John Batelle's New Interactive Web Chat

I read an article today in the blogosphere about interactive web chats. John Batelle's search blog is going to be having their first interactive web chat this week. The format will be question and answer, and can even ask the audience survey questions. In this particular post, he asks bloggers that will participating to give him some heads up on what everyone wants to talk about. He offers some ideas for topics including: Can Yahoo pull even or ahead of Google? and What's the Future Interface for Search? Many people posted comments in response with ideas for conversational topics. I think this is a good way to engage people and make sure you are keeping them interested with things they want to see and hear. Good move, Batelle.

Stiuqxela

This is my first post in which I am participating in the class blogging experiment. The word of the day is stiuqxela. Hopefully, stiuqxela will come up first on the google results in my blog so I can win a cool prize. stiuqxela, stiuqxela, stiuqxela. Check out stiuqxela and the green bay packers site. That's all. Bye.

Virginia Tech Article

Today in class we talked about an article regarding the Virginia Tech tragedy. The main idea of the article is that social media tools such as blogs and social networks were not utilized to effectively manage the crisis situation. According to an article in the New York Times, students were not notified about the first shooting via email until 9:26 am, over two hours after the first gun shot occurred. Although students did utilize blogs, phones, and Facebook to communicate with one another, many question why instant tools were not utilized by the university to notify the students of what was actually going on. This is definatley an idea that organzations and universities across the nation should consider factoring into their crisis management plans in the future. Who know whether the proper use of social media tools would have helped during the tragedy? All we can do now is better plan for the future and hope that something this awful never happens again.

Class Today

Today in class we read a really interesting article about Amazon. The main issue in the article revolved around the fact that Amazon's loyal customers are growing angry because it seems that new customers are receiving greater discounts. Old customers found that by making small changes to their computers to avoid cookie files they were offered better prices. Angry discussion forum posts state that Amazon's behavior is "unethical" and "sneaky." Amazon claims that the price differentials do not reflect whether customers are new or old. Rather, the are the result of various buyer behavior tests. The company maintains the sole purpose of the tests is to discover how different price levels affect purchasing behavior. A spokeswoman for Amazon claims, "It's quite a standard procedure in retailing." Regardless of whether the company used cookies or not, the central point of the article is that as technology becomes more advanced and common, buying histories are expected to make a difference in price. How will this affect e-commerce in the future? Time will tell.

Pina Colada anyone?

I wanted to change one of my Wikipedia articles, but I couldn't decide what I wanted to switch to. So after sitting in my freezing cold room for a little while, I found myself wishing I were back in Southbeach in the beautiful 80 degree weather sipping on a pina colada. Therefore, I looked up the famous frozen drink on Wikipeida and decided to edit the article. Since the article is relatively short, there weren't many grammatical errors. However, I did clean up the introduction paragraph and rearranged some of the sentences. The article is not very detailed, so it leaves plenty of room for expansion in my future edits. Check out the article and read more about the pina colada if you love them too.

No, chimpanzees should not have human rights. They're not human!

My awesome teammate, Kerri Angell, had a very interesting post regarding whether or not chimpanzees should have the same rights as human beings. Kerri's post was in regard to an article she found on Slashdot highlighting the story of a Brazillian court that has granted a chimpanzee with habeas corpus. It seems a court in Austria may follow this course of action in the future as well. Habeas corpus grants human beings the right to a fair trial and punishment. What could chimps possibly need a fair trail for? If anyone has any ideas I would love to hear, because this issue has got me stumped. Check out what Kerri has to say and the actual Slashdot article.

Back to Blogging: Wikipedia Edit

Well, spring break is over and it is time to return to the wonderful world of blogging. One of the articles I chose to edit on Wikipedia is "Online Poker." I used to play poker online on common sites such as Poker Stars and Party Poker. Since we've discussed the legality issue in many of our classes, I thought it would be a good topic to research. This is my first edit on this article, so I just did a grammar clean-up. If you would like to check out my edit and more about online poker click here. With the next edit, I will attempt to add more updated information on the legality issues.