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.