Social networking

Social networking has changed the way people socialize for almost 10 years. Those new technologies open channels of socialization not only between people also between businesses and consumers.

Today it is very difficult to find a person who does not use a social network to share their experiences through the network, and people are also related through social networks, talk, share, comment on the moments and feelings of others, approve or disapprove these experiences through “likes or shares”. Such is the importance of social networks in today’s daily life that even a birthday greeting is done through the network, as we can see in the article “Antisocial Networking” says:  Recently when he mentioned that it was a friend’s birthday, she recalled, “I said ‘Great, are you going to give him a call and wish him Happy Birthday?’ He said, ‘No, I’m going to put it on his wall’.

One of the ways that companies use social networks today is the direct communication with consumers or potential consumers, as it did 20 years ago through the TV companies conduct advertising campaigns and marketing through social networking platforms. Another way is that companies use social networks to study the behavior of consumers, which product they prefer, how much are they willing to pay, through which channel they prefer to buy it, etc. This is one of the ways we are helping more companies today because they can adapt their products and services to the immediate needs of consumers without spending money on it.

Due to social networks now people do not need to live in the same city to communicate, share experiences and learn about the daily life of others, which is a big plus for families who do not live in the same city, distance couples or for anyone traveling around the world.

The problem here is that nobody is wondering themselves what happens with all personal and non-personal information that rise to the network. Where it goes? Who else can use it? Which level of privacy we have?. The issue of privacy is very ambiguous and no user is able to say you have 100% privacy of your information in the network, even the creator of face book’s sister, posted a picture in her private Facebook page, ensuring that this photo was private just for her friends and she does not know how a completely unknown woman got the picture and twit it. This case is explained in the article “Facebook Privacy Is So Confusing Even the Zuckerberg Family Photo Isn’t Private”.

Personally I believe that social networks are a very useful tool but all active members should be more careful about what they post, because nothing is private on the network.

Wikis vs Blogs

As a result of technologies development and new communication media Wikis and Blogs appear. Both are website used as communication platforms but the way they work it is really different. The first and more important factor is that using Wiki users are sharing their knowledge about a topic, and in blogs users are shearing their opinion. Wikis are also dynamic web sites, where users can edit and change factors about a specific topic, instead Blogs are static websites where the author posts, all users can comment but they can’t edit the post. In Blogs normally you have one author who posts in the blog and then you have the users who follow and comment about the post, but in Wikis you have multiples authors, every user try to improve the information about a topic shearing their knowledge. Finally, we can find that the links that are shared are different in Wikis and Blogs, in Wikis all links that are sheared are links for others wiki web sites, in blogs those shared links are for external websites.

No matter the differences Wikis and Blogs share an important factor both are created for no-professional people that want to share and communicate, as we can see in the article How Can We Measure the Influence of the Blogosphere?  “Most blog authors are amateurs with a passion” and as we can see in the definition of wiki in Wikipedia “A wiki invites all users–not just experts–to edit any page or to create new pages”.

Convergence network or media convergence has become a essential tool in today’s world, because right now we do not communicate only using a media, we need the interrelation of various media to make our communication more efficient and to reach more people. I think a few years ago this network convergence was not necessary because it was not something accequible, but the current reality is very different. Both companies and people depend on this convergence to communicate every day.

A collaborative blog is when the posts are written by more than one author, good examples for this kind of blog are the political blogs. As we can see in the article How Can We Measure the Influence of the Blogosphere?  Political blogs started to attract the young people “Dean was the first candidate to create a blog, called Blog for America; the campaign also created a separate blog to target younger voters”.

Wikis could be used for the publication of braking news where you do not know exactly what happened, as the attacks in which at first did not know where it was, how many wounded there, which has been the attack, etc. But people who are near the bombing know first-hand information and can share this information, so every time someone has more or better information can edit the new for citizens to be better informed with primary sources.

Analysis of the effects of smartphones on society

With this analysis I want to show how smartphone technologies have changed the way we live and communicate. Normally when technology advances it is assumed that all changes are positive, I would like to contrast the effects of this technological advancement.

First blog post

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