Celebrity Influence in Politics

With the election just days away, candidates and their campaign officials are working there hardest to ensure that people vote for their candidate. They are all over the news, traveling the country, and all over the Internet. They are making last minute plugs as to why they are the most qualified and they are ultimately convincing the public to vote for them. Political elections have now come to a new level with celebrities posting videos in support of a particular candidate or better yet speaking outright against a candidate. In a Youtube video with Blake Lively & Penn Badgley as well as other young people, they joke about not voting for John McCain. This video appeals to young voters and can significantly influence votes because people may vote for the candidate that their favorite star is voting for. Sarah Silverman also posted a video that talks about voting for Barack Obama that may influence some of her fans. Is celebrity influence deciding a large portion of votes? I think it is. I think often times, people who may be voting for their first time, are being largely influenced by a celebrity and not by the issues themselves. Although I don’t think celebrities should tell people who to vote for, I think it is great that celebrities are getting people excited about voting. In this video, celebrities use sarcasm to tell people reasons to vote. 

 

NEW IDEAS FROM DIFFERENT PLACES

A few weeks ago one of my favorite comics posted this

Now, you might ask why I would post this, and its not just because i love xkcd. Im actually not a really big fan of this particular comic. The reason i brought this up is because a short time after this comic was posted youtube came out with a new feature. Here is what it looks like:

does that look familiar. Youtube actually just took the idea straight from xkcd. Now this isn’t exactly from the comic because it does not automatically read it to you, instead it is an option but i think that it is very cool when major companies like youtube will listen to ideas like this. In this case from a middle aged guy who sits at homes and writes comics for a living. The possibilities are endless so if you have an idea. Share it. Someone might just agree and have the ability to make it happen

DON’T VOTE

One of the great things about todays technology is that it allows anybody to post videos, pictures, or ideas instantaniously to the internet, allowing them to be viewed by the entire world. When most people see this they think of teenagers or kids posting their silly videos. One of the things most people dont think of is main stream actors either posting their own videos they make or they can get together and post a mainstream video instantly. Recently with the election many actors have been doing this. One example is Matt Damon who posted a simple video on youtube stating that their is a 1 in 3 chance that mccain is going to die, and that if palin becomes president it will be like a bad disney movie. This video even led people to make the trailer for this bad disney movie.

Another example is my favorite video at the moment which is called Don’t Vote. This was a video comprised of many famous actors. they get together and give the message that you need to register to vote and why. This i thought was very interesting because it wasnt just one or two actors but a group of them getting together to show  that they think this is important. They even tell you how to register and tell you why its so important.

Their are many other videos like these but i jsut thought these two were good examples.

Browsers & the Web, Part 2, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Collaboration

Please comment at my blog.

Sorry for the random Dr. Strangelove reference, I just love it too much. Before we get started, here’s a video that will blow your mind – Flobot’s handlebars (on YouTube)! Watch it 2-3 times and look at all of the symbols and the storyline deeply.

Beyond the sites many of us use daily – YouTube, Google, some of us Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Fantasy Sports, and maybe CNN, there are a ton of awesome and useful tools out there on the Interweb. I will catalogue a number of my favorite tools on the net for you and talk about the significance of what I consider the coolest part of Web 2.0: collaboration!

---

Google docs

Google Docs is a powerful tool for creating and editing text documents, spreadsheets, and slideshow presentations (“Powerpoints”) collaboratively. In this case, collaboratively means that you can edit a document at the same time 1, 2, 3, 5, or 20 other people are! I love using Google Docs for any class project where I need to write something with other people. Of course the web-based document editor doesn’t have anywhere near the power of a computer program on your desktop, it is suitable for 90% or more of a student’s work. The presentation creation features don’t allow for anything near as cool as Keynote does on the Mac transition-wise, but its great for showing a presentation in a pinch like we did in class yesterday. The spreadsheet feature is surprisingly awesome because not only does it support some in-cell functions, but you can even use it to create forms (like a grade survey on where to do prom, or a signup form for who will bring what food to a class party). Other collaborative web-based word processing suites exist. An especially good one with some interesting business tools is Zoho.

Basecamp, Google Sites, Wikispaces

If you need to collaborate on a big (or small) project involving a lot of (or just a few! )documents or todo’s, there are many options on the web. I can highly recommend Basecamp and Google Sites. So far, Wikispaces seems like another powerful and well-built tool as well. Each is suited towards slightly different styles of working and collaborating. Experiment and see which you think will work the best for you. The order of them in the title is a rough spectrum from most to least structured.

digg, reddit, and delicious

I purposely did not capitalize the names because that is how they are written in the sites’ respective logos. These are each examples of quintessential Web 2.0 websites, because they exemplify the social web. These sites depend on their communities of users to define the content on the site. digg and reddit are social news sites where the users submit links to news articles, pictures, and anything else and then vote for which links they like the best. The articles which achieve the most votes the fastest¹ make it to the front page – the users control the content on the site! delicious (officially formerly del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking website where users submit links and tag them. Many users use the site to find articles on particular topics, to find “hot” news articles, or just to organize their own bookmarks better using the tagging features.
1: A highly simplified explanation, they use some complicated alogirthms to prevent gaming of the system.

So why should I care?

You should care because all of these tools will make your life easier at one point or another. You won’t have to drive to a friends house to do a project, or email a document back and forth 30 bajillion times to get something done. You can better manage your college application process, or just finish a group research project with less stress. You can utilize the bored masses on the Internet to find and identify the funniest and best content on the web for you.

All of these tools, and more out there (see the links at the end of this post) allow for totally new methods for the creation, management, discovery, organization, and storage of media. Check them out, they really do make a difference.

---

---

A few of my other favorite tools on the web include Google News, Facebook (of course), and Google Reader.

Major shoutouts to Markdown for making the formatting for this easy, and Showdown for turning my Markdown into HTML for WordPress.

Author’s note: For those of you who are wondering why I combined Web 1.5/2.0 web-based tools and Web 2.0 “social” collaboration in one blog post on seemingly somewhat unrelated sites, it is because everything here does fit the definition of collaborative tool. I do recognize that I might have muddied the waters a bit, but my goal is simply to introduce people to the breadth of the best-of-show tools on the web.