Sunday, October 25, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
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.
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.
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.
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