To deal with death on networking sites

While writing my last post about networking sites and new reseach tools I thought about how amazing it is how you can connect to everything and how much stuff has developed in the last couple of years.

That reminded me of my thoughts about profiles on networking sites and how they are used. What happens when a member of a networking site dies? The profile will stay forever. Everytime when I log into the German punk networking site Abgefuckt liebt dich, it tells me that my friend Micha has not logged in since March the 14th.

That is because he died shortly after the last time he logged into this website. The scary thing is that I found out by going on his profile, reading messages that people left in his guestbook. As it was in the middle of the term, I was stuck in London. The only way I could deal with it was to read those messages. There were hundreds of them and still today, nine months after Micha's accident, people still leave messages saying that he is dearly missed by everyone.

This networking site really helped me to deal with the death of my friend Micha. I don't know if that is a good thing or just a scary aspect of how the internet has changed our lives.

Review of Session

photo taken from room214

Last Friday, Kathryn Corrick, a digital strategist at McCann Erickson, came to our class to talk about social media and more research tools for journalists. I thought this is going to be another repetition of the stuff we talked about in class, such as delicious, twitter and so on.

However, I was very impressed with those dozens of new sites and possibilities she showed us. First of all, she said journalists with Iphones were quite behind. I swore to myself not to buy one of these things ever. I guess I have to, now.

I think the search tool addictomatic is brilliant. It gives you the most recent news on a certain subject on twitter, blogs, youtube and so on. I haven't signed in for Brightkite yet, but what I heard intruiged me. It is a location-based network where you can check out what friends in your area are up to.

What? Another social networking site? At the moment I am a member of four networking sites, including Facebook and Myspace - and it takes half an hour in the morning to go through all of them. Now, Friendfeed should solve that problem by showing me all updates on networking sites at one site. However, your friends have to use friendfeed as well in order for you to get updates.

Twitscoop is showing you what the most used words at the moment are. This could be quite useful when writing news stories for Debell Publishing as I always have to be as up-to-date as possible.

Some sites she mentioned were very hard to get into. I did not manage to use sites such as Marumushi or silobreaker in the way Kathryn Corrick showed us.

But all in all, I enjoyed her talk and I was proud that she liked our group blog wandersee.

Evaluation of the Group Blog

photo taken from Clipartof

The week is over and it has not been long since I pressed the "publish" button to put my last post on the group blog wandersee. I'm really sad that it's over, because I enjoyed being part of that group so much.

The blog was all about collaboration. Each day the bloggers commented on what a word means to them. The interesting thing is that every individual was so completely different. The only thing that each post had in common was that it was a statement of the same idea or concept. I think the idea is brilliant, because it allows people to share their memories, ideas and feelings. The bloggers could show their personalities by expressing their thoughts in different ways. Sophie for example often used poems and photographs, Jade always linked words to broad things such as drugs and the Middle East conflict, Metthew always managed to mention alcohol in every post and I used a lot of music, lyrics and play on words.

Having said this, I have to say that it was quite challenging for me to write my posts as I am not a native speaker and it was all about language. However, that kind of writing is what I love most. Some might argue that it is not journalism, but I say it is. It is some arty way of dealing with words, puns, words twisting around - and I enjoyed it so much. It might have been hard, but I did not only improve my English a little bit, but I also gained more confidence that I can write in a creative way, even in English.

Wandersee is a blog that is using multimedia. It's all in there: the written word, literature, audio, photographs and videos. That is something arty print magazines cannot offer. Additionally there is an option for people to choose the next word that is going to be discussed - so the blog also offers interactivity. Moreover the posts are more informal and therefore closer to the readers. Reading a post of wandersee is like reading an e-mail from a friend.

It was quite a challenge to publish posts every day. That is maybe something that did not quite work. Some bloggers did not manage to publish their posts in time. But before judging someone, it has to be said that this project started two weeks before the term finishes, which is the time when all essays have to be handed in. It was a busy week. But in principle, I think the blog idea would work if people had time for it. They'd have time to take own pictures, write own poems, go out and ask people on the streets what a certain word means to them or make documentaries.

It was quite hard to get along with the wordpress template. In my opinion, it does not look very nice, the sidebar does not allow much flexibility and the categories are not shown clearly. With a better template, the blog would look so much nicer.

I am also not sure about the name of the blog. Wandersee? I had to ask Sophie what it means. It is very hard to figure out what the meaning is - or I am just a bit stupid or slow. I think there are better solutions. But, I was lying in bed with fever when the decision was made, so I did not contribute to it at all. Therefore it is not my place to criticize it.

I am quite satisfied with my posts. I really like my post on "boobs" as it was quite linguistic and I tried to use puns. I am also happy that I managed to find documentaries on the topic "home". Maybe it should have been my job to go out and interview people about what "home" means to them, but because of lack of time and camera I could not. However, I succeeded to find videos of people who already did my job. So this was the most journalistic post I guess.

I always tried to use photographs and paintings that illustrate what a certain words mean to me. I also put some music videos of songs on the blog that expressed my thoughts about that word.

I had the chance to have the experience to post on a daily basis - which was quite a lot of work, but a wonderful experience as well. Every morning I woke up with the thought that I have to pay attention to a certain concept. As I mentioned above I improved my English a little bit and most important of all, gained more confidence in my writing skills.

I think the blog idea of wandersee is brilliant. There are some things that have to be improved, but we only had five days to work on it - with other deadlines looming. I would love to continue blogging posts in that way and I think it has a potential to become larger and maybe successful as well.

Whereas the target audience now consists of young people from 18 to 30, students and people interested in art, photography, music and literature, it could possibly target all kinds of people who enjoy reading some deep thoughts of ordinary people. I also think readers could build up a relationship with the bloggers and get to know them only by reading their posts regularly.

Review of Sessions

Last weekend I wrote a very angry post about the Online Project. Some things have changed. Unfortunately not the feedback problem. I still have not got any feedback, so I have no idea how I am doing in this module.

But apart from that, Jim was very helpful and emailed me on a Sunday (WOW!) to give me some information on how to catch up with the others after my illness.

I am feeling much better now and so I am more than happy that I can still participate in the group blog task. Originally, I fancied a international news blog - because I'm that kind of a serious person. However, I decided to be part of Sophie's blog, called Wandersee. For this project, every team blogger has the task to express what certain words, that were picked in advance, mean to them. Topics of the day are for example wander, boobs and home. I really enjoy that task.

It gives me the opportunity to be more creative. Writing news articles is horribly stiff. But for this blog I can philosophize, express myself in many different ways and use puns. I love to play with the language and that blog is all about language really. It sounds simple, but it is challenging me as well. I go deep into words, do research on similar words or expressions used in the english language and I guess this can't do any harm considering my language skills.

I try to use different media, such as the written word, pictures and paintings but also videos and music. This makes this blog very arty, which is something I'd never guessed I would end up doing. I am very surprised and even impressed with myself.

One night I could not fall asleep as I was thinking about what to write about the word "boobs". Oh god, I really need to get a life.