bit to another article that can be read here. Hopefully I can do some more reasearch and add to the page later.

Wiki project part 2

I added some demographic information to the Wikipedia page of my high school since there wasn't any information already there. The site didn't seem very informative except in terms of the mission statement and core values. That's all well and good for the PR of the school but it doesn't give much insight into the student life.

I also figured out how to add pictures so I added a picture of the walking trail to the light house on the Fitzroy Island page. I visited the island over winter break and thought the view from the lighthouse and the island as a whole was just beautiful. I figured that researching the island for the sake of this project wouldn't be too boring plus I took a lot of pictures that I figured could help make the page more interesting.

Wiki project part 1

So this wikipedia project is definitely a challenging one since I don't really feel like I know enough about a subject to become a source of information. Either way it is required so I got a start on it. I just created a page for my family name which you can see here. I also linked it back to the Clan Ross site under their subject of "Septs of Clan Ross". I saw that there was no site for my name but there were sites for other names so I added a little background information. Hopefully I will learn how to upload pictures soon so I can add them to the site.

2nd intro

I made this blog for my Information Technology Applications in Marketing class. We'll be studying the use of wikis and blogs in marketing and I will be posting my observations, edits, and comments to various blogging and wiki sites here.

1st post

Hey everyone. My name's Beth and I'm junior majoring in marketing and minoring in international business. I just spent my winter abroad in Australia and it's not easy to be back in cold Delaware after spending so many days at the beach. Study abroad is easy at UD and it's a great opportunity to learn about a new culture or spend the winter in a much warmer place.