Social Net'g

Social networking is considered as a new opportunity to create and communicate with people who care about a specific issue. It provides great benefits to not only a group of individuals, but also people within the companies, such as a unique community, thoughts sharing activities improvement, good news celebration, and so on. However, the “dark side” of the social networking is the privacy issues, misleading information, and too much power to the consumer.

“What’s next? Your future in social networking”, a special interactive report written by Maclean stated that social networks are not only Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube; but also new ways to communication and doing business. The report also indicates that the social networking can reduce business cost.

In the corporate level, the social network may be used to find jobs; Frank Langfitt wrote a story about Osram Sylvania found its talented employee Alfred LaSpina through Linkedin in his article “Social Networking Technology Boots Job Recruiting”. Linkedin is a site that allows people to put information in their profile, so that recruiters can see and hire workers easily.

On the other hand, the loss of privacy is an important issue. People may input their private information like their real name, date of birth, and address on the site, while other people may steal this kind of information to commit frauds. Consequentially, many consumers start losing confidence on the social media.

In sum, the social networking has its good and bad factors to the consumer. It is a powerful tool that can help people to success, and also may lead to failure.  People must be very careful when working on the network.  

Blog vs Wiki

           Blog and wiki are identical tools that provide a platform for not only individuals, but also a group of people to communicate to each other.  The difference between them is that the blog is where a single person creates and controls the information, and the other people can comment on it; while the wiki is a place that anybody in the group can edit, add, link, and make changes to it. Basically, the blog is mostly used for sharing, and the wiki is more likely used for coordinating.
          In the article called "Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid", Michael Wilson wrote a story of how the neighbors share comments about what's happening and what they thought about the drug dealers in the area on the neighborhood's blog, which helps the policemen to investigate and arrest the suspicious quickly. This shows that the blog is being used in a helpful way to improve the security of the community.
          Gardiner Morse illustrated the usefulness of the wiki for the companies in his article "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on making the most of company wikis". The writer stated that within the same company, employees can add their ideas and knowledge on the wiki to improve the company's productivity. The wiki is a fast way to collaborate and communicate, especially when people are far away from each other when they have to discuss some important issues.
           In conclusion, the blog and wiki are pretty similar, but they have their own benefits. The blog is good for the individual, while the wiki is good for a group of people.

Social Networking: A Purposeful Loss of Privacy

For this project, I will be doing a research of the loss of privacy in the social networking. First at all, I will find out a little bit of the history of the social networking, and its advantages and disadvantages that the social network bring to humanity. Secondable, I will explain in depth about the issue of the loss of privacy and the impact for not only invidually, but also socially. Thirdable, I will provide some suggestions on how to protect privacy on the social network.