Very Pinteresting :)

Ana Banana

so here are some facts that involve Pinterest! It is actually very interesting to see 

Kastle: Facebook Means Something To Us

Facebook makes our status's feel meaningful, if people like them or not. This social network has affected all of our lives in some way, and whether positive or negative, Facebook means something to all of us. What does Facebook mean to you?

Kastle: The Social Network

The invention of Facebook has become such a huge hit that a movie was made specifically about how Mark Zuckerberg came up with the idea. The synopsis of this movie, given by Rotten Tomatoes website tells us this:  
        Director David Fincher (Fight Club, Seven) teams with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) to explore the meaning of success in the early 21st century from the perspectives of the technological innovators who revolutionized the way we all communicate. The year was 2003. As prohibitively expensive technology became affordable to the masses and the Internet made it easy to stay in touch with people who were halfway across the world, Harvard undergrad and computer programming wizard Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) launched a website with the potential to alter the very fabric of our society. At the time, Zuckerberg was just six years away from making his first million. But his hearty payday would come at a high price, because despite all of Zuckerberg's wealth and success, his personal life began to suffer as he became mired in legal disputes, and discovered that many of the 500 million people he had friended during his rise to the top were eager to see him fall. Chief among that growing list of detractors was Zuckerberg's former college friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), whose generous financial contributions to Facebook served as the seed that helped the company to sprout. And some might argue that Zuckerberg's bold venture wouldn't have evolved into the cultural juggernaut that it ultimately became had Napster founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) not spread the word about Facebook to the venture capitalists from Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer and Josh Pence) engage Zuckerberg in a fierce courtroom battle for ownership of Facebook that left many suspecting the young entrepreneur might have let his greed eclipse his better judgment. The Social Network was based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

I've seen this movie, and it was very interesting. It gives us, as an audience, a 3 dimensional array of technical images of how Facebook came to be. A way of understanding it all without even needing to read the book; the text. How do you feel about the Social Network? Does it tell the truth? Or does this movie deceive us into thinking a certain way? 

Megan: Bloggers

What better place to visit to get an idea of what people think of bloggers than urban dictionary!

Some of these are hilarious, some accurate, some offensive, all insightful as to what non-bloggers and bloggers alike think it means to be a blogger.

Blogger

"Term used to describe anyone with enough time or narcissism to document every tedious bit of minutia filling their uneventful lives. Possibly the most annoying thing about bloggers is the sense of self-importance they get after even the most modest of publicity. Sometimes it takes as little as a referral on a more popular blogger's website to set the lesser blogger's ego into orbit. Then God forbid a blogger gets mentioned on CNN. If you thought it was impossible for a certain blogger to get more pious than he was, wait until you see the shit storm of self-righteous save-the-world bullshit after a network plug. Suddenly the boring, mild-mannered blogger you once knew will turn into Mother Theresa, and will single handedly take it upon himself to end world hunger with his stupid links to band websites and other smug blogger dipshits." - Maddox any user of www.livejournal.com, www.greatestjournal.com, etc.

blogger
	A person with a laptop, an ax to grind, and their virginity Steven Colbert: "And in case you don't know a blogger is a person with a laptop, an ax to grind ... and their virginity"

blogger
	derived from weblogger, s.o. who keeps a weblog, a diary on the internet. You'll find plenty crappy bloggs on the net.

Etc. Scroll through the page(s) to get more ideas.

Do you agree with these definitions?

Ally: Twitter's top 100

Okay this I found simply wonderful. Twitter top 100 most followed. This put the idea that twitter is just a place for people to stalk, live through, and love the lives of celebrities. The majority of these top people are almost all celebrities with a few random news sources or ads thrown in there. But look at those numbers. Sweet Jesus that is a lot of followers Lady G. How does it feel to be the most followed individual in the world? Ashton Kutcher once shared her popularness but is now dropped to an embarrassing 18. That sucks dude. But really why do we do this? That will be in my next post. The why behind it all. Enjoy those numbers!

Ally: Twitter's numbers not so strong?

When reading a Forbes article on the idea that Twitter's growth is slowing I honestly wasn't too surprised. The article compares Twiiter's user numbers to that of Facebook when Facebook was Twitter's current age ( 6 years ). We all know that Facebook has taken off much quicker and stronger than Twitter did and is continuing to. Twitter's number of posts and the amount of revenue from ads continues to grow while the user numbers stay the same or even lessen. This makes sense considering that it is mainly the people that jumped on the original Twitter train that are creating the increase of posts and what not. But it is not quite as addicting as Facebook, it doesn't draw in quite the same audience.

Megan: Crossover

I just found this interesting, and a touch "ironic" since I found it on tumblr:

Three things you should read about Facebook

Three things:

1. Alexis Madrigal presents The Case for Facebook in The Atlantic. Key concepts: “classic market myopia,” the global mass and velocity of Facebook, and design momentum.
2. Robin Sloan on Pictures and Vision. Key concepts: “Facebook is the world’s largest photo sharing site,” and oh by the way Google Glass(es) is the tip of an augmented iceberg.
3. Oliver Reichenstein, Information Architect, on how to Sweep the Sleaze. Key concepts: Your users might be smarter than you think, and that dirty pile of buttons you crumble all over your content doesn’t account for that.

My take:

1. IPO drama aside, Facebook isn’t going anywhere. For better or worse (and some will say for worse), it’s now woven deeply into the fabric of the web. Take it away, and we lose our easiest, safest, most casual connections with our social graph. The lines fall away.

2. But it’s a mistake to get caught up in the devices and applications of the present. Data has value, and the tools to interpret it. Delivery systems will continue to evolve.

3. And although we may lean on crutches of interface to open channels of content into the sprawl of niche networks, to access the intersection of social graphs, eventually we can lean on our users as they pick up the next tool and the next. “If the news is that important, it will find me” does not depend on any particular network or Like button.

(Source)

Megan: F--k Yeah, Tumblr!

One of tumblr's rising trends has been the 'F--k Yeah!' Evolution, a movement elaborated on by an article at Mashable.

After the popularity of the original 'F--k Yeah!' (FY) blog, Fuck Yeah Sharks, in 2007, several bloggers decided to hop on that idea train and take blogging to a whole new level; it took about two years for the FY trend to go viral. Now there is likely a FY blog dedicated to just about anything. According to Mashable, between 100 and 200 FY tumblrs are created every day and there are about 100,000 in existence so far (with more than 200 dedicated to Justin Bieber alone). Some change it up slightly, opting to place "effyeah" or "fyeah" at the front of the URL.

Not only has this trend changed the way users access tumblr, but it has extended beyond the tumblr realm. Newspapers and magazines have caught on to the trend, mentioning them and occasionally adapting the tumblr jargon. The earlier forms of media, such as newsprint and cable news, aren't always able to keep up with the fastpace communication of the world wide web, and so they cannot ignore what happens on twitter and on tumblr.

A prime example is the fact that political satirists, such as Jon Stewart, mention open-source networks weekly (such as here or here). Occasionally he is more subtle, such as when he used the "dramatic chipmunk" to demonstrate apprehension of SOPA. (And guess what? Because Jon Stewart so often mentions tumblr, he has his own FY blog. Yes, indeed.)

All of this blogging with a creation of trends and language complicates how we as humans communicate and comprehend. And then there is the issue of worlds intersecting -- should what happens on tumblr stay on tumblr, or is it/ should it be yet another place to spawn creativity that is/ should be completely accessible to all?