Skype is an application that allows you to make voice and video calls to communicate and collaborate with people over the Internet. This application is very beneficial because of features that allow voice or video calling, conference calling, Instant Messaging, file sharing, screen sharing, and calls to mobile devices. Anyone can use the free version of Skype, but to get full access to all the features you will need to pay according to how you want to use it. I personally use it to talk with and see people all over the world. There's nothing like hearing a person's laugh and seeing their smile while you're talking to them.  As with all things there are advantages and disadvantages for this software.

Advantages:

• Saves money
• Video capabilities for those with Web cams
• Data can be sent while in a call
• A UPS ( Universal Power Supply) can be used in case of electrical outages

Disadvantages:

• Requires Internet and electricity to work
• Limited by the quality of your Internet and the hardware being used
• Is inadequate for secure transmissions with businesses

LinkedIn started in 2002 and has grown with the development of Web 2.0. It has not only grown in membership, it has grown in capabilities and features. Grant it, they do not incorporate video uploads and VoIP, but they have kept up the the changes in how people now use the Internet to expand their options when it comes to their professional lives and networking. The purpose of LinkedIn is to expand your network of connections to build or enhance your career by providing you with access to connections beyond the people you know. It can help by showing you a map of the people you know and who they know that you might find useful in your search. I recommend trying it out, finding or inviting people you know, see who they know, and using the tools and resources to make a build a strategy and plan of action for your own career development.

Linked In is considered a social networking site, but is designed around professional networking. There is a free version for people who want to keep in contact with their classmates and colleagues, search for jobs, and make new professional connections. The paid version offers increased access to everything and is designed more for businesses, recruiters, and sales professionals. Linked In has a growing list of tools and resources, all geared towards career enhancement and professional networking.

Facebook is the top social networking site in the world. I've been a member of this site for about 2-3 years now, and although Facebook has it's share of bugs and development issues, it has earned it's place at the top of the list. They are constantly adding new features and phasing out the ones we aren't happy with. There's no charge for being able to utilize every feature they have. More uses for this social networking site are found all the time and many sites are finding that it benefits them to be connected to a site with like a billion members. Of all the features Facebook offers, my favorite is VoIP. They not only offer messaging and chat that can be forwarded to my cell phone, they have added video and voice calling to their growing list of features. I don't have to use a separate application to talk to my friends and family around the world, and it's free!

Friendster is a social networking site, but with a different twist. It's considered a social gaming site. For people who love online gaming, this may be for you. I prefer a little more personal social networking myself. I felt it was a little too impersonal because mostly I seen avatars as profile photos. While it offers more customization features such as adding your own CSS to the layout of your profile and the ability to add your blog, I found it less than desirable to stay a member due to not having chat capabilities and having to pay to get the best of what's offered on this site. Another drawback for me was having to upload videos to another site like youtube.com in order to add them to my profile. I might only want to share something with certain people, not the whole world.

Podcast Alley vs. Podcast.com

I believe the difference in the top podcasts for each site could be due to the ability to add podcasts on Podcast Alley vs. what is available on Podcast.com, which is enabled by providing a login for creating a personalized account. Podcast.com provides the script that makes up the podcast so that you can read along.  I didn’t seem to need any additional software to listen to podcasts when using Podcast.com, but when I started listening to podcasts from Podcast Alley I ran into problems. I installed the RSS feed reader, RSSOwl, but continued to have problems with most of the podcasts I tried to listen to. I was unsure if the problems were from the podcast feed or my inexperience with the software. Either way, I couldn’t listen to them online from that site anymore and couldn’t seem to listen to them even when I was able to get them downloaded. One reason being, I couldn’t find the file in the Windows Media Player Library after I downloaded it! Even after my experience with Podcast Alley, I would choose them over Podcast.com because of the many different features they have over Podcast.com. I’ve listened to podcasts before in college courses, but my experience so far with finding them on my own left much to be desired.

Nutrition Diva

Podcasts for Nutrition Diva are approximately 20 minutes in length covering  fitness and nutrition facts about food and fitness myths. The podcasts give the good and bad side of healthy food and fitness routines, taking into consideration what moderation people use it in. I found it very informative and concise in deliverance. I chose this podcast because it was on both the most popular and recommended lists of podcast.com.

Up Next at CES

These short session podcasts produced for the Consumer Electronics Show feature mostly interviews with executives in the digital media industry. The sessions are up to 10 minutes long and cover a time period in 2009. They reported lots of new podcasts coming for 2010, but have not produced any since. These podcasts cover how digital media content will be used, sorts out truth and fiction of media hype, and strategies for turning a profit, as well as the platforms they may be distributed on. I picked Up Next at CES podcasts because they were a featured item on Podcast Alley.

Buzz Out Loud

This website is connected with CNET and covers newer and upcoming technologies. Buzz Out Loud has produced over 1500 podcasts, but came to an end in April, 2012. With podcasts at just over 30 minutes in length, they covered a variety of topics in the world of technology. Podcast participants included CNET's top experts among the crew where all would participate in analyzing, interpreting and even arguing about what new technology meant to the world. I picked this podcast because it was in the top of the featured list and out of curiosity for the podcast title without looking at the genre.

To join a discussion of Web 2.0 and how it is transforming wikis, check out my personal wiki, WW-Wiki, at http://ww-wiki.wikispaces.com/ .

Wikis
Why not wikis
This short discussion covered ways in which wikis can be used to benefit education. Most participants were teachers with wikis set up for purposes of the classroom and teachers wanting to set up wikis for the classroom. Some resources within this wiki are links that show examples of how teachers are using wikis in the classroom and free educational wikispaces. Part of the forum addressed the acceptance of wikis by parents and appropriate use of editing wikis by students.

Wikis
The Essential Shift
The video "Did You Know?" was pretty much the inspiration for this forum discussion. For the most part, what needed to be examined to plan for the future in shifting times was all that ended up being discussed, without anyone producing a starting point. There weren't many members in the discussion and the conversation didn't last long. There haven't been any posts to this wiki since 2009.

Wikis
Preparation of students for the future?
This wiki is a discussion of resources, concepts, and ideas to prepare students for the future through leaning channels and the vast resources of the Internet. Many people participate in this discussion from adult students to multilevel educators, sharing their thoughts, research results, and resources to further the discussion with the hope of improving learning in the 21st century.

Delicious
I've heard of this site before, but didn't really pay attention to what it was. It is a social bookmarking site where links can be stored and/or shared with the public. You can start a network of your own, add people to your network and be added to the networks of others. There are advantages, as well as disadvantages to this. Some advantages would be having all your bookmarks stored in one location that is accessible from anywhere you have an Internet connection, staying current with issues of interest to you, and being a part of a collection of people with similar interests. A distinct disadvantage could be that your link history is available to the public and can be monitored by anyone. I would have to give more thought to come up with other disadvantages. This one seemed to be the first thing that stood out to me. You may not want others following your activity. Cyber stalker comes to mind. Actually, I think this is a great save. It is convenient to store your links and a perfect way to share them with others. It has the social aspect, you can follow friends and colleague's findings on points of interest, or just see what they're interested in. 

Flickr
This was my first time trying online photo storage, if you don't count Facebook. It was easy to follow and with a little bouncing around after selecting my photos to upload, I had added descriptions, tags, and privacy options. This is a great way to store your photos and share them at the same time, or not. I loved the privacy options, as well as the different ways in which you can organize your photos. I'm considering storing gigabytes of photos here so I don't have to worry about data corruption and damaged storage devices causing me to lose precious memories.

I wanted to have something to report on that was worth the trouble of downloading and that I would actually use, so I downloaded Open Office. Finally something without any hitches! I have used this software before and it is very compatible with other systems, supporting multiple file types. It has many similar programs that are comparable to Microsoft Office programs like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with all the same functionality. This software has many uses and is flexible enough to go right from a paid version to the free version without having problems understanding the different names for things. When you need good office software and it's just not in the budget to get the top seller, Open Office is a great open-source software to have.

The second and third open-source software that I chose didn't turn out so well. It was mediacoding from Gimp and audio manipulation from Audacity. It wouldn't work without FFmpeg and other similar libraries being downloaded, which didn't happen either. I found them and after downloading, still wasn't able to access anything within the program. Evidently they have a problem with restrictions on different audio and video file types, and actually finding the libraries, getting them downloaded and working makes this a little too frustrating and too much work for me to use this software, free or not.

I looked forward to this week's assignment in Web Development. The open-source browser I chose to download and give a shot was Opera. I have heard of it many times by word of mouth, but hadn't really seen anything on the Web about it. My first try was a dud, but after going to the Opera Web site to download it directly, nothing was missing from this choice, so the install was on. It was time to put this browser to the test and see where it stood with my personal style of surfing the Web. As with most browsers I've used lately, a plug-in was missing. At least Opera needed one that would allow me to install, where Firefox was having the problem of not even being able to manually install missing plug-ins. I love this browser! It has several features that I haven't seen on IE, Firefox, or Chrome. Just a few of the newest features have to do with tabbed browsing. Features like looking inside tabs, recovering closed tabs, protecting a tab from closing, and saving sets of tabs to open in a session later make for quick and convenient browsing. Upgrades were made to productivity, search, security and privacy, the latest technologies that make up Opera also. It is now easier to control downloads, use spell check during browsing, maintain searches in any engine, view the security of your sites, browse privately, and control website cookies in the newly enhanced JavaScript engine that supports HTML5 and is open-source. I only had one issue with using this browser. The test I put it to was heavy social networking, gaming, and uploading videos from YouTube all at the same time. I'm talking about many tabbed browsing and multiple downloads that frequently lock up Firefox and Chrome on my pc. The only problem I encountered was with generating pop-ups from within applications. This could be something easily fixed with an extension or some other minor adjustment, and I will be checking into that very soon. I really liked this open-source browser and it's many features and options not available in other browsers that are leading the pack. Settling this issue would make me happy and give me a new default browser.

Erin Marie's Blog

Web 2.0 Summit 2011

Rev2.org

Now this was a good blog. At first sight, I thought it was going to be a little over my head and the sort of thing that made me shy away from blogs until now. But once I got past all the technical terminology that stood out to me on the page, I found it really wasn't as far over my head as I had feared it would be. So far, it's the most interesting blog I've been to with a nice variety of subjects concerning the web and many other facets of life. I had to read several of them because they actually interested me! With articles about the government and the Internet, a new Health Site, Instagram/Facebook news, coding in 2012, and an On the Air Video Call-In show, I will definitely be revisiting this blog.

eHub

My first thought on seeing this blog was "Wow!" So many stories!? All sorts of stories about anything to do with the Web were boxed into this page. Upon reading a few of them and clicking to go to the complete story, it wasn't much more than what was on the front page after all. I consider this blog an informative, quick-read that I personally found a little disappointing. I wanted a little more information than was given. 

ReadWriteWeb
With this being my "almost" first experience with blogs, I was a little surprised to find several articles of interest to me personally. I say almost because, until recently, I had never visited a blog before. And wouldn't you know it, I found one that was very helpful in my favorite pastime: Farmville! I never really had a use for blogs until  recently learned all the different things they can be used for and links that can be embedded in them. ReadWriteWeb actually had a very wide variety of articles and ads for apps and whatnot that made it an interesting read. I assumed with it being a "techy" blog I would be a little lost and get disinterested pretty fast, but that wasn't the case. This is a blog I may be returning to in the near future to check in and see what's new.