Visit From Erik Hanberg

We got a visit from Erik Hanberg, and he talked about being online. He talked about the internet and how our work flow has changed because of it. Now you can have a job right at your home office. Or get together a group of people who are states apart or even countries apart to come and work in an office you have rented. He went on to saying that he writes books and publishes them, and at first he did that through the normal way you would have done it before the internet. He went through an agent, an intermediary who would then contact publishers to get his book published. When you publish books this way you have to think about marketing, how to make your book known at first when you are publishing for the first time. If this is not the first time you have to think about keeping your readers up to date with what is happening and at the same time try gain new readers. Now with the internet Erik has found it easier than it used to be, and at the same time it seems the competition has grown tremendously. With the internet when publishing a book you no longer need that agent (disintermediation) and you become self-published. With self-publishing you get the benefit of keeping all the revenue you have earned minus the online publish sites small cut which in Erik case was Amazon and kindle. Before he would have had to split his money two ways for the agent and the publisher. And with the internet reaching out to his readers and marketing to new readers is even easier and virtually cost no money and can travel around just from word of mouth. But with this the Self-publishing on Amazon and kindle grew exponentially because of how easy it was. And this means that you do not have to be a big name writer to get recognized and have this as a job.                  

What I Would Not Buy Online

It was hard to choose what three things I would not buy online, because in almost all cases I always order from Amazon unless I really want something that day. But then I started to think about what I bought online and it was exclusively electronics, books, and games. So branching out from that what I would not buy became easy.

I would not buy:

1. Food items – I will always prefer going out to the store and picking my own food items.
2. Clothing – just like food I prefer to go to a store and try them on before buying them.
3. Car – This is a onetime purchase but when I do purchase it I want to be in the car test driving it.

When I shop online I always look at user reviews and YouTube reviews before I buy something online. Electronics, books and games are where I can find people who have the same taste as me. And I have YouTube reviewers who I have followed for a very long time that I can put my trust in them when they are reviewing something I want to buy. Food, Clothing and cars are where I am uncomfortable listing to another’s point, because it is way more subjective than the other three I listed.        

EPIC 2015

EPIC 2015 was a short movie we watched in class that talk about major events that happened in the world of technology. But those events takes a turn for fiction when the date passes the videos published date, in other words it completely turns to fiction after about 2006. It starts out by saying factually correct information like Tim Burners Lee inventing the World Wide Web, Amazon and Google inventions. But after 2006 he starts to predict new events that would unfold, and I can see why he would predict these based on the time. But all of the predictions he told did not come true at all.

Predictions he made:

2006 - Google unveils the Google Grid, a universal platform offering an unlimited amount of space and bandwidth that can be used to store anything.

2007 - Microsoft Newsbotster, a social news network, ranks and sorts news. It allows everyone to comment on what they see.

2008 - Google and Amazon merge to form Googlezon.

2010 - The news wars rage between Microsoft and Googlezon. But not really wars.

2011 - The New York Times sues Googlezon.

2014 - Googlezon unleashes EPIC, the Evolving Personalized Information Construct.  

My personal favorites are Googlezon and how The New York Time sues Googlezon. And the Fact that google won because it was so powerful. That fact is basically true today. Google is really powerful, and the internet is putting the Newspaper industry out of business. And I won’t be surprised if EPIC does come true and even more powerful so. With many researching more powerful A.I maybe the world will become fully automatic without human intervention.      

Scavenger Hunt on the Internet

On Monday’s class we had an assignment to go on a scavenger hunt on the internet. We had nineteen items we had to find and I thought it was going to be relatively simple. We divided up the work I was working on question three. The first two question we my teammates did quickly but I got stuck on number three because it asked me for old information, I had to look through many sites to go through to find it. When I search on google there are literally millions and millions of search results. But just typing in the question didn’t work so I had to choose key words just to get around to find it, it took me awhile. But without the doubt the hardest was to find the married name of the professor’s younger sister. One team found it so quick and easy I don’t know how they managed that. We don’t know what she looked like, professor never talked about her so we had no context. That question we spent the rest of class time on we still couldn’t find it. Some people went to Facebook, some went to historical records. Still that’s millions of people to look through even if we know the family names of the professor there are still multiple people with same names. What it does illustrate is that we can find ourselves on the internet even without us ever doing anything, maybe because of a friend or a meeting we attended to.