Discussion Forum

Intro for Strother's “Legal and Ethical Issues of the Corporate Blogosphere”

The mass of blogs on the internet, or the blogosphere, is growing at an incredible rate. This growth is because of how revolutionary the power to blog really is. Individuals can blog to get their voice heard, or companies can blog to communicate with the public. Due to its profitability blogging has become completely international. Companies can both give updates and receive feedback from their costomers through the same method, blogging. Blogging has forever changed the face of the somuter science industry. Nearly all large computing companies have blogs, because of the massive percentage of their target audience that is willing to get online and read these blogs. The gameing industry has also been fundamentally changed. Good or bad reviews in player blogs ultimatly have a larger affect of the sales of a game then millins of dollars in advertising. However revolutionary a process it might be blogging is by no means free of risk. Companies and individuals alike are responsible for what they post on onlineblogs.  Strother’s article points out the positive aspects of blogging while at the same time highlighting the risks and moral issues that blogs entail. An innumerable amount of corperate and personal blogs demonstrate questionable ethics in their use of the blogosphere. Whereas for individuals the blogosphere is a way to epress themselves and/or gain information on things they are intrested in; for corperations the blogosphere is a tool to make money as well as a weapon that could be turned against them. It is sometimes difficult to maintian ethics when it is so easy to seriously and anynomiously damage a competitor’s reputation. Strother accuratly discribes all aspects, both positive and negitive, involved in the growing corperate blogosphere useing numerious intresting examples.

Collaborative Project

Non profit proposal-with references (1)

This is the PowerPoint for the proposal project. We were the non-profit group, where we showed a gardening group how they would make a YouTube channel to teach people about gardening.  We dealt with each problem individually from how to make a channel to how to film and edit a video. We all learned how to effectively use each other's skills in this project. For example some of use were good at research, others at organizing, others at putting together a PowerPoint. So we used this and broke into separate roles of and each had a job to do. I believe we had excellent results. 

Multimedia Work sample

In the mock interview assignment, through several takes I learned how to compose myself in an online interview. I used the living room area because it was clean and gave a good backdrop for my interview. I also learned to react to unexpected questions. I learned a lot from the experience as well as being able to play back what  I said and watch myself so I could learn from my mistakes. In the last take I was able to remain confident and finish out a strong interview. I enjoyed this assignment, and am glad I was able to do it, because I learned a useful skill, how to act when being interviewed. I am no longer nervous of video interviews.

Visual Design Elements

This was a public service announcement to warn against giving tests and quizes during dead week. In this project my group and I demonstrated that in many cases few words on each slide is more effective for portraying a point. People lose interest very quickly when there is a multitude of words on each slide. We said everything that needed to be said but first used bold faced words and clever parallels to gain the audience's attention.

Individual Work Samples

These were false photos that I did in Photoshop. The first is a dog riding a rocket powered skateboard. this combined elements of several pictures which  each on their own was completely normal. But When I put them together, taking advantage of the human tendency to view adjacent parts as a collective whole, it became a ridiculous picture that looks more or less real. The second picture I Photo-shopped to show me in a T-shirt sitting on top of mount Everest. Two reasons this is impossible, I am in nowhere near good enough shape to climb mount everest, and its really cold up there. However, with photo editing tools I was easily able to show myself on top of the mountain by simply splicing 2 photos together. These examples proved to me how easily the human eye can be fooled, and not to believe pictures on the internet.

Resume

      I designed my resume to show me in a professional light. Using much of what I learned in this class I was able to make my severely limited work experience and make a presentable resume. Before this class my resume was almost completely unusable however now I am confident that I will find a job for this summer.