Tech637- My Semester Experience

What was different about this course?

What was different about this course when compared to my other courses for the semester? I sure read a lot. I had to read an average of 5 papers for every week. But I can’t say it was bad because as learned just as much as I read. The beauty about reading in this course was that I got to share what I learned with my wonderful and fun classmates. Now the great thing about sharing the knowledge I gained was that I learned from other classmates as they too shared the knowledge they gained. From them sharing their knowledge, I was able to gain insights into the reading that I would have had had not we shared our knowledge. It was somewhat similar to pair programming, where two programmers work together on the same code. In this was they are able to give each other ideas on how to go about solving a problem. This was probably the most engaging class I’ve ever had and I loved it. It’s also cool when your professor encourages you to tweet in class. But then again it was a social media course, so we were supposed to tweet in class. I encourage anyone reading this to try out Tech637 @ Purdue University for Fall 2014.

 

Favorite Topics

Well one my favorite topics was the use of the social media to maintain weak ties. The readings did a great job at showing the great benefits of weak ties, but what made it even more wonderful was the fact that I was able to see how social media was able to easily facilitate this process. Another great topic, well presentation session was the class on the dark side of the internet. If I had to remember one thing from class that day id that troll no longer live under uder the bridge awaiting little goats to cross. They have become technologized and move to the internet. Word of caution when meeting a troll on the internet: DON’T FEED THE TROLLS!

 

Personal Takeaway

Social media had brought a world of change to what we all know as the internet and has completely transformed it. It has brought many benefits such as the easy sharing of information, but like every good thing it can also be abused if we don’t manage it carefully.

I learned so much on various social media tools and websites. How I’ve also realized that it is impossible to keep up with every form of social media. However I can utilize those social media toolts that I think may be of greatest value to me in both my personal life and professional life/career. I care about maintaining my weak ties, so I will make use of Facebook in order to maintain those ties. Twitter is a great tool to express my thoughts on interesting topics, or maybe follow people who are of interest to me to know their latest developments. I will encounter other along and will evaluate them to see how much they can improve my life and from there I will make a decision. Signing out DDJohn from #Tech637

Ranking with Social Media

It may come as no surprise to many people that Google uses social media in ranking websites in the search results. For example one could go the internet right now on Fiverr.com and find hundreds of social media services offering Facebook like, shares, pininterest, tweets, stumbled upon ect. And when you think about it, it makes sense right? I mean we all know Google love fresh content and if there is some content being shared by everyone on social media, then it should be very important. Lately I’ve been thinking about the value of G+ in ranking a website in the search results. I mean Google is pushing it on us and frankly I’ve got no problem with it because I think it might be very useful in SEO. For example, now you comment on YouTube through you G+ page.

I read MOZ article some time ago which reported of a scientific correlation between Google +1’s and higher search engine rankings. Based on that correlation study the number of Google +1 Pages linking to your website is beaten only by page authority. I think I read another article sometime age which said and showed an example of a Google +1 page being listed in the search engine results. Will I jump on ship? I already have my friend. Google owns Google +, don’t you think they will give their social media platform some serious juice? Currently the number of Facebook share a site receives positively affects it ranking in the search results. Google is already doing so with their platform.

I was hoping for the same with GPlus, but the word is that GPlus don’t provide any link juice to your website” Matt Cutts said so”. I was disappointed to hear that, yet I will try and see for myself.

We already know how valuable social media is in ranking you in the search results. My goal is to see how effectively Google +1 pages can help me accomplish this. Will let you know how it goes in a future post.

Link to the Article: http://moz.com/blog/google-plus-correlations

The cost of Malware

According to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt the internet’s biggest problems are:

• Hackers and cybercriminals
• No delete button
• Censorship

It should be no surprise to us that hackers and cybercriminals made it to number one on this list, although I must say I was surprised to see that lack of the delete button was such a major issue. Many of us have seen if not experienced the damage, which can be caused by cyber criminals. The fact that we have antivirus programs running on our computers is evidence of their presence.

Let’s take a quick look at one their main tools used to commit cybercrime. Malware!! The name says it all. The word malware is a short form for malicious software. I’m from a French creole persuasion and the first part of the world “Mal” means something ‘bad’. So yes, malware will definitely do bad things to you. So let’s take a quick look at some of these bad things: Viruses, Worms and Trojan horses (not a condom). I promise you that if your use this Trojan, you WILL get infected with some virus. Your only safety is to abstain.

From the year 2004 we’ve seen a dramatic increase in malicious programs ranging in the 100 million. But what is the cost of such large a large increase in malware?

Yea, it not much you say, just $29.99 for a top of the line antivirus program, right? Hey for me it’s free because I’m running the Avast free version.

Only if this was the case!!

Symantec says we spend $110 billion annually on malware damage while McAfee says $1 trillion. Now there sure is a large error between the two reports, but the point is that malware is costing us lots of money. Though these criminals who release those viruses get the personal information (credit cards, SSN, passwords) of us every day regular folks, this financial damage is the result of damages caused to businesses. For a large multi-national firm or business, a virus attack that may affect the computer systems for one or two days is millions of dollars lost. Therefore if you didn’t know, guess what?  Malware is expensive!!

 How to protect yourself

1. Use an antivirus software
2. Do not pirate software- you can get infected by viruses and Trojans
3. Be careful when opening attachments
4. Click with care! Avoid visiting infected websites
5. Enable your firewall
6. Keep current with operating system updates

References

Hyman, P. (2013). Cybercrime: it’s serious, but exactly how serious?. Communications of the ACM, 56(3), 18-20.

http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/staggering-cost-malware-now-over-100-billion-023014986.html

Trial of SocialOomph

I decided to use SocialOomph in an attempt to tweet my website links to Twitter. This was in an attempt to create social backlinks to my website learning that they could help my website rank higher in Google. Like tweet adder it can be used for managing and scheduling tweets. I tried the free version because it contained the basic functionality that I wanted. These included unlimited accounts and easy schedule of tweets, though not limited only to these two features.

What I liked about SocialOomph compared to TweetAdder is the ability to create different categories of tweets that can all be drip fed automatically. It also has the option of adding multiple accounts and tweeting to each account from the various categories. I think this is cool, well when compared to TweetAdder.

On a down side however, it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing tool that I’ve used, but hey, I was able to schedule and automate my tweets for free.

What is the position of this website in Google right now? Well, that’s for another story or should I say, another post.

Amazon Mechanical Turk

I don’t think that Amazon Mechanical Turk can be called a social media tool, but since we discussed crown sourcing in class and I used MTurk to conduct my class research experiment, I thought I should write about my experiment with it. Always skeptical about MTurk, I thought that this class research paper would be a great opportunity to try it out. Overall I’d have to say that I like MTurk, although I’m not certain about the reliability of the data. After all, those who complete the human intelligence tasks are paid and they may try to complete as many tasks as possible to increase their pay.

Knowing this MTurk allows you the person designating to decide whether you will accept or reject the work completed. To increase your chances of getting good work completed, it’s better to filter for higher quality workers, though this means that your pay will need to be slightly higher. If your HIT is a survey, you could also verify that workers completed the survey by having them submit a validation code at the end of the survey.

I think MTurk provides a great opportunity for recruiting users to complete any sort of HIT that one may need done. The task type will determine how much you need to pay your workers, which can range from a penny to more than 20.00 per task. The higher the pay, the more complex and time consuming the task will be. I was able to pay workers 0.35 cents to complete a 12 item Likert scale survey which took worker an average of 2.5 minutes to complete.

Still skeptical even after my first trial, but I am willing to try MTurk again.

Social Media and Warfare

Social media is radically changing all that we know, from communication, marketing, even warfare. Today it’s all being done through social media. In this post I will take a look at the role social media in warfare in the 21^st century.

Let’s go back to 2010-2011 in what we all know as the Arab spring. During this short time period we saw one leader after another toppled over in the Middle Eastern Arab world. Through Facebook and Twitter the citizens of those countries were able to organize and coordinate large crowds containing thousands of people to protest against the unjust acts of their government. Through social media people were able to express their thoughts and complaints and their desire for change (freedom, democracy). Without the tool of social media, such actions would most surely result in death. But through slacktivism via social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter, thousands of people got the courage to make their desires known to the world. But could social media be used more menacingly to cause disruption of governments by other political powers. I can already foresee it happening.

The 2009 elections in Iran saw Iranians taking to Twitter in protest against the government. Based on data analyzed from Twitter during this period, we saw that many of those who were taking to Twitter in Tehran were not even located in Iran (Gaffney, 2010). Many individuals simply changed their profile information to Iran’s and were protesting as if from within Iran. Maybe they were doing so to give courage to those within Iran who were protesting. But can this be abused? What if an enemy through social media organizes and coordinates the people of a country to rise up against their government? All they need is an incident with the country and a change of IP or location to incite the citizens to spark off a protest. I am just thinking of the evil possibilities afforded through social media to incite war. Need I saw more. It is indeed something to think about.

What if?

References

Gaffney, D. (2010). # iranElection: quantifying online activism.

Collaboration on Twitter

Hey world, in 140 characters here’s what I’m up to. This is the typical language of a Twitter message. But can the micro blogging platform be used as a tool for conversation and collaboration. And if so, what type of collaboration can it be used for?

To investigate this, Courtenay Honeycutt and Susan Herring scrapped hundreds of tweets from Twitter in a 12 hour timeframe and analyzed those tweets. In spite of the fact that Twitter was designed for answering the question “What are you doing?” their work showed that people are actually utilizing for much more than this.

The research showed that Twitter can be used for conversation and collaboration, but in order to successfully accomplish these tasks certain techniques must be utilized. The most popular of these included using the @ sign for addressivity. Since twitter is a very noisy platform which does not differentiate between conversation dialogs, users have to use the @ sign to direct messages to a desired individual.

It’s good to know that Twitter can be used for collaboration, but the work done through collaboration on Twitter will depend on its importance, nature and sensitivity. Sure there is the direct messaging option, but that would somewhat defeat the purpose because this is similar to traditional email except in character count. But irrespective of this, we’ve seen collaboration through Twitter on a massive scale as was demonstrated in the Arab Spring revolutions, the occupy Wall Street movements and the 2009 Iran election protests.

I think that Twitter as a good collaboration platform for public activities. Since it is such an open platform and anyone who decides to follow you can see your posts, one needs to be more careful about using the platform for more sensitive activities. But for a quick non sensitive collaboration in achieving some objective, as Honeycutt and Herring reported, Twitter can serve a very valuable role.

References

Honey, C., & Herring, S. C. (2009, January). Beyond microblogging: Conversation and collaboration via Twitter. In System Sciences, 2009. HICSS’09. 42nd Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 1-10). IEEE.

Distraction Distraction Distraction

Remember the days when your parents used to tell you don’t do your homework while watching TV; and you used to try arguing your way that it did not distract you. Guess what, it probably did distract you. I’m thinking back to that time and today about 14 years later, I’m saying to myself it’s great not being distracted by television anymore. Well what I didn’t realize until recently is that I am distracted more today than I was in my teenage years trying to complete my homework while watching my favorite tv show. Today distraction is all around me. Back in the late nineties, I did my homework on a notebook and if unwanted distraction came my way I could have easily find some isolated location. Well in my line of work, I can’t really do that. My notebook is no longer a stack of paper joined together by spiral wires. The work mead is not written on the front cover, but rather the word ASUS. Yes, I’m a windows and PC guy. When I take my notebook to a secluded I take the distraction with me because they all come from the notebook. I might be in be middle of writing an article or paper and suddenly a message pops up notifying me that I’ve received. I immediately try pressing the close button but miss and inadvertently click on the popup immediately opening email message. OK, the message is open now; I guess I can read it quickly to get back to work. Now it’s about 15 – 20 later and I’ve found myself on YouTube watching a video of Kel and Peel: Suburban zombies. Come to think of it this usually happens to me when working late at night.

Well this might seem extreme, but is it? I think there are others who experience something similar. What are those daily distractions that keep eating away at our capacity to be productive?  Need I mention social media? How many times have we seen the message that a friend has just upload some new photos. How many times have you passed off this message to continue with your work? It seems like every day there is a new social media platform and if a not a platform, then a new tool to make easier management of an existing platform.

What about our smartphones, a small handheld device which contains everything possible to keep us distracted. You know what’s worse, we cannot see ourselves living without it, yet we can’t seem to look pass the distractions emanating from it. At least with the laptop computer, the distractions are gone when we’re off the computer. On the other hand, we take the phone to bed and wake up to it first thing in the morning. If fact the phone may be the one who wakes us up with the first of the many distractions that will fill our day.

Hey sorry, I’ve got to go now; my phone has just distracted me with an international call from a childhood friend. Come on now, it’s international and it’s from my CHILDHOOD friend. What would you do? My next post would be how to control those distractions. Hopefully I would have learnt the how by the time I write my next post.

TweetAdder

I tried out a twitter marketing program called tweet adder. Well the program has just undergone some major changes, since they were sued by Twitter. The previous version was fully automated allowing users to automatically follow, unfollow, schedule tweets, manage and tweet automatically from hundreds of account. As you can imagine it lead to some serious spamming on the twitter network which eventually resulted in them (TweetAdder) being sues by Twitter.

Though not as automated as the older version, the new version does off some good automated services. I personally like the automated tweets which can be scheduled for every so many minutes or hours or days. I used for some time trying to get an audience for a blog I started, but soon realized that many of those who followed me were accounts similar to mine. They followed with the hope that I too would follow. Didn’t see them much of a valuable follower, since these accounts too may have been automated account like mine was.

Still got TweetAdder though, planning to use it again sometime soon in the future. Hope by this time, the software has not undergone some major changes again.

Advertising? Where? Tell me why I should!!

Tim Worstall recently wrote an interesting article on twitter which in effect summed up my thoughts on the social media platform. Here are my though on the aricle.
Tim seem to think that Twitter does not have enough real users to make it valuable to advertisers. Not valuable, whatever does he mean? Doesn’t Twitter claim a user base of approximately 281 million users? Though substantially less than Facebook’s, this is however larger than LinkedIn’s, right? So why would Mr. Worstall believe that Twitter lack monetary value?

Well according to a Forbes article, “Twitter makes 39 cents for every dollar Facebook gets out a user and 30 cents compared to a similar dollar LinkedIn makes on a user.” On this statistic alone, I can see why the author would think so. So in effect, advertisers are reluctant on using the micro blogging platform because it won’t make them enough money. They seem to think that it does not contain a big enough audience. Well in fact, they just may be correct right.

The 281 million accounts Twitter claimed to have are not individual users but accounts. So it would be more correct to say that Twitter has 281 million accounts. Out of these accounts, an individual may have more than one. Hey, don’t I have 2 twitter accounts, one for which I’ve forgotten the password? I wonder whether it is still active, Hmmmm?

Are you getting my point here? But wait, it gets more interesting. Haven’t you ever seen a Tweeter user starts following you, but when you do visit his/her profile all you can see on the timeline is a bunch of links pointing to a product or service? What are the chances that there is an actual individual sending out those tweets every 20-30 minutes? Also what are the chances that the individual running this bot have more than one account similar to this one? Even without any calculations, we can probably estimate the total Twitter user count to be a lot less than the acclaimed 281 million. So Tim Worstall’s article title that “there maybe aren’t enough real people on Twitter to make it valuable” may just be right! Why would advertisers pay to get thousands of ad impressions from a bunch bots that for sure aren’t there to buy squat?

This reminds me of MySpace in their dying days when they claimed to have millions of registered accounts, only a few of which were active. How do I know? Well it is because I attempted to run a cost per impression advertising campaign, which was discontinued by MySpace because it was just not getting enough impressions. That’s how I knew there was no one on MySpace anymore. Then again I may have not bid enough money to have my ads shown. But then again, I seriously that this was the case.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that the micro blogging platform is headed down a one-way track leading to the end of their existence. I am just saying that they need to clean up their platform and find a way to increase their actual active real user count, and soon enough they may just be knocking heads and matching dollar for dollar with Facebook and LinkedIn.