Social Bookmarking

This assignment made me use Del.icio.us which I have used many times before this past year for certain assignments and overall ease of bookmarking all my important web pages on a universal browser; del.icio.us
The advantages of del.icio.us are very great! Instead of getting a cluttered bookmark page on your one computer with all of your important favorite websites, you can simply get all of that without taking memory space from your hard drive, and putting all that information on a single web page 'del.icio.us' where you can access from any where in the world that has a computer and internet! Even if you have hundreds of bookmarked websites on your account, it doesn't matter! You can tag your favorite websites making it easier for you to access them later on. And because it's all connected with your peers, then all your bookmarks, and their bookmarks are seen by you and others! Making all your new bookmarks seen by others, and vice versa.

The disadvantages are...none! I can't see any reason why some one would not use this for their work, business, school work, or even leisure. It's great!

Making a Connection

After reading a few people's blogs about the assignments, I found some good feedback on how I can make my answers better by comparison to theirs. I left some good comments on their blog topics of 7 & 1/2 habits of life long learners and one on Google Docs. I think many of the Bloggers left good responses to the questions, very well thought of, and answered in a manner of making you think of other possibilities to use the same types of programs.

Google Docs

I found Google Docs very useful. The pros about this application/document are that you can send information and work easily in an organized neat manner to multiple recipients, and receive it back with updates without getting confused with more than ONE copy back. It is very useful and practical for the common business man or the hard working student. Little things like this make life easier.

The cons of Google Docs is that the interface is somewhat confusing and not very attractive, and takes time and tutorials to get used to. Other than that, it is a very good program to use which can be mastered within a short while.


Google Docs can be used in school because it can let me send my documents to my partners' emails letting us all contact one another on our share of the assignment so if we are unable to meet up, or give each other the assignments, then we just send it over Google Docs and receive it back with an ease of organization.

The same goes for my personal life, if I needed to send something to my friend and needed it with organization to be sent back as one copy, then this would let me do that properly.

Social Networks

Social networks are very interesting, they allow for users to communicate with one another very easily in a very user friendly manner with pictures and information on who we are talking to.

The social network I have been using for over a year now is Facebook. I chose this over the popular Americanized Myspace, because all of my local friends use Facebook, and it's interface above all, is very appealing to me. It is not as complex as myspace, everything is very organized and neatly put together with pictures of your friends, their notes, and the famous wall which lets you talk to your friend and anyone else who reads it, sometimes having even a group conversation on someone's profile wall.

What I like about social networks is that you get to talk to your friends, view their new photos, and see all the new information and news that has been happening with your close or even distant friends, giving you information on what's been happening!

I use this in my personal life already, and find it hard to live without! However as for using it in a professional manner, may not be as useful, since I would just email my clients or co-workers on any information I may have.

Teachers and students can use this technology of social networking to possibly find out the latest information of their work lives, rather than personal lives such as we all would use with Facebook.

Image Generator

The image generator I found to be to the most fun and useful was most probably the magazine generator, where you get to put your or a friend's picture on the cover a template magazine. This one's really funny and good to send to friends. My second favorite would probably have to be 'Your Face on a Different Body' generator. I tried a few, it really made me laugh.

Here's the link to the main site:

http://www.imagegenerator.org/

Here are my Favorites:

http://www.fakemagazinecover.com/

http://www.bodyswitcher.com/

RSS

I never fully understood what RSS was, or what it was used for. After completing this assignment I now know what it means. RSS is an ingenious way to bring all of my interests into one spot. For example, with email, we don't have to go and check each one of our friend's accounts to see if they sent us an email. Instead, we get all the emails they send us, in one place, which is our inbox. RSS works the same way, instead of going to this site and that website to look for what we are interested in, we get all of our interests broad casted to one place, our Google Reader page. Where all of our subscribed interests show up each day with new information and news! That is what I like about RSS and Newsreaders.

It is easy for me to use this knowledge/application for my work and personal life, because it saves my time from searching up so many different websites to find what I am looking for. Instead, I just get what I'm looking for in one page. As an example, I am very interested in cars, so instead of searching the web for all the different car sites that will bring me my favorite news, I just subscribe to the several websites I like, and all of their news is brought to me, instead of me, looking for them.

Students and teachers can take advantage of this technology because it can help them with all their information being neatly organized and properly updated. In my case as a student, I would subscribe to various websites of information for a project I may have to complete for school. In this case I would simply click the RSS button on the sites I choose for newly updated information, and receive that info on a daily basis, getting the latest news. The most useful way to use RSS for a teacher or student that I can think of is to have a local site for news and information for assignments for students sent by their teachers, instead of the teacher having to email each student, they put it up on the local website, and it is transmitted to the student's RSS feed. ex. Google reader. This is somewhat like the way VLN has their website working, we, the students go to your homepage of ICT 12 Digital Media and get the latest news on meeting dates, assignments, ruberics, and deadlines.

Flickr's 3rd party apps and Services

after playing around with Flickr's 3rd party applications and programs, I found 'FD's Toys' to be the most fun and useful. He has made games such as making our custom pictures into jigsaw puzzles, having to put them back in place correctly! The most intriguing little 'program' I saw was the poster utility. Where we can put any of our pictures from Flickr and create a poster out of it, with possible captions around/underneath it. However, I am just as equally intrigued with the wallpaper utility. Where any of your pictures can be made into a computer desktop or cell phone wallpaper with basic picture editing and the option to include a calender on the bottom is very useful.
Another interesting program that is quite useful when in the need of knowing sunrise and sunset times, along with current moon phases is the sunset app. Giving you a monthly schedule of all sunset and rise times, with our current moon phases, all corresponding to Google Maps to locate wherever you are in the world!