Blog v. Wiki

Blogs and wikis have many differences and similarities. Blogs are know to be more personal and act as a way for people to express their feelings and thoughts freely. As seen in the NY Times article, people can speak freely about anything. Blogs serve as a window into the personal lives of bloggers.
According to Wikipedia, wiki's are websites where multiple users can add, edit, or delete content using their web browser. With that said, blogs have a exclusivity trait to it that's a bit intriguing. With wiki's, the experience is less personal but more focused. Both are similar in the sense that they are leaning toward this idea of collaborative social networking. I personally work on a blog where I collaborate with 3 other girls. It is with this point that I think that the idea of wikis and blogs are somewhat merging. The idea that multiple users can edit one single page shows how society and social media is changing. By examining blogs and wikis, we can see that it is becoming more interactive amongst the community.

I've never used a wiki before so it's a new experience for me to log in and edit knowing that there are at least 20 other users editing the same pages as I am. I can't particularly pinpoint one way that wikis can evolve but I can definitely that wikis will change the way information is found. The information is not always reliable, but it's always there with sources to back it up.

Social Networking: A purposeful loss of privacy

With the recent surge of social networking websites in today's media, one must wonder how this affects our privacy. Recent controversies surrounding new privacy policies issued by Facebook, YouTube, & even Google bring to our attention the vulnerability that we expose ourselves to when we post up personal information on the web. In some ways, you can't undo what you post on the web because there is always someway to track it back. Phone numbers, credit card purchases, websites you visited; all those are stored somewhere in cyberspace for a technologically savvy individual to find. With the prominence of social networking sites, we are setting ourselves up for a loss of privacy. By the time we realize this, our information has already been leaked and it's too late to undo it. Sure, we can change our settings but someone out there has this information. My project will examine how social networking is an example of a purposeful loss of privacy. It will further examine the privacy policies that are put in place on popular social media sites and how they don't really protect our privacy. Once again, I stress the point that any information you give out on social media sites is fair game. There's always some way to find this information regardless if you have it "hidden." One must wonder if privacy even exists in the digital age...

This article quickly summarizes the danger the new social media outlets present us with...http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-02-15/news/the-facebook-killers/