Badass Bloggers

Throughout the spring semester I tried to see what everyone else in the class was blogging about. To be completely honest, not many blogs caught and kept my attention. In light of that, I wanted to give some shout outs to the students whose blogs I thought were worthwhile. All of them are clearly passionate about what they're writing about, which makes their blogs way more interesting than just a post on a ClickZ article. Hopefully, at least some of them will continue blogging in the future.

Hats off to:

Keith
Craig
Rob
Chris - clearly the best blogger in the class.
Scott
Bob - possibly my fav. blogger in the class.
Steven

Best / most hilarious posts of the semester:

Craig's post on away messages
Scott's post about Craig's post on away messages
Steven's post about Ipods <~do your errands really need a soundtrack?

People I talked to...

Not sure if this is a required post or not... but here's links to all the blogs I commented on throughout the semester.

Ryan's post about the Naked Conversations blog
Ryan's post about blogs getting students suspended
Steven's post about open source marketing
Samik's post about MySpace
Lindsey's post about advertising
Samik's post about phishing

Speaking of Samik...he is a student in another 477 class. Let me just tell everyone how easy we had it (in my eyes). Each of Samik's post had to be 250+ words and had to pertain to legal, ethical, or privacy issues on the internet. He also had to comment on classmates' blogs...but the comments had to be somewhere around 250+ words as well. It does make me wonder what that professor is like...because I'm almost positive one of the key rules in blogging is brevity. And requiring students to only blog on required topics really takes out the possibility that there blog will be interesting because they won't be posting about information they particularly like or even feel like researching. So, although they're utilizing blogs, I don't think the professor is teaching the right principles in blogging.

Dave Matthews Band Wikipedia Summary

I decided to edit the Dave Matthews Band Wikipedia article because they another one of my favorite bands. The first edit I did was on a link within the article to a listing of their songs. It took me about an hour, but I ended up listing all the songs in order by album with links to lyrics and a music video if possible. Unfortunately, the entire section was deleted. The second edit I did was to add the discography link from the band's official site under the discography section; however, that was deleted as well. So I'm not making a third edit because most likely it will be deleted.

This article, as I assumed, has the strongest community around it. The page is constantly updated and new links to outside articles pertaining to DMB are constantly created and updated as well. DMB has had a strong following so it's no surprise that a lot of them are keeping the Wikipedia article up to par.

Here's all the fun stuff:
Dave Matthews Band Article
1st DMB Edit
2nd DMB Edit
3rd DMB Edit <~didn't happen
DMB History Page
Loocsixela

The Shins Wikipedia Summary

I decided to edit The Shins Wikipedia article because they have come to be in my top 3 favorite bands this past year. They've been featured on two widely acclaimed soundtracks, Garden State and In Good Company, and are slated to release their junior album in the fall.

For the first two edits I pretty much cleaned up and enhanced information found in the 'other details section'. The 3rd edit I made was adding their MySpace site to the external links section. The article gets an average of around 20 edits per month, so there are a lot of people keeping the information up to date.

For more information see:
The Shins article
1st Shins Edit
2nd Shins Edit
3rd Shins Edit
The Shins History Page
Loocsixela

Garden State Wikipedia Summary

I decided to edit the Garden State Wikipedia article because (1) it's one of my favorite movies (2) I'm incredibly impressed that Zach Braff wrote, directed, starred in, and chose the music for the film and (3) it's has one of my favorite soundtracks.

The first edit I made corrected a quote from the movie in the music section. The second was to add some content under the trivia section. When I went to make my third edit, the trivia section had been deleted - so I found the section in the history page, reput it in the article, and added some content. Unfortunately, another Wikipedia user deleted the trivia section again because it is "redundant and useless." So apparently there is a strong community of people working on this article.

For more information see:
Garden State Article
1st Edit on Garden State
2nd Edit on Garden State
3rd Edit on Garden State
Garden State's History Page
Loocsixela

Anosmia Wikipedia Summary

I chose to edit the anosmia Wikipedia article because I suffer from congential anosmia - which means I was born without a sense of smell. During my life, it's become apparent that anosmia is often overlooked and most people do not even realize that such a condition could and does exist. So, as I expected, the anosmia article is grossly underdeveloped when compared with blind or deaf.

Of the 3 edits I made, 2 were purposeful - meaning I added links that would be helpful for someone researching anosmia that were not already listed in the article. The 3rd edit I made was really to see if there was anyone keeping up with the article (I added that body odor was a dangerous side effect). That addition hasn't been removed so clearly there isn't a strong community around this article.

For more detailed information on my edits, please see:
Anosmia's Article
1st Edit on Anosmia
2nd Edit on Anosmia
3rd Edit on Anosmia
Anosmia's History Page
Loocsixela

3rd Wikipedia Edit on Garden State

I just made my 3rd and final edit to the Wikipedia Garden State article. I tried to add some more information to the trivia section; however, to my dismay, someone had deleted the section altogether. I went through the history, found the original content, and put the trivia section back in the article with some new content. Hopefully history won't repeat itself and the section will stay up.

All Bundled Up

Recently in class we talked about 1 of the 4 P's (pricing). During the lecture we learned that many companies in the software industry 'bundle' their products together and offer one price. When a consumer buys the 'bundle', he may not need all of the services or programs offered; however, down the road he may need the one he wasn't using and since it's already offered in the 'bundle' that he bought, it pretty much has created a lock-in against him going to other competitors for the same service or program.

ClickZ had an interesting article the other day about how bundled services have gained momentum in industries outside of software. For example, bundled packages that include phone, Internet, and TV services are very commonplace (43% of consumer households subscribe to bundle services). It also says that consumers subscribing to bundled services are less likely to switch to an alternative service provider (lock-in).

Firefox Flicks

A while back I wrote about a post from a fellow classmate of mine, Steven, that talked about open source marketing and a few companies that were taking advantage of it (MasterCard, Firefox, Nike, among others).

Well, I noticed an article today on Slashdot that said the winners for the Firefox flicks challenge have been picked.

P.S. - If anyone in the class is wondering why I'm posting about kids that aren't in my group... In the beginning of the semester when I was subscribing to all of the required feeds for the class, I misread the syllabus and thought we had to subscribe to everyone's blog in the class - I should have known better after I realized how long it was going to take me. Oh well.