Enjoy!

Used in a right and smart way, Twitter can give the regular man or woman a social boost. It makes the world a smaller place and gives Twitterers a sense of importance. It will also give users the feeling that they’re still in the game.

On top of that, it has proven to be a serious media tool for promoting celebrities and even presidential candidates too! For instance, President Barack Obama used Twitter for his campaign and it brought him closer to the voters. Being able to communicate with ‘regular’ people, people that go to their movies or voters, really is priceless. The feeling of importance is a big part of living and that is why I believe that Twitter is not just a hype, but it will survive the test of time!

Google anything and you are likely to find that the first hit belongs to the massive online encyclopedia that is Wikipedia. Google ‘wikipedia’ and you will get about 260 million hits. It is an easy source of information and it will save you time. The downside to this is that it makes it hard to look beyond this information that is served to you on a silver platter, and to do some further research. Also, there has been a lot of speculation about how reliable and trustworthy this source is. Time to find out!

Because this well-known digital encyclopedia can be edited by anyone, the content is, by critics, said to be doubtful. However, studies showed that wikipedia is not far behind on more acceptable sources. In 2005 the scientific journal Nature published their results after comparing wikipedia with the printed encyclopedia Britannica. The outcome was that the number of factual errors was not much different. Also, studies done by IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) researchers showed that poorly edited articles and vandalism are repaired so quickly that most users will not notice its effect.

This still does not undo the fact that you should not rely on wikipedia a 100 percent. At any time, an article you use as research material could be under the process of being edited and therefor give different information than the day after. Also, writers of articles often fail to include their original source and their knowledge on the subject cannot be checked.

So next time you need information on a subject, do not hesitate to use the online encyclopedia. However, keep in mind not to take your findings for granted. Do some further research and double check the information you come up with. It will only give you more perspectives!

source: www.wikipedia.org

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Definition of a ‘weblog’ according to www.wiktionary.org: a website in the form of an ongoing journal, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary.

The popularity of the weblog or blog skyrocketed in the late 90′s after a slow start. Because of its simplicity, a personal website was now accessible for anyone. However, as opposed to other websites, one can comment on the subject on a blog. This makes the blog a two-way communication tool. The rise of this new medium did not go unnoticed by companies and they started to use it as a way to reach more people. In 1997 a man named Steve Gibson was even hired as a full-time blogger by a company!

Evolved from personal diaries that were posted online, the weblog is now a very valuable communication tool. Like Twitter, the weblog is also used by politicians and, as mentioned above, by companies. In some cases it is even used as a news source by main stream media. For example during the tsunami in 2004 and hurricane Katrina in 2005. People that were there would report to specific blogs via SMS and by doing so, they could cover news that TV, radio nor newspapers were able to cover. The weblogs would get the news firsthand instead of the mainstream media, who usually got the scoop.

A different form of blogging is micro-blogging. This entails sending brief updates through cellphone or computer. Twitter is a good example of a micro-blog.