My Rugby Presentation

Above is my presentation on Rugby. Unfortunately it may not make much sense when looked at on its own as I have no script to accompany it.

Overall I was very pleased with how my speech went. I think I spoke without too much hesitation or repetition. I think my timing with the slides was quite good, however I think had I practised a bit more it could have been better. I think I should have put more pictures in the presentation as it was mainly text, although I thought I did quite well in not putting too much text on the board and not reading from the board or burying my head in a script. After listening to everyone else's talks I feel I could have maybe used slightly more imaginative language and maybe gone into a bit more detail about the actual rules of rugby and given my opinion on certain aspects of the game, e.g. the best players. I really enjoyed making the Pecha Kucha presentation and look forward to using the skills I learned in making the presentation in other subjects.

Pecha Kucha - The art of a good presentation

If you are able to make a good presentation and are able to deliver it in a confident manner, you will go far in the world. The worlds most confident speaker can ruin a nervous speaker in a matter of minutes even if the nervous speaker's point is clearly good. Below is a video by Don McMillan which points out all the bad things that you can do when making a speech. From experience, reading several articles and watching some very well known public speakers, such as Al Gore and Bill Gates I think I can summarise how to make a good speech:

• Speak with Confidence, let the talk flow
• Do not speak for hours while not actually giving any facts, i.e. do not waffle
• MINIMALISM, simplicity is the key
• Know your topic
• Have prompters in front of you, but DO NOT have your head in a sheet of paper reading your speech

In my opinion when writing a speech follow Pecha Kucha. This is a method of speech writing where you have 20 slides, and each slide only lasts 20 seconds. Of course this can not work for all speeches as some are much longer than 6 minutes 40 and others a lot shorter, however it is a good concept to try and follow.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. In its eight year life it has turned into a goldmine of information. Wikipedia is the ultimate wiki, it works as such. Anyone can join for free. Once joined up anyone can write an article on just about anything they choose. Once written that article can then be accessed by anyone on the internet regardless of whether they are a member or not. Once the article is published then any other member of wikipedia can edit that article if they see a mistake or a fact which needs updating. This system has resulted in the biggest most reliable encyclopaedia ever. Today Wikipedia has over 12 million articles in many different languages; 2 million of these articles are written in English. Wikipedia is so huge that nowadays if you type a random object, person or event into Google then a wikipedia page is usually in the top 5 results. So why is it so reliable? Wikipedia could never work if half the facts on their pages were incorrect. So whenever someone writes a page they also have to write a bibliography explaining where they got all their facts from. This bibliography can be looked at by anyone. Another way to check if a page is reliable is to look at the amount of edits a page has had. Again anyone can access this information, the edits page lists all the people who have edited the page and puts their edits in chronological order. Naturally a page with lots of edits is more likely to be correct than one with very few edits. Some pages have been edited hundreds of times. Of course a massive website like wikipedia is prone to vandalism as anyone can edit its pages. Wikipedia are extremely good at fighting vandalism. They have huge security teams who scan wikipedia constantly, meaning that incorrect facts and fantasy articles are only ever on wikipedia for a matter of hours. As wikipedia has millions of users it is also becoming a great source of news. The best example of this is the July bombings. Someone heard the explosions went home and minutes after the event had created a wikipedia page asking people to update with all the news they could get. Within hours the page had been edited hundreds of times and the result was wikipedia had a in depth account of the incident hours before news teams across the world. The interesting thing about wikipedia is that about 90% of its edits are done by just under 2% of its users. This means if the top 10% of wikipedia editors and writer’s packs up and stop editing, wikipedia would cease to exist within a day or two, as the mobs of vandals would take control. For a more detailed history of wikipedia just follow this hyperlink. Wikipedia is a great website as it provides the world with countless facts. It is Vanevar Bush's dream come true and also would sit comfortably with the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee wanted the World Wide Web to be used for science and education and for it to be free; Wikipedia fits both of these credentials. Below is a video which shows the Wikipedia article of the July bombings while it is being edited.

Tagging and the many ways it appears on the web

Tagging is a way of organising things you need to find on the internet. Today I will look at three different websites and how they all use tagging in different ways.

The first website is facebook. On facebook tags are put on pictures and videos. If a friend uploads a picture of your rugby team he could then tag all the people who have facebook on the rugby team in the photo. That photo would then be sent to the members of the rugby team's collective photo album. This is an album which every facebook member has. The album contains all the photos that that person has been tagged in. Underneath the super album are links to albums that that person has uploaded which may not have pictures of them in necessarily but might have pictures of their friends in them which they have tagged them in. So what are the advantages of this, well firstly it is an easy way of sharing photos with your friends who live on the other side of the world and who would not be able to see the photos in hard copy in your living room. It is also becoming a new way to find old friends. People are uploading their school pictures from years ago then tag a couple of people who they have kept in touch with in the photo, then some of those people will tag a few more people that they have kept in touch with but the original up loader may have lost contact with. Eventually you may find that half the people in the photo are on facebook and that they are now back in contact with each other as after seeing old friends tagged in the photo they have added them as a friend. Of course there are some disadvantages to tagging on facebook, you may be tagged at a party doing something that you would not like other people see, but because of the tag all your friends can see you in this photo, this can lead to trouble with employers, school, and your family, however the way around this is to untag yourself from the photo or to just be careful what you are photographed doing.

The second website that uses tags to a great extent is Flickr. Flickr as I have described in previous posts is a social networking site which specialises in sharing photos, so how does it use tags. Well you can upload photos like with facebook and then arrange them into albums for example, "Holiday to America". You can then tag different things in each photo for example in a photo of the Grand Canyon with your uncle in it; you could tag Grand Canyon and Uncle. Then depending on the privacy settings of the photo you have uploaded, these tags will be placed in a sort of super album where if anyone searched grand canyon then your photo would come up along with anyone else's photos which had Grand Canyon tagged in one of their pictures, that is if you had your privacy settings like that. Why is this useful? Well again like facebook it helps you show family and friends on the other side of the world what you have been up to and also helps you find friends you have lost, for example like with facebook the snowball effect could occur if you add a school picture and then everyone tags different people. However Flickr takes tagging a step further than facebook. Flickr is now being used like a Google images search tool bar, when students are doing projects for example on the rainforest and need pictures, not only will they search on Google images but also on Flickr now as there are bound to some good rainforest pictures in the 3 billion photos that Flickr has.

The final website that uses tags is one called Delicious. This is an extremely useful website that allows you to save tags on the internet. How it works is you sign up for an account then in the option that says save url you copy and paste your favourite websites url then you leave a description to remind what the website does then you tag it for example if you were to add facebook you could tag the site social networking, friends and favourite website. Then when you come back in a year’s time and you have 100 different tags it is easy to find your different websites and remember what each website does and why you needed it. You can also share your delicious bookmarks with your friends which can become useful in business. Below is a very good video describing delicious and its advantages. The other video describes tagging on a more general scale and compares it to the old way of book marking websites with folders.
If you want to find out more about the history of any of these sites then simply follow the hyperlinks in the blog.

Flickr

Flickr is a social network which specialises in photos. Developed by Ludicorp in February 2004 Flickr in its short five year life has already collected over 3 billion photos. So lets back track a bit, how does Flickr work? I will give a brief description here; there is also a useful video below and for more information follow this link Flickr. Flickr is a free site which you can sign up too, although there is a version where you pay and you are allowed to upload an infinite amount of photos, where as with the free version you have a limit. So once you upload your photos what can you do. Well you can then arrange them into albums for example, "Holiday to America". You can then tag different things in each photo for example in a photo of the Grand Canyon with your uncle in it; you could tag Grand Canyon and Uncle. Then depending on the privacy these tags will be placed in a sort of super album where if anyone searched grand canyon then your photo would come up along with anyone else's photos which had Grand Canyon tagged in one of their pictures, that is if you had your privacy settings like that. This is the other thing about Twitter the privacy settings. Once you have uploaded a photo you can choose who sees it, and comments on it, the scale ranges from just your friends to the whole world. If you limited it to just your friends then only your friends who had Flickr and who you were friends with would be able to see the photos. So what are some of the advantages of Flickr, well it means if you have family on the other side of the world they can see how you are doing and what you are up to, and also it means you always have a saved copy of your beloved photos

Facebook Privacy

I touched very briefly on privacy in facebook in my last blog post. Since then I have had talks with my ICT teacher about privacy on facebook. From these talks and several other sources, I am able to draw up one very simple easy rule of how to use facebook. This rule is only post a picture, or a video, or write a comment on someone else's page if you are 100% sure that you do not mind who discovers this information. Here I am talking about issues that go beyond your friends finding out that you have been slagging them off behind their back. I am talking about your safety for the future. I am almost 100% sure that our school knows ways of tracking our facebook's, I am sure they have fake accounts which makes it even easier to track our facebook's. This means that not only do you have to be careful about not slagging your friends off, but also not slagging your teachers off. To keep this idea more simple never insult someone over facebook. Be careful what you get photographed doing as with facebook it can be all over the web within hours, the same applies for videos. Photos and videos are more dangerous for when you are applying for a job. If an employer sees a photo of you throwing up at a party, or a video of you singing a drunken song they may think twice before they employ you. The final thing you should do with your facebook is go over your privacy settings and limit what information you show people. When I talk about information you reveal about yourself I mean do not put your number or email address up on your facebook page, and definitely not your home address, I also question whether you should put your religious and political views up or your relationship status on your facebook page. Your privacy settings are probably the most important things to your facebook page, if you do not spend time reviewing them then you should not have a facebook page. You should review your privacy settings thoroughly. In my opinion you should make yourself hidden to searches on facebook and google, make you profile and all of your pictures visible to only your friends, I also think you should only be friends with people you know well. In conclusion it is easy to be safe on facebook all it takes is common sense. What goes on facebook stays on facebook.

Facebook

I spend more time on facebook than any other website in the world. Is this a bad thing? Does it make me more vulnerable? Could it possibly cause me problems in the future?
First of all I will tell you a bit about the history of facebook. (A more in depth history of facebook can be found here, The History of Facebook). Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg while he was a student at Harvard. Originally the site was only available to Harvard students, this was then expanded to colleges in the Boston, Then to colleges in the Ivy League, then to Stanford University. It then became available to High school students, and is now available to everyone older than thirteen. Since starting three years ago Facebook has gained over 175 million users and made Mark Zuckerberg the youngest billionaire in the world. Yet there are many controversies surrounding facebook, and there have been many problems with people's security. Originally facebook was not that private, this time last year anyone in the same network as you could see your page, meaning if you were in the London network millions of people could see your page. Students who have had facebook throughout University are being turned down by employers. In the past they have posted pictures, videos or written comments which do not put them in a good light with employers. If an employer saw a picture of the person when they were at a party drunk and they were doing something like jumping off a table they would probably trust them less and would be less inclined to hire them. People also can get bullied over facebook, internet bullying is a as bad as bullying in the real world. People can be discriminated over facebook, say if someone wrote on someone else’s wall, "oh so and so is being really annoying at the moment" if so and so saw this he would be upset, so friendships are easily ruined over facebook.However it is very easy to use facebook and get around all these problems. Security has been tightened on facebook; it is possible to have a limited profile so some people can only see certain things on your page. If you go through your settings carefully it is possible to choose who sees your page whether it is just your friends, people in your network, or anyone in facebook. If you are careful with what is put on facebook you can avoid the problem with employers, or you make you page private enough so they can not get onto your page. The same applies with what your friends see, you should never insult someone over the internet behind their back, as the odds are they will see what you have written.
In conclusion I think facebook is brilliant, it connects people all around the world and makes it easier to talk to your friends who you do not see everyday. If you are careful with you privacy settings and with what you written there is no reason to be scared of facebook, although you should respects its power.
Below is a very good video which explains social networks on a more general way.