www.me.com

Creating a website is a challenging yet self rewarding task for anyone to accomplish, especially for a student in the Communication studies department.  As a person who is graduating, creating a self-promotion website is extremely beneficial for the future of job hunting.  After graduation, it is time to step into the world as an adult and become the person you set out to be.  Creating a website that promotes the things you have done throughout your school years is something that could possibly get a foot in the door of your own future.

To promote yourself, there are important things that a website must contain.  A personal and professional photo, a professional and promoting biography, and several things that you have already accomplished are important to include.  Things such as press releases, audio mixes, and other works that you have personally created throughout school and free time are all appropriate to put up on a self-promoting website.  These works should showcase your personal talents within your major and show your future employees the type of work you can and are willing to do.

Social Media is important for anyone to include on a self-promoting website.  Because Social Media has become so prominent in the lives of everyday people, companies will look for someone who is able to use Social Media in an efficient and professional manner.  Social Media projects performed in classes such as a Twitter Project, maintaining your own blog on Blogger, and even creating your own WikiHow page are all things that will showcase Social Media talents to possible future employers.  It is important to remember to be professional in these Social Media platforms.  Employers are not looking for someone who gets hundreds of likes on their newest selfies, but instead someone who can use Social Media to promote themselves in a professional way, or the company they are working for in a professional way.  They are also looking for someone who can dish out information, not someone who can retweet puns and funny GIFs.  These specific Social Media projects tie into the self-promoting websites because the Social Media projects are also self-promoting.  They are self-promoting on the abilities of using Social Media, and they are self-promoting about the work that you personally have done through Social Media platforms.

The overall experience of designing a self-promoting website is slightly challenging yet extremely rewarding.  The most important thing is to have a plan of action before starting.  Thumbnails will really help the process go more smoothly than just starting completely blank.  When you start off with a plan and an end goal, it is much easier, less frustrating and smoother to actually create the desired look.  The software to create a website is surprisingly less challenging than a person may believe.  It is a lot of copy and paste for coding, and knowing the quick tricks like borrowing HTML from other websites.  Knowing this and having a set plan will make the website unfold before your eyes.  Although the process is fairly simple, it is very tedious.  Every single character in coding is important, and you really have to pay attention to what you are typing and deleting in order for the website to come out the way you want it too.

A self-promoting website is a very useful resource as a college student who is about to graduate.  Promoting yourself is important in order to find the career path you are hoping for and to start your future.  Although it would be easier to find someone and pay them to create the website for you, it is much more beneficial to do the work yourself.  It will test your own patience and really show yourself who you are and what you can do as a student and as a person.

All Sorts of Information in 140 Characters or Less

Social Media has become very prominent in the lives of people that live in this generation.  From interacting with friends to reading breaking news, Social Media really can do it all. The wide diversity of topics that circulate through Social Media makes it an enjoyable place for almost anyone.

Twitter is a Social Media platform that is rising in popularity extremely and beating out its competitors.  The fast nature of Social Media is one of the reasons that people love it so much, and Twitter keeps up with this fast nature better than a lot of the other Social Media platforms do.  The instantaneity of a tweet to the public is a key factor of twitter.  For social reasons, people love the fast factor of Twitter.  It is easy to tweet something funny that just happened in a person’s every day life.  Twitter goes much farther beyond the realms of just social purposes though.  Although it is technically a Social Media, it is also so much more. 

Twitter has been used beyond socializing and used for marketing in many different instances. In an article called, Egypt five yearson: was it ever a ‘social media revolution’? , Twitter was used to literally overthrow the Egyptian President.  Although Twitter was not the reason the president was overthrown in Egypt, it helped share the story to the world.  People in Egypt took to Social Media platforms such as Twitter to talk about the protests that were going on and how they felt about the situations.  With the power of sharing and retweeting, the instance gained all sorts of attention and even was named the Twitter “news moment” of the year according to Foreign Policy magazine.

Twitter can also be used for journalistic purposes and as an organizational tool.  Just like the organized chaos of the protests of Egypt, people have used twitter for other huge events in our recent history. In an article titled How the Boston Marathonexplosions reveal the two sides of Twitter, Twitter is shown as a tool for communication about information about the Boston Marathon.  Unfortunately though, that doesn’t mean this information is always correct.  Because Twitter is so instantaneous, it is easy to tweet something that you think you know is true seconds after it has happened.  A quote in this article from Matt Roller says, “Twitter does its best work in the first five minutes after a disaster, and its worst in the twelve hours after that”.  Within the first five minutes of a story, people are taking to Social Media to exclaim what they know, or at least what they think they know.  In the next 12 hours after that, journalists are trying to clean up the story to reveal to the public what actually happened. The Boston Marathon was breaking news on twitter, although many stories about the incident were wrong.  It is a journalist’s job to figure out what is right and what is wrong, and then break the news to the public.  With something so instant and fast paced as Twitter, a journalist really has to be on their game and getting the right news out to the public before their competitors do.

In the past 12 months, Twitter has been dealing with a lot of news events.  Whether we are talking about the election of President Trump, the news about United Airlines, or the passing of Prince, the news continues to travel around Twitter.  Since the presidential election started, Twitter has been cycled with stories, opinions, and negative comments at each of the candidates.  It is hard to forget about the time when Hillary Clinton got sick at the 911 memorial, left early and lost her shoe, or when President Trump mocked out a disabled reporter.  Thanks to Social Media, these types of stories circulate around all the time for the public to see.  The people of Twitter like to jump on harsh news and spread it like a wildfire.  When the story about United Airlines broke on Twitter, people were instantly retweeting it, tweeting their opinions, and sooner or later making memes out of the situation.  When news is broke on Twitter, it stays serious news for a short amount of time.  The general public is respectful about the news that is circulating for a while until eventually it becomes a joke.  Puns, memes, and endless jokes begin to circulate Twitter after a while.  The United Airlines case is an excellent example of this.  It is hard to find a story on Twitter about the United Airlines case that is actually news and fact now compared to a joke about the situation.  Whether it is the society’s way of dealing with such harsh news stories, or just the desensitization of the public, harsh news becomes lighthearted jokes and we move on to the next big story.  One thing that is hard for the public to move on from and tends to stay pure and not joked about is the death of a loved celebrity.  News broke on Twitter about the passing of the superstar Prince.  The story changed multiple times about how he died, but continued to stay purely news instead of making memes about dying from drugs.  Twitter was flooded with tweets that read things such as “RIP to another legend” and variations that respected the passing of Prince.

Twitter is a place for news to break, people to socialize and everyone to connect.  The people you follow on Twitter shows a lot about you as a person, and the diversity of those types of accounts are important to keep your timeline from being the same old boring thing over and over.   Ariana Grande, the Buffalo Bills, and Donald Trump are all very different sources to follow on Twitter.  Ariana Grande is a pop princess superstar that will fill a Twitter timeline with music.  The Buffalo Bills are a NFL Football team that will fill a Twitter timeline with sports.  And Donald Trump is the president, for better or for worse, and will fill a Twitter timeline with politics and keep the followers up to date about what is going on in the country.  The difference between what the three accounts tweet keeps the information well rounded.

Twitter is a form of blogging but is very different in many ways.  Twitter is very easy to use for the common person, and is a fun way to tell the world a little bit about you in a short amount of space.  The fast pace and limited amount of characters are two key things that make Twitter stand out from Social Media and other blogs.  Not only is it an easy way to share information about you, but it is also an easy way to learn information about others.  Celebrities, friends, family and literally anyone can use Twitter for whatever use and gratification they please.  Socialization, news, promoting a business, keeping an eye on family members and so on, Social Media is a place where anyone can get something out of it.  This world is filled with very different people, but we all come together on Social Media and unite as one.

can you communicate communication without verbal communication?

The process of making a video to communicate a certain topic without the use of verbal communication is a very difficult task.  With topics such as communication, time, politics, separation and abstract, the use of visual communication and nonverbal communication must be relied on to get the point of the video across to the audience.  These topics are very non-obvious topics that normally require some explanation, but not being able to use words creates an extra hurdle that a person must jump over in order to complete the task successfully.

When working with a topic such as communication, you must over exaggerate the use of communication or else the topic wont come across the way it should.  There are many different aspects to communication that you can focus on to make the video stand out more.  Because communication is such a broad topic, focusing on the whole of communication itself will make it hard for the audience to understand exactly what the video is that they are watching, especially because words are not allowed.  Take a topic like happiness for example, happiness is a subcategory of communication and is something very easy to communicate without the use of verbal communication.   Limiting a broad category to a narrower subcategory will make the whole process of making the video easier.  

Shooting video for such a broad topic is definitely a challenge.  When working with other people on a topic that is so wide, it will be hard to fit all the different videos together to make the whole video make sense.  If a group of three were to shoot video about just communication, there could be videos on such a broad spectrum from writing or playing music to showing empathy.  There are so many different ways to communicate communication and putting all the different types in one video will not show a clear topic and will be very confusing to the audience that is trying to understand what they are watching.

After the topic is narrowed down from a broad category, the video shooting process becomes much easier.  When shooting video for a topic like happiness under the category of communication, the video becomes very personal to the person shooting it.  The happiness of the person who is both in the video and shooting the video is very obvious to the audience watching.  The audience gets to see the person in the video doing things that make them happy, so we get to learn a little bit about that person just from watching the video.  You wouldn't shoot a video of someone doing something they hated with a smile on their face to convey happiness.  This is common knowledge, so because of this we know that the person in the video conveying happiness is doing activities that makes them happy.   This can cause slight vulnerability but will make the video less fake to the viewers.

Because this particular topic is being edited in iMovie, it is important to remember to film all of the videos horizontally instead of vertically.  If there are some videos that are filmed horizontally they will fit onto the screen nicely, but when they are paired with videos filmed vertically it becomes an issue.  A black border appears around the vertically filmed video and they two different landscapes don’t look well together.  This can become an issue while filming because certain things look better in one filming style while other things look better in a different filming style.  It is a challenge to capture a moment in the right way if it is filmed horizontally instead of vertically, but horizontally works better for the video overall.

Editing the video after it is shot is a completely different challenge than coming up with the idea and actually filming it.  It is an easy process to have a bunch of short videos about an agreed upon topic, but putting them in the right order to make them flow and narrate a story that needs to be told is very difficult.  Compiling three people’s different videos together that show their happiness is definitely not an easy task.  The order of the videos and how they are compiled will change the tone of the video.  Will it look better if the three people’s videos are mixed up together or if one person plays all of their videos one after another?  That is something for the group to decide.  A video about happiness would look better with the videos of different people intertwined.  If all of one person’s videos play and then the next person’s play, it seems to create a sense of separation and loneliness.  The nonverbal and non-obvious communication of a video is just as important as the obvious and the verbal.

After the video is put into an order that tells the story in a certain way, the next thing to worry about is music.  With a video about happiness, it is not hard to find a good tune to go in the background.  There are plenty of happy sounding songs that work well for videos.  The issue is correlating the song with all of the videos that are playing.  Using one song in the background for the whole time seems to make the video drag.  Using a song like Happy by Pharrell Williams in the background of the video for the whole video made it seem longer than it had to be.  When the songs were switched up, playing songs like The Circle of Life and Hakuna Matata in the beginning added spunk to the video that created never ending smiles.  Everything plays into the whole image of the video to narrate a story that the audience will in turn see.

Creating an iMovie that narrates a topic without actually using verbal communication is a very difficult yet rewarding experience.  The challenge puts a twist on the video that makes it entertaining for the viewers and creates a deeper meaning and really makes a person think about the actual point of the video.  Happiness is an easy and fun topic to communicate, because it is a universal feeling for everyone around the world.  Anyone can relate to happiness at some point in their life, and watching others be happy makes the audience happy as well.

The How of WikiHow

The evolution of the Web caused major changes to the way we search things and the way we present ourselves on the Internet.  The Web is still evolving and changing into something bigger and better as time goes on that none of us are even expecting.  The era of Web 1.0 was an era of information. Many businesses would have a website that had some information about their business and some contact information for further details.  Things such as social media and online shopping did not occur during the Web 1.0 era.  This is mainly because the Web 1.0 era was only for informative purposes and not interactive purposes.  The “social” Web and the “interactive” Web came along with the Web 2.0 era.  This is when things such as social media came along.  Interaction on websites was now very prominent in the cyber world.  Because of interaction, the creator of a website could get immediate feedback on their business, product, or page.  This caused more customer satisfaction and happy business owners.

The Web 2.0 era is when all of the interactive websites were born, including the creation of Wiki pages.  A Wiki is a website that allows people to interact, collaborate, and edit the page to keep the content updated for its viewers.  This interactive type of website became pretty popular in the Web 2.0 era.  There is Wikipedia, which is used primarily for information purposes but is still an interactive website.  There is also WikiHow, which is used to teach people how to do something.  Although Wikis are very popular websites and WikiHow has hundreds and thousands of pages, still some people don’t know about it.  This is because there are other websites, such as YouTube that are more popular for learning how to do things.  The problem with the Web 2.0 era is all the competition.  There are tons of social media pages; there are tons of wiki pages, and so on.  Everything is now interactive and new types of websites are being created to become the next best thing.  WikiHow and YouTube are direct competitors.  Many people don’t know about WikiHow because of the tutorials that are available on YouTube.  YouTube rose in popularity so fast and beat out a lot of its competition.  The addition of the visual imagery of the video helps a lot of people when it comes to learning how to do something.  Although WikiHow has pictures for each step, it is much easier to physically watch someone perform whatever it is that needs to be performed than try to figure it out through one picture.  It is also easier to hear someone explain something out loud than to read directions and try to figure out what they mean.

That being said, the experience of writing a WikiHow page is a very important experience that anyone involved in web design, social media for a company, computer graphics and so on should have to encounter.  WikiHow is such a large environment.  There are thousands and thousands of pages on any topic you can imagine, and a plethora of pages are being added everyday.  Because of this factor, WikiHow is not the most stable environment.  Keeping this in mind, while writing a WikiHow page you must continuously back up your work. 

The topic you choose to write your WikiHow page on must be original in some way, because if it isn’t the administrators will combine it with an already existing topic.  When writing a WikiHow page, it is important to remember that you are teaching someone about something they have no idea how to do.  You are the expert in this scenario, but you can’t act like you are teaching it to yourself because you already know what you are doing.  It must be assumed that the reader of your page has no idea about the topic you are providing information for.  This means that details are very necessary.  Along with details is the necessity of pictures.  Many people are visual learns, which is why YouTube is so popular.  Pictures help to explain in further detail what you cannot explain in words.  Besides good details and the help of visual imagery, another thing you can use to help get your topic across is the use of internal links within the WikiHow community.  If there is a topic similar to the topic you are writing about, it might help to link that page for further information.  If you are writing about an advanced topic and the information is supposed to be common knowledge, such as an advanced make up tutorial with the basics of make up as common knowledge, it might help to link to the basics so you don’t have to further explain more than you need too.

The writing and publishing of a WikiHow page is an interesting yet slightly stressful experience.  It is interesting to learn about the coding of a webpage and how the smallest mark can create a subheading or a bullet point and completely change the look of the page itself.  It is stressful though because of how unstable the environment is due to how large it is.  A flash drive will be your best friend in the process of writing a WikiHow.  You can save your changes a million times within the WikiHow environment, but the next time you come back they probably wont be there.  That is why you have to save a copy to your desktop, a copy to your flash drive and save in the WikiHow environment as well, just incase.  This causes a lot of stress while writing the Wiki page, but it is also good practice and a good habit to get yourself into when doing anything.

Interactive websites are a huge thing now due to the evolution of the Web into Web 2.0 and into the future versions of the Web as well.  People will go onto the Internet to learn and find anything now because it is always there.  The use of Wiki pages for information has become one of the most helpful resources for a lot of people and the making of a Wiki page is definitely a good learning experience.  Whatever the next version of the Web brings, Wiki pages will always be a wonderful way to learn and something great to participate in.

Link to my WikiHow page  

Link to information about WikiHow

A Journey Through the Wonders of the Web

         

 As time progresses, so does the complexity of technology.  It is quite fascinating to see the things we as a human race are capable of creating, and now doing due to certain technologies.  The evolution of the World Wide Web is one of the most intriguing things to look into and learn about.  Technology is constantly being updated and the capabilities of technology are always improving and becoming more and more.

If You Feel Like Reading My Opinion…

Web 2.0 was a ginormous leap from the abilities that Web 1.0 provided.  Now users were able to interact through the Internet and connect with people all around the world via Social Media.   Compared to standing Web pages that were merely for informative purposes, Social Media really changed the game for businesses. This leap was a very positive thing for many reasons.  Businesses could now create a Social Media page and advertise their products to people all around the world.  Getting the word out about promotions and coupons was now easier. People could comment on things and leave reviews to get their opinions out there, and these opinions were very helpful for business.  User involvement was important because not only did people feel their opinions were valued, but immediate feedback made it easy for companies to stay current and up to date with the wants and needs of society.  It was a big step for consumers as well.  People could now follow and interact with their favorite food places, stores, bands and so on.  This newfound Interactive Web was now more geared towards the individual consumer instead of just informative purposes. Web 2.0 was properly named as the Social Web. The leap from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 was all about user involvement and social interaction, and completely lived up to the hype.  The change from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 was not as big of a leap, though.   As far as what we are able to do on the Web, not much has changed since the era of Web 2.0.  Web 3.0 is more about the technical aspect and also about linking data together.  Web 3.0 is known as the “Semantic Web” because the definition of semantic according to Google is related to meaning in language or logic.  Web 3.0 works in a way where the data can be read directly by the computer, allowing a faster search time and more relatable results to pop up.  Web 3.0 is taking us into an era of faster and more concise searches, a more connected and more open Web, and more intelligence. This Web will be a step in the right direction for the most part.  Because of the understanding of information, it will be much easier to search for information, which will also make the life of the average person much simpler.  On the other hand, a disadvantage of Web 3.0 and where it is taking us is too much reliability on the Web.  We are becoming more and more reliable on Social Media and Google as a society, and the more advanced the Web becomes the more we may rely on it for everyday use.  Lifeboat provides a Website that talks more about the evolution of Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 and where the possibilities may take us in the future for a Web 4.0

If You Feel Like Reading Journalistic Facts…

The evolution of the Web is just as complex as the actual Web itself.  First off is Web 1.0, properly named because it is the first version of the Web.  This existed when there were merely Websites connected by hyperlinks according to Google.  There were no interactive Websites or content within the whole Web during this era of technology.  The information that existed on the Web during this time contained stand-alone information that didn’t ever change.  Its purpose was to inform the public.  If it was a Website for a business, it may have some information about the business itself and then some other form of contact information such as a phone number.  Things like online shopping and Social Media did not exist during this time period.  During the late 90s and early 2000s is when Web 2.0 evolved.  This Web era was known as the social Web.  The social Web was when Social Media really took flight.  Instant messaging was a sort of segue into the realms of Social Media, but the first very popular Social Media site was MySpace, which was founded in 2003.  This launched a whole new cyber world that people had never encountered before.  MySpace is now a very different website than when it was first created. It was easy to talk and connect with friends and family all around the world.  People were now able to follow their favorite things through the Web and on Social Media.  Instead of going to a Website and finding some stand-alone information about that site with some outside contact information, people were now able to find that business’ new Website and interact.  Interactive Websites were another thing that came out of the Web 2.0 era.  Commenting on a post, sharing something via Social Media, leaving a comment or review on a product and so on were all new features of Web 2.0.   This provided users the ability to leave opinions about certain products, businesses, or anything on the Web so the creator of the content or the owner of a business can update and cater to the wants and needs of the public.  Immediate feedback kept business owners in the loop and allowed them to update their products according to the feedback they were receiving.  Next was the era of Web 3.0.  This generation of the Web is more about the technological aspect.  Web 3.0 is known as the “Semantic Web” because it is all about how data in Web pages are structured and tagged in such a way that it can be read directly by computers, according to Google.  This new Web is not much different than Web 2.0 in the content we access but instead how we access it.  Data, intelligence, concepts, applications and people are all connected in a way that make it easy for the computer to read and ultimately easier for people to search.  Flat World Business provides a Website to more information about the evolution of the Web.

Our opinion about the evolution of the Web, whether it is a positive or negative thing, doesn't change the fact that as time goes on technology evolves.  We are becoming a generation that is very privy to technology and we have wrapped our lives around it.  Some people say it makes things easier, while others say that it is dumbing us down and making us to reliant on it.  No matter our opinion though, the Web is evolving into something amazing and looking back through the stages is something very intriguing to learn about.