Amy’s Weblog

This final week of class, we are looking at Mash ups. Now, I have to say that all the mash ups on Twitter and music videos did not really interest me all that much. I haven’t caught the Twitter bug, yet, and I feel fine with looking for videos on Youtube, but I did finally find a Mashup that seemed very important.

It’s the WiiFinder mashup offered by findnearby.net. My first impression upon going to the site was, wow, it can tell that I’m in North Carolina. My second thought was that I could send it to my friends that have still not been able to get a Wii. Since I have a Wii and love it to death, I have nothing but the greatest of sympathy for my friends that haven’t found one yet.

So, what does WiiFinder do? Well, the search that ran instantly looked at e-bay and gave prices and times left in the auction. It also looked at Amazon.com, Walmart, and Circuit City. For the Walmarts and Circuit city’s, it provided addresses and phone numbers. Also, if you clicked on the link, it would show you that store on the map and offer to get you directions. In some instances, the date for when the Wii’s were being shipped in was given. This information appears to be updated by the general public.

Tabs exist to take you to Wii Auctions, News, and Games and Accessories. Overall, it’s a pretty neat site.

This week’s second assignment was to use rollyo.com and a pre-built librarian blog search to find blog entries on privacy and post the results. Well, I glanced through a few and read one. Most of the blogs seemed to be speaking about privacy issues in terms of generational values and social media or Web 2.0. I have to say that a lot of it seems a bit alarmist to me. Yes, it is true that privacy has a different meaning these days. I know a lot of people that don’t restrict access to their personal blogs. Why? Well, they don’t care who reads it for one, and the second point is that they don’t see why anyone other than friends would read it. I think they might be right. I don’t read personal blogs of anyone that I don’t know.

Now, I know some people like to bring up the whole potential bosses Googling their candidates. What if they find the blog? Well, don’t use your real name, I guess. The other point, and I think this is common sense, don’t put information up in a public domain if you don’t want people to see it. My mom always told us not to write anything down that you didn’t want people to know, so I’ve never been that into diaries. I actually feel safer putting my stuff up on the web under an alias than having a physical diary laying around to tell you the truth.