Assignment 10

I have never posted a video on Youtube but I have posted videos using the posted items application on facebook, most of which came from other sites using their share function As for the statistics in the article, I was not surprised by the number of students who watch, send, or posted links to online videos. The reason being is that I, along with all my friends, have watched and referenced to videos seen online. Compare that to my family, most have never even heard of youtube, its popularity must come from younger adults becauses plus the fact most older its not stemming from older people. I selected this video link because I find the series, which got its start on youtube, really funny videos and its not just another relinked from another site onto youtube. As for alternative video search places I usually end up using yahoo or google video search engine options. What I believe makes Youtube a Web 2.0 application are: its accessibility, the freedom to post whatever you find interesting thus allowing you to share it, anyone can leave a comment on a video, you can subscribe to a author of a video and follow what they are posting, and users decided what videos make it on the homepage.

The video post link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2eH3vYbdGo

Assignment 9

The main similarities between the two websites are their encyclopedia like design and the ability of users to edit content. That is where the similarities end though. The difference are profound. Where wikpedia is composed by anyone, scholarpedia is composed of authors and professionals only. When editing, wikipedia authors have little control over it. Scholarpedia though the author must approve all edits. Also user interface was much better on wikipedia. Articles are simple to find which was unlike scholarpedia where article searching was a pain, I could not even find a good article on basic scientific concept like evolution. Wikipedia barely contains redirects to other sites while scholarpedia contained frequent links to Amazon.com, almost to the point where I question if it was just created by Amazon for advertising. Another difference is that most articles were full text on wikipedia and were exactly on topic while many articles on scholarpedia where just a sample of the text or search engine results that many times linked to the authors products. Finally the variety of articles on wikipedia have a mixture of scholarly and common interest while schlorpedia is what I consider just a very small fraction of scholarly information. As for use, I have used wikipedia many times trying to get background information on subjects or when I was just surfing the web. As for scholarpedia I used for the first time today and plan to never use it again due to the lack of information and its horrible user interface.

There are several concepts I find interesting. The first one is that wiki allows anyone to edit or contribute to a web page. The second concept is that answers/solutions have the opportunity to be easily created by a collaboration of professional ideas instead of each individually, which could have biases and errors.

I think based on the ease of misinformation that can be created on a wiki, its use for research should be limited to basic background research and should never be actually used to write a paper. As for projects, I think it could be used to organize and construct projects when parties involved have trouble meeting face to face.

Assignment 8

The tool I tried was the Google Docs online collaboration tool. The major advantage of this tool is how it makes it easy to sharing a document with multiple people, who in turn can download and edit the documents with out the mess. An example of how people were using this tool was for a group project for school. Everyone sent their specific section of the project for peer review. Then everyone peer reviewed the other group members sections. Once that was complete they pasted the project together and gave it a final review before completing it.
As for me, I have never used web tools like Google Docs or Zoho before this Web 2.0 assignment so I have no purpose or opinion of it. If I would use this tool though, I have several ideas. One would be the example mentioned before for group projects or labs. I could also use it as an Internet storage site for my school documents. I could also use it to do web based projects such as news letters or to collaborate data for research purposes with the help of other people.