Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Final Blog Entry!!

For my last blog entry of the semester, I do not have a general theme, but I would like to touch on various topics.

Lamar Bone
Cartoon Characters as facebook profile pictures- I noticed a lot of my facebook friends were changing their pictures to cartoon characters, which I thought was pretty funny, and I decided to look it up. It turns out that doing this is intended to create child abuse awareness. It is similar to the "I like it on the..." campaign which was to create breast cancer awareness. I think this is a fun way to use social networking in a good way. I even changed my picture to a photo of Assistant Principal Lamar Bone, a character from Nickelodeon's cartoon series Doug.

According to David Murphy of PCMag.com, there is some opposition to these types of facebook awareness campaigns. He noted that he read someones facebook status that said "Putting up a picture from a cartoon is not going to end child abuse. If you would like to be a part of the solution, click the link and support Prevent Child Abuse America." 

I'm not sure I see the need for this negativity, he has a point, but any type of publicity towards a cause is useful I believe.

New Media and MLB Off-season

I am an avid major league baseball fan and this time of year is extremely exciting for a baseball fan to follow because it is the off-season, and many teams are making trades and signing free agents in order to improve their team. New Media outlets such as twitter and blogs have totally changed the way that fans can follow the moves of their team in the off-season. Its almost pathetic how much I check blogs such as MLBTraderumors.com, Federal Baseball.com, and Nats Insider on blogspot.com. I check it more than I check my e-mail or facebook. You never know when an earth shattering transaction can happen such as The Nationals acquisition of Jayson Werth, signing him to a 7 year 126 Million dollar contract. Since I am constantly in touch with the new media feeds I was one of the first one of my friends to hear about this.




The Newest member of the Washington Nationals, Right Fielder Jayson Werth
Also, a lot of discussions happen on reporters twitter feeds, and I am contemplating creating a twitter account just to consolidate the various reporter's information.

Final Thoughts-

Overall I found this course to be useful and informative. I feel like New Media is contributing more and more to society by the minute, and I am glad to have a strong foundation in New Media skills and knowledge going forward into the business world. I am sure that we will see amazing new advances in this technology in the coming years. I hope you guys enjoyed the semester as well and thanks for reading my blog!

-Will