Twitter

Before starting this class I had no intention of ever having a twitter. I thought it was kinda pointless that all you used it for was to update other people on what you were doing. However, now that I am in 109 and 107 I see that it can be use for other purposes as well. Since I am new to twitter, I don't exactly know how to use all of its features. I do have a facebook and thought it was easy to figure out, but for some reason tagging things seems harder for me on twitter. I also need to figure out how to do direct messages. I know they are messages between another person and yourself, so I tried one out. However, I either didn't go about getting it started right or the other person didn't respond. Either way, I still have some work to do with keeping myself updated on twitter and figuring it out. Hopefully I will engage in an actually conversation sometime soon.

Privacy

In class we talked about privacy, and what it really meant. I was surprised to learn that websites were achieved. I had no idea that you could go back and look at old websites or things, even if they had been "deleted." This makes me nervous for my privacy online. When our professor showed us the video on how someone could pull up another person's chat on facebook I was a little creeped out. I thought chats were private, but what if other people could read my past chat history? There is nothing that I am worried about, or that someone couldn't read, but that is besides the point. I want what I say online to other people to be private, unless I willingly post something on someones wall on facebook that I know other people will be reading. It also creeps me out that there are ways around everything on the Internet. You may think your password and files stored online are safe, but half the time they aren't My own mother had her identity stolen awhile back when I was younger, and I remember how hard it was for her to fix everything that the criminal had done to her name. They ordered things online with her credit card and started online sites in her name. Now that I am older and understand things more, I can't imagine that happening to me. Privacy is a huge thing to people. If someone doesn't feel like they have privacy then they won't do something, However, the sad thing is that often times people feel like their information is secure when it isn't, and that is what continuously worries me about the Internet. I think we need to find more ways to keep information private for people, including having companies on and off the Internet work harder to keep their customers private information safe.

Blog Platform

I already have an account with blogger for my 107 class, so I decided to stick with Blogger for this class as well. I found a website that compared all of the popular blog websites and it said that blogger is one of the easiest blog platforms to set up and use right away. Sometimes I am a little slow with technology so I like that it was so easy to set up. I made a separate blog for this class and it maybe took me a minute to fill out the questions. The website that I found also talked about wordpress.com and joomla.com. it said that both were more complicated to set up. However, joomla.com seemed to be the hardest to set up and required you to install a bunch of things on your computer, which I don't like to do, so Blogger seemed even better to me. It also talked about an Xanga, which I used in 8th and 9th grade not knowing it was a blogging site, so that was kinda funny. I went and actually found my old Xanga site and shut it down. It looked exactly as I left it, which made me realize that everything stays on the Internet until you take it off. It has been 5 years since I have posted on Xanga, or even looked at it, so who knows who has seen my posts in that long amount of time...kinda scary.

Anyway I really decided to stay with Blogger because it is so easy, and I only plan on using these blogs for class purposes. So having something that is so easy and quick to used when I have an assignment it awesome :). I'm sure there are other easy ones out there too, but at least I already knew how to use it from my 107 class.