What better day than today to begin something new? This is the first entry in my first blog, on the first day of office for the first African American president of the United States. “Far out,” you say? Indeed.
**UPDATE: Now it’s the 2nd day. Darn procrastination!
This blog is required for Dr. Ives’ course on Web 2.0, but I hope to use it as often as possible, and perhaps form a new hobby while fulfilling my obligations to the course. My main motivation for taking this course, as with any course, is to learn something I was previously unaware of. Obviously, we prefer courses which inspire us to think in ways we had not thought before, and of course, those which we expect to entertain us. I expect that this course will entertain me thoroughly, which is a wonderful thing in a college of business.
I currently participate in several groundswell technologies. I have used MySpace for more than 4 years, and more recently FaceBook, to connect with family and friends. I frequently use Wikipedia to research topics of interest or to settle the odd dispute. Although I have not been an active participant in YouTube or Digg, I often visit both websites for entertainment and information purposes. I also employ less obvious groundswell sources, such as customer reviews on Amazon or Target.com before making purchases.
The best 2 links on my iGoogle Enterprise 2.0 tab are an RSS feed from Dion Hinchcliffe’s blog on ZDNet (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/) and a feed from Original Signal (http://web20.originalsignal.com/).
I am a new Twitter user! In addition to my professors, I will be following Pete Cashmore (37,107 followers) from Mashable , David Meerman Scott (6,335 followers), and Charlene Li (6,945 followers). I selected these three because of their experience creating, using, and studying the technologies we will focus on in the Enterprise 2.0 course.
I read a great article on Digg today: RIAA Fears ‘Manipulation’ of Courtroom Web Broadcast. It describes the RIAA’s justifiable concern that live streaming of its trial might be tampered with and used to place the RIAA in a negative light. I think this clearly illustrates both the power of the groundswell, and the fact that after Napster, the RIAA is all too aware of the power of our collective annoyance. In fact, it is beyond probable that moments after the stream began we would start seeing new posts on YouTube slamming the RIAA in a re-cut (My favorite re-cut movie trailer of all time). I also Dugg an article for the first time today. The article (40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them) did a great job of illustrating to me how Twitter can be a useful technology in the groundswell. Watching friends and professors tweet randomly doesn’t really show you how this technology can be harnessed to promote brands, so this article really brought it home for me.
Without further ado, I present my first (OK…third) post!
Please…don’t do the wave….
They’re doing the wave….
