Internet vs. Intellect

The internet has by no means made us dumber. It has rather increased our access to much more information around the world making us more knowledgeable in a lot more areas. Knowledge can be the greatest resource a person can have and the internet is the only complete tool that organizes such information and presents it to the user. Books are also an incomparable resource for knowledge, but both books and the internet enlighten us, they both complement each other in educating a person.

While amateurs have the right to express their opinions on blogs, wikis and other resources on the internet so do the experts. It is the readers responsibility to authenticate the statements of amateurs and the experts online. In general, people do want to listen to what experts have to say on their subject of study but that does not mean that we can disregard the amateurs opinion just because he does not have enough experience. An amateur may not have a degree from a reputable university or come from within a specific industry. Although, he may have life experiences that give him the knowledge to state his opinion without the clout of a degree or job in that area. This is not to say that all amateurs on the internet know what they are taking about. I'm just saying that we should not disregard them just because they are amateurs.

"Nobel Laureate Says The Internet Makes Us Dumb, We Say: Meh"

"The Digital Emperor Has No Clothes"

Standing Out From The Crowd

After reading the The Myth of Crowdsourcing and Is Crowdsourcing Evil? I realized that crowdsourcing is a topic of great contention among a lot of people. Crowdsourcing is a mixture of the words crowd and outsourcing, which basically means that a job that requires a specifically skilled person like a web designer is outsourced to a group of people or a community asking for answers from them.

I believe that crowdsourcing will be a great resource to companies as it becomes a wider known concept. It has the capability to really drive innovation like never before. Crowdsourcing is giving opportunities to creative people who might not get that chance otherwise. It levels the playing field for a lot of junior web developers who might have the talent but not have gotten noticed. It increases competition which is always a good thing. This helps both the companies and the designers because the most talented people will stand out while the companies will get a lot more options then they are used to. Another positive is that since a product is being created by a "crowd" the company will have a better vision of what the people want because it will be reflected in the "crowds" work.

Although there are a few problems I foresee with this concept. The wages these developers will be paid will be far lesser than what they would be paid working for a firm that does the same type of work. Which in turn could largely diminish the quality of work performed by the crowd. Also it will be quite difficult for the firm to build a relationship and have too much input into the project after the crowd starts working on the project, any changes will be hard to communicate. The third problem I foresee is that the company might lose a lot more time and money in going through all the options provided by the crowd only because there won't be a limited choice, although this is not always a negative aspect. If crowdsourcing can get over these hurdles it can be extremely successful in pushing the boundaries of innovation around the world. Which brings me to question can crowdsourcing be controlled to a degree of overcoming these obstacles without stifling the innovation?

Social Capital, Six Degrees, and Social Network Analysis

Hey guys,

After reading the articles by Clive Thompson and Mark Zukerburg I found out that scientists use reality mining by tracking people with location aware devices like cell phones to understand how social networks functions. What is interesting about this is the privacy of the user involved. There needs to be some mechanism to make sure that the privacy of the user is not compromised. This type of information can be useful to people like direct marketers but it can cause a lot of inconvenience to the actual person being tracked. This could soon turn into a security issue too as the technologies for cell phones evolve very fast and more personal information can be stored on them.

It is also been seen that people interact better through real world social networking rather than on Facebook. This is normally because it is easier to decipher what a person is saying when you have visual clues. Facebook is also the most popular social networking website and is growing rapidly, they keep adding more features to enable the user to share more about themselves. So the question is can all social networking sites keep increasing their capability to allow user information and at the same time keep it secure and private? And also can they do it without compromising the usability of the website to user standards?

My first blog post

I am a student blogging for ITEC 335. “On my honor, all posts on this blog are my own”