Unlearning Due to Technology

Epilogue: What have you had to “unlearn” (i.e. that only phones are for having conversations) in the past 10 years due to technological change?

Answer: Although it is the example, a huge thing I did have to unlearn is that phones are only for having conversations. Now one’s phone is a portable computer, a map, an instant messaging machine, and a camera. Another thing I’ve had to unlearn is that you have to use a phonebook to find out the telephone number to a store, restaurant, or friend’s home. With technology, you can look these up on the computer, on your GPS, or do what I do which is text the store name to Google (466453) and have the number texted back to you by Google nearly immediately. Another is that you have to have a free hand talk on the phone – with Bluetooth and speaker phone this is not true. One big thing that technology has made me unlearn is that road trips have to be boring. Nowadays with tv screens, DVD players, video game console hookup ability, and satellite radio there is no reason for one not to be able to have fun in a long car ride with all of these things. You used to have to be unexcited about road trips and expect to look at the trees for hours, but now if you sit in the back seat you can look forward to watching a string of DVDs until you reach your destination. Finally, one large social thing that the past 10 years of technological changes have forced me to unlearn is the importance of face to face communication and meeting with people. With webcams, social network sites such as Facebook, the widespread use of e-mail, and text messaging, one no longer has to see another person, hear their voice, or even know where they are in order to get an important task accomplished.

Customer-Empowered Rating Systems

Chapter 11: Many online merchants today, such as eBay and Amazon, use rating systems empowered by its customers. Is this adequate for determining which products to buy, or which users to trust? Cite examples from these two merchants that support your opinion (whether it is good enough, or inadequate).

Answer: I believe that the customer-empowered rating systems on eBay and Amazon are absolutely adequate to determining the safety of people that you don’t know. For example, on eBay, you just know that if someone has a 99.9% satisfaction rating out of 20,000 total ratings and you read the positive comments that people have left about them after working with them over and over that you can trust their product. The reason I believe that this is adequate is that the people that leave these responses have worked with that person and, on eBay, can only leave feedback if they have either bought from or sold to that user. The people leaving feedback are people that were once in your shoes, and if they say that a vendor of textbooks shipped the book promptly and it was in good condition as described, and 5,000 people have also had this experience, you should have no reason to believe that that vendor will personally seek you out and screw you over when they have treated everyone else so well. This is really the only way to rate people as the customers are the only who experience each other on these websites, not the sites themselves, and you know that they will be honest because if they got screwed over they wouldn’t. The system also works as a deterrent against poor dealings. A vendor knows that if he takes someone’s money and either does not send out the product or sends one with less quality than bargained for that that person will rip into them verbally on the ratings and feedback system and then people in the future will see that and choose not to buy from that person.

Finding Info from a Social Website

Chapter 11: James Surowiecki’s book mentioned in this chapter outlines four elements to create a so-called “wise crowd,” one that can make decisions better than experts. These include “diversity of opinion” and “independence.” Since social groups online seem to form crowds of many like-minded people, what caution would you give someone using information they find from a socialized website or resource?

Answer: When a social group online forms a crowd of many like-minded people, this breeds a problem that can cause incredibility of information and the spreading of often incorrect and biased information. A group of like-minded people will be biased towards one direction of a situation and may not give you the factual response that you desire. These groups of people can also experience groupthink. That is, if you search for information on a discussion board of a social learning or social website in general, the information may look as if it is agreed upon and appears to be absolutely valid when it really is just a group of people agreeing with each other without the desire to break from the norm opinion. The bottom line is that when you are searching for information and especially information that is debatable, you want the ability to see the situation from different viewpoints and perspectives in order to ultimately asses in your own mind the correct answer based on different points of info. When you pull information from a website that consists of all like-minded individuals, you do not have the ability to receive the information from different types of viewpoints and you therefore can not trust it. It can be too biased and therefore mislead you from the truth.

Opportunities to Experiment and "Fail"

Question: Think back to your experiences in middle and high school. How many opportunities were you given to experiment and “fail” in solving a problem? How could a school work today where students were regularly offered such opportunities?

I am having trouble recounting specific examples of when this happened in middle school and high school, but I do remember that there was a good amount of times throughout that we were given a problem where we were set up to try it a certain way and ultimately fail by design. I think that it would do one’s education great things if this were employed by schools more often. Much like Shirky’s point that “Success is 99% failure,” I believe that much success comes from trial and error or getting close to success and then finding where you erred to perfect it. I know for instance that in my COB 202 course, the teacher often put us in groups and set us up to negotiate with one another that would ultimately leave us all unhappy with the result, but we would do our best to ensure that we still reached our goals as much as possible in the process.

I believe that a school could work where students are regularly offered such opportunities. I think that in order for this to work however, grading will need to be adjusted. I like this idea regardless. Grading should be less-focused on the end result, but the process by which you got there. This would work if students were given opportunities to experiment and fail in solving a problem. In this process, students would be able to focus more on the process of solving a problem, would not be pressured to cheat, and would be able to learn how to correct mistakes and follow the process of trial and error – something that they will continue to see in the real world.

FOAF-style Networking

Question: What professional benefits do you see by investing time into a FOAF-style network?

From a personal standpoint, investing time into a Friend of a Friend network can do great things as far as networking goes in the professional world. In recent years, I have been told time and time again that in order to get a job, you truly need to know someone. This is where FOAF comes in. By expressing yourself on an FOAF-style network, you can spread yourself and who are you are to people all over the world, create relationships, and ultimately aid in the process of “selling yourself” for job purposes.

From a corporate standpoint, investing time for research purposes can provide monumentally valuable information to a company in aiding in their marketing strategy. One of every company’s toughest tasks is to identify accurate market segments of different populations of people to whom they will market and sell their products too. An FOAF-style network allows businesses to not only research the product desires and suggestions of many different people, but social aspect allows for firms to more accurately identify the number of potential customers in different target areas. Any information like this enhances a firm’s ability to earn profits and cut costs by not wasting marketing time, money, and energy on people that this type of social network can tell them to disregard.

Online vs. Print Media

I don’t truly make a distinction between online and print media because I expect the same exact information to be on both. If I look at the Pilot Online (Norfolk, VA) or the Atlanta Journal Constitution, I expect it to have the same, but more updated, news stories as is printed on the newspaper at my doorstep in the morning. I think that there has to be an advantage for online media because it is more time-sensitive. Online sites are updated by IT people all day, everday. This is something that you can not do with print media. I do however still respect print media and enjoy its ability to be transported, unlike a computer.

Is eBay safe?

I used to argue to my peers that eBay was completely safe and reliable – until this semester. I had ordered textbooks, video games, clothes and more from eBay for years and likely will take more precaution in the future. Why? Because I ordered textbooks this semester that never came and as a result my grades suffered. Overall, as I do have to admit that these books were from the same eBay user and I have had large successes from eBay in the past, eBay ought to work for most people for many items. I believe that as long as you follow the user’s rating, take note of their posted location and watch for potentially risky items, you should be fine. Most people are scared to order a car on eBay because it is such a big purchase, but I think that I likely will in the future because of great prices and PayPal protection. There is risk, but I believe that sites like this do work and should continue to work with the insurance of PayPal.

What is the Value of a Bit?

Question: What’s the value of a bit? It seems that going after folks who have traded songs or movies online is a huge expenditure of effort and money. Is DRM-protected content the way to go? If you don’t agree, propose another method for the distribution of digital multimedia so that content creators can still be compensated.

Answer: I believe that DRM is not the way to go, not because of the apparent controversy involved that has probably been stirred up by the thieves themselves, but because it is much like the algorithm-type software that encrypts DVDS - it is useless in the large scheme of things and will only continue to be hacked. Additionally, the excessive, costly, and intense law suits that pretty much everyone in the world has a terribly negative attitude about need to be gotten rid of. They often attack the wrong people - the people that steal hardly anything compared to the big guns - and make the content providers who are trying to recover damages look foolish. The RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America, a coalition of these content providers that takes care of the industries in an attempt to curb this problem, will end these lawsuits and has begun to work with ISPs to fix this detrimental problem. This new step will hopefully lead to the RIAA attacking the right people - the huge, costly offenders - and get compensated for this stealing more often and efficiently and allow them to take adequate steps in the correct direction by working with those who have the best ability to help them and take control of this current situation (the ISPs).

DVD Copy Protection

Question: The copy protection originally designed to protect content on DVDs has been overcome some years ago. What other methods can you find today that movie studios are using to protect their content on DVDs or other optical media?

Answer: The first big one I found is CSS, which uses keys to allow DVD information to be translated and therefore copied. This was cracked however back in 1999 by people who use reverse engineering of the algorithm. The DVD Copy Association created this as well as the RPC, regional playback control, which the movie studios use to control the geographical and overall distribution of the products that they create. This one has been controversial though as there is likely some obvious profiling of different geographic areas involved. The current most popular, widely-used, and useful form of protecting against DVD copying is AACS, Advanced Access Content System, which protects against DVD copying and now, as of 2005, against HD DVD and Blu-Ray copying as well. Of course, just as always, people are certainly working hard to crack this and enable the continued piracy of Hollywood movies and studios will have to perpetually fight to earn and preserve what they deserve.

WEP/WPA

Question: If your mother uses wifi at home to send you e-mail, and your home network is not protected by WEP or WPA, what reasons would you suggest to her for enabling one of these two protocols at home if the liability of reading those e-mails still exists once her message leaves your home, on it’s way to school?

Answer: Both of these forms of security are proven to not substantially defend a wireless network from external hacking, which could lead to the compromising of perhaps valuable information within e-mails. Professional, intentional hackers can still hack into your information even if you use these protocols. However, it is clear that she ought to continue to use it/them, as many people still do today years after proof that they not completely effective, because it beats not having them. These protocols can not defend against pros, but they do still protect information against accidental hacking. As most people are not hackers, especially the people near you that are able to pick up your Wi-Fi, most of the time your information should continue to travel peacefully with the use of these two protocols.

Google's Text-based Ads

I do pay attention to Google’s text-based ads – I see them everywhere I see them on Google Maps, Google’s search results pages, Gmail and more. I don’t take most of them too seriously as they are often irrelevant to my life and for marketing segments that do not have anything to do with me. However, Google does attempt, when they can, to use what they know about you to effectively place the correct ads with different people. On Gmail, there are commonly advertisements for things that I care about and local to my area – something the Google has used to target consumers on a very individual basis. I believe that Google is doing the right thing by using sponsored ads. First of all, I respect this as a good business move as I do with just about everything that Google does. This program brings in ample revenues for Google and helps small business people to market very easily. Anyone can market on these tools and this platform Google has provided hits just about as much of one’s target market as is conceivable possible in this situation. This gives people a chance to market to their target consumers without spending the lucrative marketing money that it costs to advertise on a similar large scale as on TV, in the newspaper or a magazine, or on other websites.

Freeze Mob

I find it very interesting that people can really come together and do a freeze flash mob of this significance. Above that, I was truly amazed that that amount of people took the freeze mob that seriously and did such a great job holding themselves together. One great way to get something like this in motion is to invite everyone possible, or at least in one local network, to a Facebook event for this, giving out the planned time and location. A Facebook event will also get people that are going to participate to communicate about this with one another directly and continuously. In order to do some non-electronic marketing for this event, you could put together a grass roots movement and post flyers on the windshields of peoples’ cars and on front doors in urban/young neighborhoods. I would write in these flyers that we are trying to put together the biggest freeze mob to ever join together and promote that participants will be taking part in some global and important. Telling people that they will be part of the biggest freeze mob ever and will be seen on Youtube can invoke a desire for people to join.

Drug Side Effects

Drug companies should absolutely be required to come clean about situations like this in their commercial websites. The main fear that the average person has associated with any drug is its potential side effects. People enjoy the good things a drug can do for them, but not side effects. And as this is so, the public has the absolute right to not be misled about side effects associated with a drug and should not ever be surprised about any of them.
I feel that it should be very much up to the consumer to do quality research on drugs. They need to ensure for themselves as much as possible to find out the truth behind drugs that they take and learn all side effects that come with taking them. But drug companies have to be required to post all known side effects on their commercial website. If someone goes to that site and sees all of the benefits of a drug, they should not have to hunt elsewhere to know the negatives in order to weigh the two. Additionally, all know side effects should be on the company website. Companies should be required to make a note of 100% of the potential side effects and be fined if they mislead people by leaving any out.

Collective Cause

Question 2 (Shirky, Chapter 6): What kinds of collective causes have you become a part of? Did the cause have a website? How did you learn about the cause? How did you participate? What kind(s) of technology were used to communicate re: the group forming or group action?

Answer: At my high school, there is an athletic code of conduct that each student-athlete is required to sign and agree to when they try out for any of the various sports teams that were offered. During my junior year back in 2005, a huge scandal erupted when a former student’s vengeful mother mailed pictures to the school office, printed from Facebook, of student-athletes clearly drinking alcohol at parties. One other thing to mention as background is that my school has a very serious honor code, similar to that of UVA’s. Because of this, the school chose not to kick people off of teams but asked that people who have drunken and therefore broken the code of conduct turn themselves in and forfeit their spots on the teams. Many people chose to do this, because it was honorable, and a lot of them sacrificed collegiate sports dreams because of it.

The part of the cause that I took was in support of people turning themselves in. Our school president, a three-sport star athlete, refused to turn himself in. Two things made us furious about this: pictures of him drinking were on the principal’s desk in the school office and not only did he refuse to turn himself in, but the school did absolutely nothing about it because of his strong family influences at my school. Many of us organized a group protesting the double standards at our school. We used mail, phones, and tools such as Facebook to organize a powerful push to curb this lack of justice. The effort failed eventually, but we enjoyed sparking some nerve in the bureaucrats at my school. Our group communication allowed us to make serious moves and changed the way things are done at my high school.

JMU-ipedia

Question 1 (Shirky Chapter 5): The “power law distribution” or “long tail” phenomenon, as seen in behavior online on the Wikipedia, suggests that the concept of an average user of wikipedia is meaningless. Support your answer: how do you think a local, “JMU only” version of the Wikipedia would compare to the worldwide version? Would it be very similar? Higher quality? Less quality? Why?

Answer: Shirky relates the power law distribution or long tail phenomenon coined by Chris Anderson to weblogs around the Internet world. Shirky says that a relatively small amount of weblogs are seen by most people, as they have the most links that allow one to find them, and that the large majority of weblogs around the world are seen not nearly as much as they have few links to them. When I think about the question above – would a JMU-only version of Wikipedia contain higher quality information than the real Wikipedia – the first thing that comes to mind relates to the amount of people pouring into the real Wikipedia. Ignoring the fact that Wikis are usually quickly edited by the site’s management in order to preserve quality, I feel that a JMU version may be higher quality than the real one. This is because, as Shirky mentions, the average person around the world, it would seem, offers useless information to post online. However, JMU is a higher education institution, and a good one at that. Looking purely at that, I feel that JMU’s “average blogger” will be smarter and offer better quality information that the average person around the world posting to Wikipedia. It is likely that both versions would turn out to be very similar in reality because, just like Wikipedia, JMU-ipedia would have site editors constantly monitoring the updated information to preserve quality. However, if you put that aside and consider only what true users post onto it, I believe that more knowledgeable and higher quality information will come from the average JMU student than the average Wikipedia user.

Google StreetView Project

Abelson, Chapter 2: In a well-publicized news story, a man was caught “on camera” exiting a "gentleman's club" when Google photographed him for their StreetView project. He later sued Google because the revelation was unhappy news to his wife. Do you think Google is in the clear when they photograph the view from streets in your neighborhood?

Answer: I remember reading several news stories in recent months and years about people taking issue with Google videotaping their neighborhood streets for this project. I personally have no problem with this project – in fact, I think Google Earth and streetView are going to and have already proven to be incredible tools for our society as a whole. I will offer two ethical theories to cover why the man exiting the “gentleman’s club” has no grounds to sue Google and should only be upset at himself.

The first ethical theory is the Universal Principle. This theory states that you should only do things that you would be fine having projected all over the news, meaning an action that you would not be ashamed to have your wife or mother know about. The second theory is the Utilitarian theory. These projects by Google are being created for the greater good of our society. They are in motion to help us and offer useful tools – imagine being in Hong Kong and being able to show your co-workers your home and neighborhood back in Atlanta. Following the utilitarian theory, Google is providing a great good to theoretically everyone in the world who has Internet and is only hurting those that are doing things that they are embarrassed to have those close to them know about.

I think that, as long as it is legal to photograph people, or Google blurs them out if not, Google should be in the clear as they are not harming, but helping society.

"Community of Practice"

Shirky, Chapter 4: Consider the concept of a “community of practice.” How can such a community offer opportunities for learning?

Answer: Shirky talks about how people are always reading so much information that is not intended for them – but they still receive it. In chat rooms, other peoples’ Facebook walls, Youtube comments, Flickr comments and other related forms of communication, there is certainly plenty opportunity for learning. When we take in so much information at basically all times, there is certainly room to learn – it can not be avoided. I feel like every day, when I look at Facebook or comments on CNN news articles or Youtube videos, I learn something new. It may be people talking to other people and not directly to me, but as shirky says, when you post private conversation comments on public forums, it becomes public information and public knowledge. While most often there is nothing knowledgeable or intelligent transferred between people in these conversations, plenty of times there is. This is why there is certainly an opportunity to learn in a community of practice. The large wave of information sticks to us and we advance our knowledge and experiences through this visual process.

Invisible Social Networks

Shirky Chapter 4: If Shirky is right, and we’re headed to a period where social media tools like YouTube, Flickr, and social networks like Facebook become “invisible,” what’s the impact on things you spend money on as consumers? Books? Movies? Music?

Answer: Whether people believe it or not, marketing does have a serious impact on the things we humans choose to buy while eyeing the wide range of available items on grocery store, convenience store, or department store shelves. A lot of it is cognitive. Just like shirky said in Chapter 4, we used to view dignified forms of media communication such as television, newspaper and radio. Nowadays, we are experiencing a strong new wave of communications media in the form of websites such as Flickr, Youtube, Facebook and Myspace. Shirky argues that this is not advancing our communication capabilities and standards, but holding them back by ruining them with unregulated, undignified, poor-spelled online postings.

As far as how this new invisible consumer marketing goes, I feel that this will strongly affect how we spend our money. The availability of these tools online will holdback what we spend our money on. These days, people don’t need to spend money on books, movies, and music because people post all of them online for free on sites such as Youtube and Hulu.com.

Blog Comments

I posted comments in response to Nicholas Fischer's and Laura Hefty blog posting on Skirky Chapter 3 - how to I find an answer to a personal question.

Citizen Journalism

Glaser Article: Can you find any examples where "citizen journalists" have failed miserably to report accurate news? And if you do find examples (you should), does this make the concept of amateur journalism a bad thing? Why or why not?

Answer: The perfect example to show how destructive amateur journalism can be is the one mentioned in the second article about Apple CEO Steve Jobs' health. One foolish made up news story on a user-generated news site temporarily caused a multi, multi million dollar loss in equity value. This is the downside of widespread blogging and citizen journalists. Whether people trust a source or not, something like the Steve Jobs story can cause such a panic that people with sell off their stock just in case it might be true.

I can not find specific other examples because ever search I make comes up with the Jobs story. One thing I did notice as a trend across many articles and blogs is that citizen journalism should be regulated. I personally think that citizen journalism is a great thing. When you turn on CNN and see that there is a story about a tornado in Kansas and then attached to the story their is an iReport video from a half mile away from the twister, it shows how useful this grass roots movement is. As far as the terrible things it has the capability of causing, this needs to be fixed. Amateur journalism is certainly something that will only continue to grow in the future, as it should. With that said, it needs to be regulated. We can not allow people to get hurt, physically, emotionally, or financially by people that are held to know standard or responsibility.

Where I Find Answers

Question: You have an important personal question you’d like answered. Explain the procedure for getting your question answered and why this method appeals to you (you don’t need to get specific, but let’s assume the answer does not require specific expert knowledge, as from a doctor).

Answer: Most importantly, since this is a personal question and you can not search it online, I would go to a person who's answer I know I can trust. Information can get confused so easily and people may be confident in their answer and convince you they are correct when in reality this is not true. I would only ask a person who I felt comfortable hearing the answer from and knowing that I have this problem.

This method appeals to me because by doing this, I know I can get credible information to help answer my question and also stay within my comfort zone in doing so. There are certain things often about yourself that you don't want displayed on a billboard. That is why I choose this method. You will get the job done, feel safe and trusting of the person helping you and also know that this issue does not have to leave the two of you.

Trant Article

Question: Many organizations waste time and money researching answers to questions already answered or creating content that may already have been done by others within the organization. What shortfalls of social tagging does Trant identify that might prohibit a searchable tagging system to be a successful aid within an organization such as a business or school?

Answer: Trant names several reasons why searchable tagging systems may not work out as well as some proponents say it will. First, she mentions one potential downfall is the relativistic natural of socially-created tagging systems. That is, often information is retrieved, but perhaps it is more by chance than intention. Secondly, she notes that, through studies, it is shown that their is a large amount of inconsistency that is inherent in user-created vocabulary. A large amount of terms that people may use as keywords are bounds to be used differently than how other people use them and perhaps just inconsistently over time. One other issue she mentions is synonymy and polysemy. Polysemy, meaning the fact that there are different meanings of the same word, will cause problems by returning completely irrelevant search results half of the time while searching for a tagged word that is polysemous.

Problems With a Hierarchical Organization Chart

Interestingly, as stated in the book using the Western railroad analogy, an organization's management needs grow faster than the size of the organization. I feel that organizations, especially large and rapidly growing ones, do need a heirarchical organization chart in order to both define the power structure and establish channels of communication. One of the problems that these management mechanisms can cause though is that it cause the organization as a whole to be too rigid. These are put in place and meant to be followed, but they cause an organization to lose perhaps one of the most important tools for success - flexibility. Perhaps a more cross-departmental, non-hierarchical communication system would allow an organization more flexibility and would allow it to be more efficient in the long run. A very large organization with a hierarchical organization chart may put itself into a situation where certain people only talk to certain people and never get a chance to speak to others at all levels, high and low, and in all other departments of the organization. Another thing that this type of structure can do is cause issues with the accuracy of the information being communicated. When people have to pass along information to different levels, information will undoubtedly get messed up from time to time, which can lead to serious problems.

A Group That I Am a Member Of

Question: Describe a group you are a member of (online community, church, job, etc.) and how it is organized. Is there management? How is information distributed within the group?

Answer: I am in a fraternity here at JMU that consists of roughly 30 members currently, but we expect about 10-15 new members this semester. We put on many events, such as parties and philanthropy, and doing so takes a lot of work and planning that require communication among all members. We have an executive board that is elected every spring for one year terms, consisting of a president, VP, treasurer, scribe (secretary/recorder) and several other positions. These are the people that we literally call "management." They are in charge of ultimately making decisions and dealing with both the university and our nationals in Charlottesville, but they consult the entire fraternity daily on important issues.

Our main tool of communication is through Gmail. Gmail is not only e-mail, but the best way to do e-mail because of how you can do threads. We communicate multiple times daily through Gmail as it gets to every members' eyes so rapidly when we use this format. Another way that we communicate and make decisions is our weekly meetings at the main fraternity house on either Sunday or Monday nights. At these meetings, our exec board will take turns bringing up the important issues for the week under their office, and then we will all together discuss the issues behind every upcoming event and then ultimately come up with a decision - usually by vote.

Main Role of Social Networks

Question: If managers aren’t important anymore towards the formation or control of groups using online tools, what do you consider the main role websites such as Meetup.com, Facebook, or MySpace have provided newly emerging groups?

Answer: In 2009, human beings are going to use whatever technology is available to increase the speed and convenience of social networking. In the modern Internet era, many websites have emerged that allow us to form large groups of people from all over the world, who never even have to meet each other face to face, that can accomplish great things. On Facebook for example, groups come up out of nowhere daily that spread various kinds of important missions - things such as raising awareness for Darfur, political campaigns, many types of disease, etc. Some of these groups can grow to hundreds of thousands of people in just days. Considering this information, my assessment of what the role of these social networking websites is that they exist to connect infinite amounts of people, as quickly as possible and as conveniently as possible. These websites provide large groups not only the ability to connect conviently, but they allow these groups to pass information along to all members virtually instantly.

Bad Cell Phone Pictures

Question: With so many cell phones on the market today able to take photos (and video), do you ever worry about being “captured” in a not-so-flattering moment? How would you deal with a friend who decided to share such a picture or video with others?

Answer: This is not something that I think about daily, but I have had friends who have fallen victim to situations where people take not-so-flattering photos of them on their cell phones and immediately send it down the wire to all of their friends. This is something that should worry people because of how frequently occurs and the serious negative consequences that can arise because of it.

If this were to happen to me, and it was something serious that I know for a fact my friend who took the picture and sent it to people knew that it was something that would truly upset me, it would take a lot for me to ever fully forgive that person if at all. If a friend does something like this to you and it's not just something funny that you all can laugh off, then that person isn't exactly a real friend. Depending on the gravity of the situation and how "captured" I am in a truly not-so-flattering moment, I would either never talk to them again, never talk to them again after telling them how I feel, or hopefully be able to forgive them - but probably not trust them like I did before.

Censorship by Google and Yahoo

Unfortunately, the Chinese government is communist and controls all forms of media and therefore what their citizens will see on Google and Yahoo. I think it's wrong that they have to censor their information, as all information should be available to all people, but these companies are simply complying with governmental policies and should not bear the blame. The Chinese government is as big into propoganda as the Soviet Union was during the Cold War, and Google and Yahoo have no choice but to go along with it. Once again, I think that this situation as a whole is wrong, but I can't fault Google or Yahoo for doing only what they can legally.

These companies, when it comes down to it, will provide different search results in different countries because of relevancy. Certain keywords will be relevant to one search result in one country while they will be important to something completely different in another country. The sites are simply giving the various groups of people the information that they need, and I think that is the correct way for them to do it.

China = bad - but not because of the companies.

Folksonomy

After reading the two articles, and finding out about folksonomy for the first time in the process, I realize that this is clearly the way of the future. Folksonomy takes advantage of using all of the technology that we have available to us in 2009 to make the process of organizing and retrieving information as rapid and precise as possible. Folksonomy focuses on using keywords as a means for retrieving information on various ideas versus using numbers and codes. This is clearly the best approach nowadays to organizing information as keywords are what everyone uses whether they are searching on Ebay, electronic research databases or Google.