I've always believed honey has medicinal properties. I've sipped honey when I suffered a sore throat, I have rubbed honey into burns, and of course, I have dripped honey over my English muffins. My love for this serum inspired me to read up all about honey, on Wikipedia of course. I poked through Wikipedia's entry on honey, and I saw nothing about its medicinal traits, so I decided to add it in, so that others could share in this useful knowledge.
Under the Hitsory, Culture and Folklore section, I added that "Some cultures believe honey has many practical health uses. It was used as an ointment for rashes and burns, and used to help soothe sore throats when no other medicinal practices were available." I personally agree with this statement, and I wish other to try it as well, unless their allergies don't allow them to!
Update: Even a week and a half after updating the page, my entry has not been edited. I am surprised by this because although I feel this is useful information, I have no legitimate citations to back up my cause. However, my entry is quite minimal, and under a wiki page that probably isn't visited so often, so I can see how it has gone unnoticed.
Update #2: Even after a month and a half (and my confession via this blog) my wikipedia entry still hasn't been edited or deleted! Cool!
Twitter, a simplistic microblogging/social networking site, focuses its 140-character posts around the simple question "what are you doing?". It makes sense, really. We ask this question frequently; when you call a buddy, it's generally one of the first questions asked.
What's the point of this Twitter you speak of? On the surface, it seems as though it is a quick and easy way to let your friends know what you're doing. What if I don't care what they are doing?
As we've learned in class, Wikipedia participants are generally quite adamant on sticking to the rules of the game. Wikipedia as a collective prides itself on sticking to certain principles, one of which is always taking the neutral point of view; another is using the "wiki process of consensus" used as the decision-making process for all posted content. With this understanding, I took to a controversial Wiki page to check out the discussion to see exactly how this works in action.
I came upon The Holocaust because it is generally an emotionally-charged topic, and some hold differing opinions about the subject. As I scrolled through the discussion page, one discussion in particular caught my eye. Abie the Fish Peddler suggested the page be moved to "Shoah", a Hebrew term denoting the Holocaust. Because most of the discussion was about the meaning of these terms, lets give some background. The term "holocaust" was originally derived from a Greek word meaning "a sacrificial offering to the gods". It eventually grew to denote massive sacrifices and massacres. During WWII, the term was used as it is understood today, to describe the atrocities of Nazi soldiers. The term "Shoah" is biblical in nature, meaning "calamity". It became the standard Hebrew term for the word holocaust since the early 1940s. This term is preferred by many Jews because of the theological reference to a Greek pagan custom.
The argument was based around the opinion that Shoah has a specific relationship to the Holocaust, and the term holocaust is broader in scope. The discussion was quite lengthy, partly because the user had good arguments for wanting to redirect the page. However, after much analysis, the consensus decided to keep the page as the Holocaust, merely because the term is better known in English speaking countries (Shoah is only used in some Jewish groups). I felt this was a fair assessment and I was honestly impressed with the amount of discussion it took to reach a conclusion.
How can a company be so popular and still have no discernible revenue? Social networking and communication was revolutionized by the birth of Twitter. It's so simple, its a wonder why nobody came up with it before. Twitter asks its users the question, "What are you doing?" and limits their responses to a mere 140 characters. The engine is completely free to the public; users can even download their logo in three different formats, practically welcoming surfers to take, edit, and share their image. According to their website, Twitter has about 30 employees, and 25 open positions at their corporate office. If Twitter is used so frequently, and is so well liked why isn't the company banking? To answer this question for myself, I went directly to Twitter.
As I began clicking around the website, I came to the About Us section, which posed frequently asked questions. To my surprise, here was the very question I came asking myself: "How do you make money from Twitter?" Twitter's response:
Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don't want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand which is to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world. While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make.
Interesting enough. Their desire for "not wanting to distract themselves from more important work" puts Twitter in an almost heroic light. Since the boom of the internet, more and more websites have been turning to advertising for vast amount of revenue. So why is Twitter not buying into all of this? I think Twitter is waiting until they gain even more popularity so that they can sell space on their website, or even a portion of their website like Facebook did back in 2007.
And what is this "research phase" their business model is in? Isn't it obvious how to make money off the internet? Websites and search engines have been doing it for years. I think by "research" they really mean they are waiting to see where people take Twitter as a social utility. They are waiting to see how much popularity the engine can gain and how much speed it picks up amongst internet users, for both of these factors enormously affect the most practical type of advertising to implement.
Maybe what Twitter is doing isn't so bad. When Facebook sold a tiny bit (1.6%) of their website to Microsoft for a mere $250 million, the total value of Facebook was estimated to be $15 billion, keeping the interest of advertisers and software companies buzzing about what Facebook was going to do next. If Twitter plans to follow the same model, it could be pan out to be a grossly lucrative decision.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Why did Danger Mouse get in so much trouble and Girl Talk is free to throw mix-tapes dance parties?
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Free worked for for sometime, but the economic model of free doesn't hold as much weight if most porducts fit the bill. As soon as you know it, free will start to be the demand of the consumer. the money will go to the companies which provide the product and as soon as you know it, the corporations have the control.
