Practicum - Sasha: Wraping Up (7)

This is my final practicum blog, and it's been quite the journey. As a lover of lists, random facts, and obscure cultures, Stumbling (and other exploration on different social bookmarking sites) was a ton of fun.

On the whole, I've found that social bookmarking sites can be made into whatever you want them to be. If you're bored and trying to kill time, StumbleUpon is probably for you. If you know of a specific topic you want to know more about, Del.icio.us is probably a good place to start. If you like a little competition in your browsing, the voting system on Digg might be something you'll enjoy.

One aspect of social bookmarking sites I touched on in my discussion presentation was the idea of social networking through these social bookmarking sites. This is something I didn't have very high hopes for, and I was proven right. These bookmarks are things I shared with friends, and bonded with people I already knew (sometimes people I didn't expect) over Facebook when I shared them, but the main point is the fact that I was connecting with people I was already acquainted with.
I didn't get any friend requests or followers in my time on StumbleUpon (I didn't make profiles for any of the other sites, just browsed them), and I probably wouldn't have accepted a friend request even if I had gotten one. I don't like the idea of someone I can't see getting to know too much about me based on my 'likes' and my personal profile. As a matter of fact, now that this project is over, I'm going to be removing most of the 'About Me' information from my SU profile.

I certainly learned a lot, as well as killed a lot of time while doing this practicum assignment. I was fond of social bookmarking sites before I started, and have grown as a user, and can hopefully get more out of them in the future. While I won't be abandoning StumbleUpon as my go-to social bookmarking site, I know now about other sites for other needs I might have.
If you don't have a SU profile, and have a medium-to-short attention span or are prone to boredom or long bouts of sitting around with nothing to do, I highly recommend jumping on the bandwagon.

Practicum - Sasha: Stumbling the News (6)

Considering the recent events going on regarding Osama bin Laden's death, I thought I would try out the powers of Stumbling in relation to this topic. StumbleUpon didn't disappoint. I narrowed my search topic to 'News (General)' and just sat back and stumbled from there. Of the 20+ websites I stumbled to, only 1 had a feature article not related to bin Laden, and only a couple had no mention of the news on their front page (In these situations, it was generally a world source of news, and you could narrow by region). I had read a couple of articles on everything going on, but StumbleUpon took me to a couple websites that looked at the current news in ways I hadn't thought about, but that were pretty interesting. One was a site that shows a map of places getting looked up in search engines, in order of popularity:
Obviously, New York and Washington were at the top of the list, but other places with things going on (because the world doesn't work with one-at-a-time news stories) were still reflected on the map.

Another site had basically the same information as other websites, but it was illustrated in a different visual format, which I found to be helpful. To me, a lot of news sites kind of throw a bunch of stuff at the viewer that all looks the same, so it's easy to miss what you're looking for. This representation with colors and font size was easy to navigate while still looking relatively clean and professional:


All in all, I think StumbleUpon was a really useful tool for getting a lot of different information (as well as perspectives) on the news at hand. While it would be less efficient for news that was less current or relevant (such as news among a niche group of people), it might take a little more finessing to get the information you're looking for. However, for big news like this, it was the perfect tool to keep up-to-date with what people were saying about this development.

Practicum Simon Rech (6)

Finally! I've actually managed to have an interesting interaction with somebody. It took me long enough, and honestly I was starting to think that I might actually not have one in time to blog about it (wow, that sounded lame). Anyways, while I was exploring some of the other game modes, mainly tactical, I entered into a lobby and was immediately greeted with every gamer's least favorite voice. The 12 year old kid. This kid, whose gamertag was WrathOfConnor was immediately just talking about anything and everything. Asking people what their favorite numbers were, if they had pets, pretty much whatever came into his brain. Anyways, I knew this was gonna get old quick, but I played along, answering his questions because nobody else would. Then I realized that he had his little companion in the lobby with us (MessyMattman1183). Great, now we have 2 kids who love to hear the sounds of their own voices. I don't usually mind when people talk while playing, but these two were especially annoying, normally I would have muted them, but because of the practicum I decided to roll with it. They continued to talk through the game, and of course I was placed in the same team as them, which meant I was lucky enough to hear them continue their pointless conversation. At this point, in order to keep things interesting, I decided to just tell them to be quiet (I might not have actually been this polite), and surprisingly they stopped shortly thereafter. I was happy with this because that allowed me to play without any added annoyances. However later in the game, while I was waiting to respawn I was able to watch their screens, and sure enough they were just running around firing their guns randomly, and really not even playing the game.

Also, I have uploaded this picture from one of my recent games. In case you haven't seen a picture/video yet, this is what my character looks like while playing Black Ops. Although this does change depending on the map/teams.

Practicum - Sasha: Digg (5)

Another social bookmarking site, probably the best known, is Digg which has been around since 2004. According to its Wikipedia page, the sole function before v4 (introduced 9/25/10) was moving the popularity of links by 'digging' or 'burying' them with positive/negative votes.
Since the release of Digg v4, popularity of the site has decreased dramatically. Users complained about the site borrowing ideas from other popular websites, viewing it as taking the power of submitting and voting out of the users' hands.
While the site is on the decline, I decided to look into it, anyway, since it's the first bookmarking site I personally remember hearing about.

Here's a screenshot:
The look reminds me a lot of Delicious, but with a more structured category tab system. Next to the links are numbers which indicate how many times someone "dug" the article. By also "digging" it, you promote it farther up the metaphorical totem pole.

Between late August 2010 and mid-March 2011, there was a lot of change within the Digg regime. When Jay Adelson stepped down as CEO in April 2010, Kevin Rose came in as a stand-in of sorts during the interim between CEOs. I'm left to wonder how this added to the disastrous launch of Digg v4, considering that the change in power came just before the company started beta testing on v4. Again in September (RIGHT after this huge change), power changes hands again as Matt Williams replaces Rose as CEO. In October, Digg laid off 1/3 of its staff, and is trying to refocus its services. All this was a brief overview, but the full story can be read on the site's Wikipedia page.

It seems to me that Digg is dying out these days. None of the original four creators (Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson, Owen Byrne, and Ron Gorodetzky) are involved with the company anymore. It speaks volumes to me when the original people who put so much into their 'pet' project think it's time to jump ship. Only time will tell if Digg can --wait for it.....WAIT FOR IT....-- dig themselves out of this one. (Oh, you know you're jealous of that epic pun)

Practicum Simon Rech (5)

Well, I've continued to play in the other game modes other than the standard team deathmatch on Black Ops. So far its been moderately successful, I've really enjoyed playing some of the "wager" match game modes, which is when you put at least 10 (1,000 max) points (which, as I mentioned before can be used to purchase upgrades for your weapon and stuff like that) on a single match. Finish in the top three and you get your money back and then some. Anyways, I played plenty of those matches, with my personal favorite being "Gun Game" where the weapons cycle every 45 seconds, so every 45 seconds you're getting a completely random new weapon. This has proven to be pretty fun. I also played another one called "One In The Chamber" where you have one bullet and three lives. Get killed three times and you're out of the game. I was really bad at this one (my accuracy could use some improvement) so I ended up losing once and not going back. Just recently, I started playing Free-for-all in just the standard gameplay. This has been pretty fun, although things can be very hectic at times, which ends up in a lot of kills, but also a lot of respawns. I'll probably continue to venture around, and will probably try a few of the tactical gamemodes (which I rarely, if ever, play), then I'll be sure to update about how much I like/dislike the different gamemodes. Also, I still haven't had any notable incidents with any players. I'm thinking I might purposely try and troll people so I can have something interesting happen. We'll see how that goes.

Practicum - Sasha: Del.icio.us (4)

Up until now, I've been using StumbleUpon, but then I decided to compare Stumbling to other social bookmarking sites. Delicious was one of the more popular ones, so I went there first.

Compared to StumbleUpon, the biggest differences between the two are how categories are formed and how the browsing experience works.

(1) Categories are formed by StumbleUpon, and then you choose which topics you are interested in when editing your profile. Delicious lets users generate their own tags, and can combine more than one tag to refine what you're looking for.
I've already posted screen shots of SU, so here's some of Delicious for comparison:




This is what the main page looks like, and posts are organized based on newness









This is what happens when you click a tag. Obviously, I clicked "college". You can search for or click another tag from there.





(2) You are randomly routed to another website based on your interests when Stumbling (hence, the term 'stumbling'). Delicious shows you things tagged specifically, and the user can browse from there.

While I prefer StumbleUpon, there are definitely reasons one would work better than the other in a given situation. If you are simply bored and looking to waste time, Stumbling is probably the better bet. However, if you're looking for things based on specific topics, and want a more refined search, Delicious is probably better

Practicum - Sasha: Stumble Upon (3)

One of the features of Stumble Upon that I decided to focus on was the toolbar. If you go to the StumbleUpon website, you can download the toolbar for your browser. It's incredibly simple to do, and you can be stumbling in no time.



I'm not sure how it works on other platforms, but in Firefox there's a button that shows up in your regular toolbar. When you press it, it will show or hide the StumbleUpon toolbar so you can have it handy when you want it, and hide it to save space when you don't want it.
-- Hidden

--Shown



Most of the features of the main site are available right from the toolbar, like sorting what subjects you want to stumble, as well as sharing something you found not only to Facebook and Twitter, but with contacts from your personal email account as well (email picture edited to not show full emails).



Since adding the toolbar, I really haven't done a whole lot of stumbling where I started out at the original site. If you want to look at your 'favorites', the button on the toolbar will link you back to the main site where you can browse them, but most of the other buttons can function without going through the main page.
It's something I'm sure gives stumbling a lot of traffic. Like the recommendations emails I mentioned in my last practicum post, It's really helpful for getting you to think about the site, even when you're not using it.


As usual, my favorite recent stumble:
Eminem Violin Cover "I Love the Way You Lie"

Practicum Simon Rech (4)

So it's been awhile since I updated everybody on my gaming progress. I haven't been playing too much lately, maybe once or twice a week considering I got my 15 hours in pretty quick. I'm still playing COD: Black Ops. In fact I've been pretty much exclusively playing that, I've leveled up a couple times, I'm currently at a 47. Also just to spice things up a bit, I've started playing in the different game modes. I've been playing wager matches a lot lately, where you wager your COD "earnings" and then if you place in the top 3 you get those back, plus 10-15 more points. It's pretty fun, except for the fact that I've only ended up in the money a couple times. Either way, it kinda shakes things up a little bit, which I like. I'll probably keep on experimenting in some of the other game modes that I don't play much. I'll be sure to let you know how those go in the next week or so. I'll keep ya posted.

PS. I know the video didn't work for my presentation last week, but I managed to find the link for it on youtube. So if you're interested at all in watching it to get an idea of what the gameplay is like, take a look! I'll start posting more videos like this now that I know how.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T81yW4fwPGk&feature=player_embedded

Practicum - Sasha: Stumble Upon (2)

I thought I'd talk a little bit about one of the many cool features that comes with Stumbling--weekly recommendations. They come in the form of an email, and look like this:



As I mentioned in my last post, I put more detail into my profile. I listed 'Canadians' as an interest (they seem like a very friendly people), and in this week's recommendations, there's a link to something about Canadian hockey. I'm not sure if that's a coincidence, but I feel like my adding to my personal information is slowly starting to change what information the program uses to figure out what I'd like.

One of the benefits of getting weekly recommendations is that if you weren't already stumbling or thinking about stumbling, you get a little 'reminder' of sorts. As far as the site goes, this is great for creating traffic. Even if the person getting the email doesn't open it or click on one of the recommendations, StumbleUpon is at least on their mind when they see that they have the email in their inbox.

As usual, here's a fun link from my stumbling:
Dancing Kid in Apple Store
This kid is totally my hero. What a champ

Practicum - Sasha: Stumble Upon (1)

Even though I gave my presentation last week, I can still (and have to still) get all my 7 blog posts in--Hooray!

So, last I was stumbling, I edited my profile to actually reflect my interests, such as saying what bands I like and all that jazz. I did notice a slight change in the sites that it brought me to based on what I said, which I wasn't really expecting. My expectation was that it was just a way to make users feel like they were personalizing their little section/page of the site and maybe for people who wanted to make friends and use the site as a social networking tool.
The changes were pretty minor, and obviously thing like what my relationship status is didn't affect what art sites it took me to, so it wasn't a super dramatic shift or anything, but it was there.

Also, just for fun, I'm going to post my favorite stumble from each time/couple times I've visited the site between posts. Here's today's (makes me feel untalented, but still cool):
Super Sprayer

Practicum - Sasha: Questions

Hello, friends! I'm in the process of organizing a journal-esque documentation of my experience. I wanted to have all the posts be together, which, in retrospect, was a pretty dumb idea.

Here are some questions to consider based on my experience with StumbleUpon:
(1) In what ways could this site play into what we were talking about in section last week as far as polarizing opinions and filtering information? In what ways does it contrast this idea?

(2) Would you use the profile options on this site, or others like it, to meet people in 'real life', not just on the internet?

(3) Are a person's 'like's and 'dislike's a more honest representation of who they are than, say, Facebook? Why or why not?

(4) How are social bookmarking sites more passive than social networking sites? Is there a different 'type' of person that might prefer bookmarking to networking? Could this bookmarking in addition to the profile option turn into networking?

Practicum - Eric (2)

So it's been a while since my last post on here about my practicum, and I've done quite a bit of work on my project in the meantime. Last time I had just searched for and found a recipe to assist me in making a glazed ham (see the picture of how it turned out!). I had planned on posting a recipe of the glaze I used, because I ended up combining a couple of recipes, but I have since changed my mind. Instead of focusing on my interactions with other people on the website, which would fall more under the social networking projects, I am going to focus on the information available on allrecipes.com, how useful it is, and how it is presented by people.

I decided to go ahead and join as a free member of allrecipes, and poked around what I could do as a member. One thing I found excellent and interesting about the website, is that it allows users to bookmark and organize the recipes they look at it very easiy. You can rate each individual recipe, and there is a feature called the Recipe Box that allows you to add recipes you like to your recipe box, and even classify them by categories like appetizers, main dishes, or desserts. Then, anytime a user logs on to the website in the future they don't need to go through an exhaustive search to find a recipe they really like, nor do they need to print out recipes and save them in a traditional recipe box, which gets super disorganized if you're anything like my family.

A few days ago I looked for an used my second recipe. It was for cheesy potatoes, and was absolutely delicious. I added the recipe to my recipe box, which is the only recipe there for right now, since I kind of did my own thing with the ham last time. In my next post I plan to discuss how the recipes are typically presented and some of the language associated with the standard recipe that a new user might not be familiar with.

Practicum - Eric (1)

So I finally got around to starting my practicum project the other day. My topic is specialized information sites. I was a bit dumbfounded for a while when I began to brainstorm what sites I wanted to study, because I wanted to focus on one specific specialized information topic, so I could better compare how different sites treated the topic. I also was determined to find a topic that I was not only interested in, but that I could find increased knowledge useful to my everyday life. Eventually I realized the topic I needed to cover was cooking. I already like to cook, probably because I like to eat, and cooking allows me to experiment and try new tastes and foods.

To start off I decided to visit a website that I have used on occasion in the past, www.allrecipes.com. The site is basically an expansive collection of user-submitted recipes. Many recipes include pictures, and there is a review feature for all recipes. Users can rate how much they like a recipe on a 5-star scale, and then also provide feedback on the recipe. Having such a large collection of recipes in one central location is very convenient, as all a user needs to do is type what they are searching for into the searchbar on the homepage, and then look through the results.

I also decided that in order for this study to truly be effective and for me to learn anything substantial, I should actually find recipes and use them to make food. That way I can study cooking/recipe websites on multiple levels, as an outside analyst, and as an actual user. I had been having a taste for ham recently, so I did a quick search of "glazed ham" and looked over the first few results. After comparing the reviews on the three most popular recipes, I decided I wanted to try a hybrid of the three. I took the best features of all three recipes, based on user feedback, and made myself some ham for dinner tonight. It featured a glaze based on honey, mustard, and ground chives, and it turned out to be quite delicious. I have written down exactly what I used and did to prepare my meal, and I plan on submitting my very own recipe to the site in the next few days. It'll be interesting to see if anybody provides me with feedback or tries my recipe.