The only language I know is English…

So, I took four years of French in junior high and high school, but I can’t lie, I don’t remember most of it. I am also about to study abroad in Italy this winter and I don’t speak a lick of Italian. I’m not really that worried about it, I have time to learn the basics, but what happens when I make friends? I will most likely become Facebook friends with them or follow them on Twitter, but most likely I will have to translate everything they write. Enter Twitter. Twitter client Brizzly unveiled some exciting news that will help us easily communicate with our foreign friends!! Click here to read about the new innovation!

Discussion Leader: Yammer

I am going to be leading a class discussion about Yammer. I will brief the class on the history and features of the site and then I will give two examples of companies who use this site everyday.

Overall, Yammer is Twitter/Facebook for companies or organizations only. It has many similar features to both Twitter and Facebook, right down to the weird “Like” button.

I will be showing a short video that highlights all of the reasons the company AMD uses Yammer everyday.

AMD CMO Discusses Yammer from Yammer on Vimeo.

Then, I will also share information of a Fortune 500 media and entertainment company that swears by this website to complete business in their global company.

Journalism is not dying (even though the papers are)

The readings for this week made me think about my future quite a bit. Just this quarter I was accepted into the Journalism major here at the University of Washington and this article describes the newfound difficulties of journalists everywhere. No longer are people looking for that simple story in the newspaper. In fact, a lot of newspapers don’t even print anymore, it is online. It has been my goal in life to  work for a magazine or do marketing for a magazine, newspaper, or something to that effect.  So, I wondered, “did I just dig my own grave?” Or, “am I actually going to be able to use my degree in journalism?” This article proves the fact that traditional print journalism is basically ending, but it also tells me that the essence of journalism is far from dead, it is simply evolving into something we have never experienced before. It is interesting to see how our society has changed into a place where we need things instantly and easily; the less hassle, the better.  This point is thoroughly proven in the fact that tons of sites these days allow users to log in using only their Facebook username and password.  These days that is all you need.  Also, the way society demands for this easy instant access to all news is proven through the personalized homepages that some sites are coming up with. The fact that I could go to a site that is not Facebook but log in with all of my Facebook login info and it would open a page that gives me only the news I want to read (from my area, about the celebs I like, from magazines and newspapers I like to read only), implies that yes, perhaps traditional journalism is on it’s last leg, but people still need journalism more than ever. I personally think it is just taking a different form. Journalism, to me, is all about disseminating information and enlightening your community. All of this is still possible and even more possible these days.  Yes, most people can be a “journalist” if they want to be through blogs, but I don’t think that this makes professional journalists any less important and necessary. Blogging is respectable and interesting, it provides great viewpoints, but people still need the trustworthy, endorsed, comfort that comes from traditional sources. Sources that have been giving people their news for centuries will still be favored when looking to clarify and determine facts. This is how I know I did not dig my own grave by pursuing journalism. This article just helped me figure out that I need to pursue journalism with a different perspective and I will prosper.

 

1. How do you think society as whole is affected by the shift in journalism?
2. What do journalists of today need to do in order to roll with the punches of the ever changing dynamic that the internet provides?

Twitter? yes, please!

Okay so here is the deal: I was basically “anti-twitter” before joining this class. I saw no point in the site and no redeeming value (or entertainment value, for that matter) of the short little status updates. After being in class for a couple weeks and the topic often coming up, I started to feel a little bit left out and then I just started hearing about it everywhere. So, I reluctantly made myself an account about a month ago. Don’t let this fool you, I never tweeted, until TODAY. Today I tweeted for the first time and I decided to follow a whole bunch of people. I think I may get addicted to this site. My mission for this subject matter post is to persuade those of you who have not joined Twitter to do so.

I will stress four areas that I think are the attributes of Twitter that make it worth while: entertainment, cathartic release, charity and knowledge.  I will delve further into each of these areas and I hope that you find a little curiosity for the site!

Entertainment

There is no doubt that this site provides entertainment. This entertainment is WAY different than the amusement Facebook brings us. Twitter makes it so simple and convenient to follow your favorite stars or any type of public figure, for that matter. Whether you want to follow Britney Spears, John Mayer, Barack Obama, Coach Sark, or really anyone you can name, they are on there. You can even follow companies or magazines. I am following In Style magazine and they offer deals and promotions through their tweets, what is better than that? Once you become a follower of a celebrity or company it shows up on your homepage what they have tweeted, you don’t even have to search for it or type anything in like on Facebook. Anything that you are interested in will be on Twitter and it compiles all the tweets onto your homepage for easy access. This has to be entertaining because it is only things and people you are interested in. On Facebook, any of your friends can pop up in the news feed or the live feed. I know that I don’t really care about every single one of my friends since I have over 600 of them. But with Twitter, I have chosen only those people that I want to show up. You even have the chance of communicating with the celebs you follow. You can tag them in your tweet and if they are really as cool as the rep they are given, they will tweet back to you! For example, I am following Justin Beiber who, even though he is only 15, is really good at replying to his fans. He just made one of his fan’s days by tweeting this:

justinbieber

RT @amandanoyes @justinbieber im having such a bad day. can you make me feel better & follow me? == U got it. feel better and smile.

 

There really is no argument against the fact that Twitter is entertaining. The site is what you make of it and if you compile it with people you are interested in, you could be amused and intrigued for hours at a time; you would be surprised how fast and often your favorite celebs, magazines, or companies tweet and retweet.

 

Cathartic Release

There is just something about saying what is on your mind to no one and everyone at the same time that gives me a great feeling of release. Already today I have had some annoyances and just by voicing them to no one (because right now I only have one follower) I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders. You don’t have to settle for Twitter Rants though, you can rave on Twitter too! It is a great way to release and enhance excitement as well! Have some great news, a fun event coming up? Let everyone and anyone know how excited you are. By exciting other people, you are in turn exciting yourself more. Twitter is definitely a perfect way to release and enhance emotions in a good way. You never know, you could even get some good advice on a retweet or something…

Charity

If you are one of those people that thinks that Twitter does no good to society, think again. Many charities have teamed up with or used Twitter as a way to raise money. Celebrities have even used their Twitter account to facilitate money donations. For example, Hugh Jackman used his Twitter to advertise the fact that he wanted to donate over $70,000 to a charity of someone’s choice. All they had to do was convince him in a tweet why he should choose their charity. Read here for more info on how this all turned out. There have also been non celebrities who try to use Twitter to their advantage, saying that for every follower they will donate X amount of money, or these people here had a contest to see who could get to 500 followers the fastest and then donated money to a charity of their preference. Twitter, as a company, has also paired with organizations such as Room to Read, to promote donations to a literacy fund. They are incorporating the process of creating a special wine and followers may pre purchase bottles. I am sure there are many more cases such as this out there that prove that Twitter does have redeeming qualities and isn’t all about celebrity woes and what random people spilled on themselves on the bus that day.

 

Knowledge

I have saved the most convincing argument for last. Well, it was what convinced me to join Twitter. Twitter isn’t just about celebrities and it isn’t just about your friends and nonsensical status updates. You can get real time legitimate news on Twitter. You can subscribe to your favorite newspaper, news broadcaster, news broadcasting station, radio stations, and any other type of information outlet. All of these organizations tweet. All of them will tweet at real time speed if they want to compete with one another, which they do. I don’t read the newspaper on a daily basis when I am at school. Sometimes I will go home on the weekends and my parents will try to talk to me about current events or politics and I can’t keep up. I started to feel inadequate and like I was living in some sort of bubble that wasn’t affected by current events. With twitter I have subscribed to newspapers, politicians, and even the President. I will have current updates at my fingertips without even having to search for a newspaper. In a world where most news sources are going to online only instead of print journalism, they will rely on Twitter more than ever. I think it says something when our President Barack Obama updates his twitter on a regular basis.

 

With this array of convincing reasons, why wouldn’t you get a Twitter? Even if you don’t want to tweet everyday, you can still keep up with the people, places, and things of your world. I urge you to ask yourself, “why not tweet?” If knowledge, charity, entertainment, and cathartic release aren’t enough to get you there, let me know. Twitter will open your eyes to a whole other world of immediate news updates and information at a speed you would never guess possible. So go ahead, make a Twitter account, you won’t be sorry.

Filling the Void Update: it’s official!

It’s official! I have officially reserved a url name and a weblog for my “Filling the Void” blog project! The url at which it can be located is ftvseattle.wordpress.com. Just setting that up has made me really excited to start blogging about all of the awesome ideas I have.

Unfortunately, I am currently in Florida for my grandfather’s birthday and I have limited internet access. This means that I have not had ample time to sit down and configure the perfect theme and schemes for my blog. Right now it is still generic becacuse I have yet to find the perfect one. I am returning Monday morning and I plan to finalize the design and theme either Monday night or Tuesday morning.

As for the actual content of my blog, I have had a lot of time sitting in airports and on the airplanes to write down lists of the activites I plan to blog about. This is helping me complete the compilation portion of my timeline. Once I return and finalize the look of my blog I will have plenty of things to start with.

I am really looking forward to the rest of this process!I can’t wait until I have the time and internet access to really get underway. For now the site is very dull, but check back here to see all the updates in the near future!

The influence of Flickr

This week’s article, Newbie’s Guide to Flickr, was particularly useful. I am currently on vacation with the family in Florida. I have been taking pictures non-stop at Disney World, at the beach, at dinners, and just hanging out.  Even before I read this article, I have been questioning myself and wondering why I take all of these pictures anyway. I know I will eventually load some of them onto Facebook, but not all of them. I am definitely not one to upload every single picture I have ever taken to Facebook. I feel like people who are logged into Facebook don’t want to see 25 photos of the same exact thing even though it may be with different light, or from a different angle.  When I go on Facebook I love looking at people’s pictures to see their activities and their friends, but that’s it. I need them to get straight to the point. If there are too many of the same thing I just feel creepy looking at all of them and I get a little bit bored, not going to lie. So where is a good place for me to share all of these photos? Where is a place that people are actually interested in looking at a lot of photos? This article enlightened me to Flickr. I think that this is just the site that it is great for a person to upload all of their pictures. If someone is on this site, as opposed to Facebook, they are only on the site to look at photos; pictures are the main purpose of this website. I think that the fact that people can search through tags on photos, or join groups and forums gives purpose to the countless pictures I take, as well as others like me. I have hundreds of pictures on my computer that no one gets to see! No one gets to see them because I have nowhere to put them, until I learned about Flickr. I think that a lot of my pictures are actually really good and with this website I can tag them and organize them purposefully so that people who are interested as well can find them. Flickr allows me to upload my hundreds of photos without having to think in the back of my head like I do when I’m on Facebook, “do my friends really want to see all of these pictures?”.

 

1. How can company’s use take advantage of the resources Flickr offers?
2. How can ordinary (not professional photographers) people benefit from the community that Flickr creates?

Crackberry: a very real addiction

So, for the past three days I have been in Florida with my family. So far, our main activity has been Disney World, the happiest place on earth! Don’t get me wrong, I would never ever complain about spending time in Disney World, but I do think that it is a place to enjoy the people you’re with. Well, over these few days, I have come to feel that if I don’t have a Blackberry or an iPhone, I have no one to talk to or nothing to do. My cousin and my sister, even my aunt, are always constantly on their phone. They are either updating their status, googling, or uploading the picture we just took. I’m fairly certain I am the only one who even knew we were going down the big drop on Splash Mountain yesterday because everyone else was so obsessed with everything else they could be connected to outside their immediate reality. So, this morning I woke up and deciding to research if this was a problem other people experience as well. I stumbled upon the following YouTube clip that highlights just what I have been dealing with during my stay here in Florida.

 

A little inspiration from the readings…

In the article that I read this week, Newspapers Use YouTube video Previews to Attract Readers, I gained inspiration on how to market my new project, my Filling the Void blog. The fact that these newspapers realized where they were losing their readers to and adapted to the challenge was thought provoking.  When asked, last week in one of our project updates, how we were going to market our project, YouTube didn’t even cross my mind. I thought of the traditional ways such as sending out emails to my personal network, Facebook, Myspace, etc. All of the things that these newspapers did as well. The one step they had above me was YouTube. YouTube attracts millions of users every day at all times of the day, so it could never damage your promotions to have a good marketing video become popular on YouTube. A lot of people, companies and ideas have had their ideas spark on YouTube. Take new pop singing sensation fifteen-year-old Justin Beiber. He was just posting his music videos of his songs on YouTube for his family and friends to see when pop legend Usher stumbled upon his clips. Now Usher is producing Justin and he has legitimate music videos and record deals. I know that creating a video is another project in itself, but somewhere down the line, when I have time and the need to have a larger viewership, I would like to produce a video promoting my blog. Perhaps I will come up with a catchy little tune and make a music video.

Coming back to the article at hand, the trailers that the newspapers made were very dramatic and enticing for all those who were watching. When I watched the very first one, I was a little scared and felt a little uneasy. I think that by eliciting this emotions from viewers, they will become intrigued and attempt to watch more or read more. This idea of a trailer is brilliant. The only thing that may or may not be a drawback is its creepiness. They will lose the fan base that has a fear of being scared, but I think that there is always a cost for going in such a dramatic direction. These trailers definitely sparked my interest in marketing on YouTube.

1. What are some of the YouTube sensation videos? Discuss how they have evolved in their market or how is has lead to success for the creators.
2. What kind of products or media can most benefit from marketing on YouTube or other sites like YouTube?

Every action has an opposite reaction…

After listening to discussion leaders present in class this week and last week, I tried to wrap my head around all of the information. What intrigued me the most was the presentation on Twitter Lists. This is a new technology that Twitter has just released. I just checked my very very new Twitter for the second time and I have the Lists option, so I am assuming now that everyone has it? Anyway, in preparing to write an analytical post, I wanted to analyze something about Twitter, since I am so new and so very intrigued. It occurred to me that when something new comes out, there is always an effect on a past technology or fad. I looked into this brand new Twitter feature and the effects it is having on the blogging community.

Twitter lists are ways to create lists of people to follow. A list can be made private, so that it is just for the user’s own personal viewing or it can be made public so that other people may subscribe to the list of people you think are newsworthy. Basically, they advertise groups of people at a time that are interesting. This is a great new tool and will allow for ease and simplicity when deciding who to follow. This tool will become essential to newcomers in the Twitter world because how else will they know who they are supposed to follow?

However, as the title of this blog insinuates, every action does have an opposite reaction. All the goodness that is arising from the introduction of the Twitter Lists, does have a sour effect on some wonderful traditions of the original, pure version of Twitter. The main one that I am aware (as a complete newbie) is Follow Friday. Follow Friday is exactly what it’s title says. On Fridays, members of Twitter give suggestions on who they think is follow worthy. With the introduction of Twitter Lists, this favorable pastime and a reason to look forward to Fridays for some people, will die. It is only inevitable that something is effected with the introduction of an awesome idea such as Twitter Lists. I can tell you, and others feel the same way as well, that Twitter Lists will now be my “go to”, when trying to figure out who I should actually follow. I did not know about Follow Friday until I started researching this topic. Had I known about Follow Friday, I may be following more than three people right now, but I just didn’t really know how to find anyone. Twitter Lists is right on my homepage, which makes it my new “go to” place for ideas. There is no real way to know if the Follow Fridays trend will die or not, but even according to others in the blogging world, they believe that there is always a consequence for the introduction of successful new ideas. In this instance, according to my research and analysis of both the new and old ideas, it may very well be close to the end for Follow Fridays.

Filling the Void: an update and a timeline

As talks about our class projects continue, it is time to set some concrete details down.

Project

I am going to be creating a blog about things to do in the Seattle area when there is nothing to do. I will categorize the activities based on price, location, how adventurous it is, etc. I will use my personal ideas and the blog style of my project will allow users to comment on these and suggest their own. I plan to use visuals as much as possible to inspire and enthuse the readers.

Name

Choosing the name of my blog proved to be a very difficult task, and there is a chance that before I launch my blog that it could change. For now, I am going to name it “Filling the Void”. I think that this is an abstract way of saying”finding something to do when you think there is nothing to do”.  If anyone has any other creative suggestions, I am always open for critiques.

Purpose

The purpose of this blog is to give people a place to go to for ideas of creative activities. So many times friends will get together and they can’t think of anything to do besides watch TV, go shopping, or go to the movies. Those activities aren’t bad, but when you have an entire three months of summer to fill, or even boring weekends and breaks, those activities get redundant and mundane. My blog will spice their lives up and provide unique ideas that they may have never even thought of in the first place!

Audience

The audience that I will be creating my blog for will mainly be high school and college students. However, the nature of a lot of my activities would probably be great for kids and give ideas for people who nanny children. Adults who are young at heart will find my activities enthralling as well, I’m sure!

Design

The design of my blog will be simple and definitely content focused. I will make sure that there are links to my specified categories (adventurous, money, location etc) and that they are very prominent and easy to access (preferably on the top or the side bar). I will attempt to have a picture or a video accompany every post. The theme for the blog will hopefully be something simple, with a splash of brightness to capture the attention of readers.I would also love to link my blog to Twitter so I can update readers on what random fun activities I am partaking in.

Content Plan

The content of my blog is limitless. As long as it provides a creative, fun way to pass time. Ideas for categories that I have had are: creative games (ie scavenger hunts etc), themed nights/outfits, adventurous, rainy day, fun baking recipes, children activities or the young at heart, free (no cost), parks, unique places to eat/dessert, hiking, and many more. I plan to base the things in my blogs off of my past activities. Readers will be allowed to comment and suggest on any and all of my ideas. They will also be updated instantly by adding my twitter feed to the blog.

WordPress

I do plan to set up a WordPress account for the basis of this blog. This will be done in the immediate future.

Proposed Timeline

The steps that I have broken my project down into are as follows:

-blog design and setup (creating the account, choosing the theme and layout,etc.)

-compilation of original ideas (writing up my reviews and stories as well as gathering the pictures and videos)

-surveying friends for their original ideas (sifting through them for the good ones, writing up their reviews)

-adding all the ideas to the blog

-marketing the blog (tell my friends and my networks about my blog)

-overall upkeep (adding posts as I see fit, responding to the comments)

 

I think that the original compilation and design of the blog will take the longest and I believe that I could have that done in a few weeks. After I have all of my information gathered, putting them on the site should be tedious but relatively easy. After that, marketing will take effort and persistence on my part, but by creating facebook messages, tweets, talking to my social network this could be done in a week or a few days, although I do understand that it is an ongoing process.

Measures of Success

I will feel like I have succeeded with my blog if I accrue interest in my blog. I understand that it takes a lot of time to gain many followers, but if I get a fair amount of positive feedback from readers, I will feel accomplished.