Thursday, May 17, 2007
last post :(
Evolution of the Dunkin' Donuts wikipedia article
In my first edit I decided to update the company information on the right of the page. I added information about the headquarter location, updated information about the number of customers served each day in how many locations, and finally I noticed that the sales revenue figure listed was completed oudated. I fixed that right up. These were minor edits but overall they are important to have on the article because I feel that this might be the type of information someone comes to the wiki article to find.
A week later I got a great idea to create a new section of the article titled "featured products". It was a great idea in theory, but the wikipedia community did not take well to my second edit. In this section I created a bulleted list of all the coffee products DD offers. What I thought was great detailed information about the products the community thought was a sales pitch and rebelled. Yes, I got the information off of the DD webpage which made it slightly biased but I was under the impression that I could write whatever I wanted on the article, thats the point of a wiki! Wrong, upon checking the article a few days later I went to the DD article and found a message asking the community to fix what I had written. Also I got a message in my talk that says, "Descriptions of DD's products in Dunkin Donuts have an advertising tone and have been tagged as such. These need to be presented in a more neutral POV." How rude! Basically I was scared and I hated wikipedia at that moment. I didnt want to sign back in and have people watch wat I edit, I felt shunned from the wikipedia community!
Ok this is an exaggeration but I was definitely upset. I would have edited the section immediately, but I had to wait a week to make it count for class. A week passed and I went back to the article to find that someone else already edited my work. I was mad, but they did a great job. Therefore, I had to come up with a new third edit to the article. Although I did not get to edit my work, I did add one more piece of information to the "featured products" section. I wrote that DD currently has 52 varieties of donuts, thats a lot of donuts! Also, in the trivia section I added a link to the Dunkin' Donuts Center in Providence Rhode Island because although the article talked a great deal about the center they did not provide a link to the cite. Lastly, I added information about DD franchises in the history section that listed off the number of franchise locations in the US, Canada, and around the world.
Overall, this article caused me the most amount of problems with the wikipedia community. Their immediate reation to what I wrote shows that there are some people out there that take their wiki very seriously, which is great, but it definitely scared me out of wanting to edit articles ever again. However, even though they showed they did not approve of what I wrote, no one deleted my work, all they did was go in and make it more objective, which I appreciated. This was definitely my most interesting article to edit in that I truly got to see the inner workings and passion some people have for keeping Wikipedia up to date and current. Maybe next time I edit an article I wont sign in so people cannot track my work though...
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Dunkin' Donuts, last wikipedia edit... ever?
That said, I went onto the Dunkin Donuts wikipedia article the other day and found that the community did not approve of what I wrote for my last edit. Apparently it was worded too much like and advertisement and that was not ok. I thought you could write whatever you wanted but apparently not. My bad. Soooo for this edit I was going to go back and change what I had previously written to make it sound objective rather than in favor of Dunkin' Donuts. However, I had to wait a week since my last edit (because those are the class rules) and when I logged on today I found that someone else had already gone in and changed what I wrote. Surprisingly they did not just delete it, rather they too the time to make it unbiased. Im glad someone did not delete my work, but they totally took my wiki edit idea!! ugh. I had to find something else to write and here is what I came up with:
In the "featured products" section (the one I created, yay) I added the sentence "Dunkin' Donuts currently has 52 varieties of donuts". I found this fact on the DD website and I thought that it was just a little fact that was somewhat interesting to know. Also, I just wanted to add more to the section I made, bragging rights I guess...
Next, in the trivia section the article talks about how there is a Dunkin Donuts Center in Providence, Rhode Island. Since I live in Massachusetts I've actually been to the DD Center and it's really nice. However, in this little blurb of the center nowhere does it mention the actual website to get information on concerts and what not at the center. Therefore, I added this sentence, "The website for the Dunkin' Donuts Center can be found here" followed with a link to the website. I thought that this would be convenient.
Lastly, I noticed that throughout the wiki article and on all the webpages I found when searching for Dunkin' Donuts there was alwasy mentionings of their franchise opportunities and I started to wonder just how many DD's there were. I looked up this information, found it and put it in the history section of the wiki article (I figured this was the best place to put it since it could be considered history eventually...). The sentence I added was this: "Currently, there are 5,505 Dunkin' Donuts franchises in the United States, 79 in Canada, and 1,856 throughout the rest of the world." As of right now this information is correct, however, I am willing to bet that this will change within the next few weeks since a company as large as Dunkin' Donuts seems to always be growing.
Well there it is, my last wikipedia edit for this article, for this class, forever! I understand the reason why we did this exercise and it really did help me in understanding the process and importance of wikis, however, the overall editing process was somewhat stressful. Unless you are a highly knowledgeable individual on a particular topic it is difficult to find information that is incorrect and also to find information that is correct and missing. But that's not importnat anymore as this project is now completed and over. Stay tuned for my summary of the evolution of the Dunkin' Donuts wikipedia article coming up possibly tomorrow.
Now that the stiuqxela challenge is over I dont have anything to put here anymore :(
Friday, May 11, 2007
Evolution of the Sunsilk Wikipedia article
In my first edit to the article I provided a little background information about the brand including when it was lauched and where. Although the article has only been around since January 2007, this little paragraph of information that I added more than doubled the size of the article.
Following my ouline, my second article edit gave a detailed explaination of Sunsilk's old marketing strategy. I created a heading section just for this additional information and went to town. I used the same method for my third and final edit to this article by adding another heading titled "new campaign" where I went into great detail of Sunsilk's new "get hairapy" campaign that they are currently running. I talked about the target demographs, the types of advertising used and even talked about features of their campaign website.
I definitely dominated this topic, but I did so by adding relevant, important information about Sunsilk that I feel anyone can benefit from reading about (as long as they are looking for information specifically about Sunsilk of course!). ALl the information I added was reasearched and then put into my own words, unless it is a company slogan or campaign motto. Through the duration of my edits I was the only one who added content of any type to the page and only after my final edit did someone else come in and put their own touch on the topic. And, even when someone else did come in and make edits, all they did was correct mys pelling errors and make it a little more gramatically correct. I think I can live with this! If anything I am embarassed that I made spelling errors for the world to see! Overall I really enjoyed editing this article and I definitely feel as though my edits will be well recieved by the general wikipedia community. Only time will tell through more edits how my information will be taken.
Evolution of Tap Dance Wikipedia article
When it came time to do my first edit to the article I shocked to find that there was absolutly nothing writtena bout National Tap Dance Day, which was a day that I had celebrated through my years of taking tap classes. I decided to add a sentence or two about the Day, when it is, and why that date was chosen. This edit is still in tact even though almost immediately following my first edit another editor came in and added a ton of additional information.
In my second article edit I found it difficult to find information to add since one person added a lot themselves. The edit that I did come up with was a sentence and a link to a webpage where a reader could access more information at the International Tap Association homepage. In addition to this I noticed that the other editor added some common tap steps but, although they got the major ones, they did miss a few, so I went ahead and put them in.
In my final edit to the article I stumbled across a webpage with a lot of tap information and I realized that it was word for word the information also located on the wikipedia article. So, in order to give the original writer credit I added a link on the wiki article to the outside webpage. I also added the britannica definition of tap dancing, which I though was an excellent definition and a vital bit of information to anyone seaching the topic.
Overall, there were not many editors to this page, but rather there was one really intense editor that dominates the history page. This person made it difficult for me to find more information to add but it also increased the quality of the article. Once again, no one deleted or edited any of the information that I added which makes me feel good and that I know what I am talking about. This is an active community of editors and while going through the hisotry of the edits I did find that some people wre agressively deleting information and content that they did not feel was necessary, luckily none of my edits were the ones deleted! I feel that all of my edits/additions were important and added to the overal quality of the page. Hopefully other people visiting the site will feel this way as well.
Evolution of Medfield Wikipedia article
Although no one deleted any of my content and only edited the format of the external liks I provided, I did go ahead and delete someone else's addition in my second edit. The reason I did this was the information they added was ridiculous and stated that Uber Jason was a notable resident in the town. In this same post I also took out some links in the page where people can link a word mentioned to another wikipedia article. I found a link to the word "books" which was just silly since I think most people reading this know what books are and do not need an distracting link to take away from the information in the article.
On what was supposed to be my big edit to the article I messed up and did the edits within a week of my previous edits. So stupid. Regardless, the extra edits I did make were excellent if I do say so myself. In this edit I added a bunch of information to the article in three different sections. The topics I added were the towns that Medfield bordered, I added some information to the history to make it a little more factual and significant, and then finally I added a sentence or two on Medfield State Hospital in the trivia section.
Finally, in my last edit I added information about in the education section of the article. What I added was the address of each of the different schools in the town. I blogged about this but going back to the wiki article I just realized that I did not sign in to make this edit. Once again, I messed up. I cannot correct it now, but the edit that is mine is the one titled "02:08, 9 April 2007 64.80.192.54 (Talk) (→Education)". Sorry about that.
Overall, even though this is a very active article for being edited, no one deleted or changed any of the information I added (except for the format of the links). I am very surprised by this and I am surprised at my self for coming up with enough quality information to add to this article that would be accepted by the general public. Also, in editing this article, I noticed that there was another individual who was editing the page with a user name of kylejtod who I am almost 100% sure is a guy that I graduated with. Perhaps he is doing the same project, or maybe he is just a passionate wikipedia editor...
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Side note...
Comment on a Teammates blog post
Out of all the articles that come into our Bloglines account, I found it funny that the one that Kathleen wrote about on her blog also is one that caught my eye simply because of its title: Wikipedia: Just how Popular is it?. I'm not saying I read the article, just that I noticed it. But now that Kathleen wrote about it and I have to write about her post, now is the time to read the article. First of all, the line in the beginning of the Global Neighborhoods post states that one-third of Americans say they have consulted Wikipedia. For some reason I feel that this number is very low. Is this 1/3 of people in general or 1/3 who frequently use search on the internet. Wikipedia is often times the number one search result on Google and it's hard to avoid, even my Mom uses Wikipedia and I dont even think she knows what it is and what it's all about. If I had to guess, I would say that more than 1/3 of people who use internet search on a regular basis have come in contact with Wikipeida for sure, its inevitable.
Although Kathleen stated that she stays away from Wikipedia when searching on the internet, I find that I am drawn to it. Wikipedia is so easy to use and it's so convenient, it seems as though it has everything! I agree with Kathleens statement that Wikipedia has a bad reputation because of its quality of anyone can change it, like we are doing for this course, however I feel that there are enough fanatics out there that are dedicated to keeping Wikipedia's content valid. At times when writing a research paper I feel that citing Wikipedia as a source creates a sense of laziness and incorrect information in the paper, however, this is usually not the case. Although many teachers frown on the use of Wikipedia of a source, Rubel states flat out that he used it as primary resource when writing his renown book "Naked Conversations". Now that's showing is trust in the wiki system.
Overall, I feel that I see where Kathleen is coming from in her response to the article, but at the same time I feel that I, like Rubel, have faith in the validity of Wikipedia. Rubel mentions something called "Wisdom of Crowds" which to me seems like a term to describe the synergy that exists among Wikipedia editors. As I stated before, although there may be many editors that do not know what they are talking about on Wikipeida, there are plenty of regulators and fanatics concerned with keeping their favorite articles updated. People make mistakes, and other people are annoying and write completely rediculous information on their articles (I came across this situation when editing my article about Medfield, MA). However, I have also had personal experience with someone coming in and editing the work that I had just added. Even though it was only spelling and gramatical errors that they corrected, this shows that someone was regulating the content of the article making sure the information was right.
On the other hand, I agree with Kathleen in that it is impossible to say that Wikipeida is 100% right. Although there are regulators of the content, they do not edit the additions to articles immediately so there is a chance that someone would come to the article and see the incorrect information and take it for truth. Eventually the error would be corrected but it might be too late and before you know it some kid has ridiculous information in his paper and gets a bad grade. Kathleen is right, if you are going to use Wikipedia as a source, which is perfectly fine, just make sure you find other information that supports what you found.
Obviously, the use of Wikipedia is a controversial topic in the world of works cited and teacher preferences. While there are teachers such as Kathleen's that prohibits the use of this online information database, I have had teachers that encourage its use. It all really depends on what that particular teacher knows about wikis. This was a great little blog post that Rubel made and it might actually do some good if teachers like Kathleen's Communications in Business professor read this blog post and saw that even authors of some of our generations greatest books used Wikipedia as their primary source. Maybe this would change the world's opinion of the website and increase the number of users to over 1/3 of Americans.
And as usual, some stiuqxela's: stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiquxela stiuqxela. And for more on stiuqxela you should check out Kathleens stiuqxela challenge attempt
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Dunkin' Donuts edits part two
While I was trying to figure out what I should add to the Dunkin' Donuts article I started thinking about the store itself and how badly I wanted a coffee and donut. So I thought to myself, I always get the same thing, an Caramel Iced Coffee, and maybe it was time to try something new, but what? This is when I realized that nowhere on the Wikipedia article did it say what products Dunkin' Donuts offered and a light went off in my head. This was the perfect edit because its informative and new to the article. I went on to the DD homepage and looked up all their different coffee options. I took down the information and put it into my own words as best as I could and voilĂ ! it was genious. What I did was make a new subcategory on the article titled "featured products" and then added information for a number of DD's coffee products. Here is what I wrote:
- In the hot summer months Dunkin' Donuts has the perfect drink to cool you down, their Coolattas. Each of these drinks offers you an icy blend mixed with delicious flavors. The flavors available are Tropicana Orange Juice, Lemonade, Strawberry, Coffee, and Vanilla Bean.
- While the Coolattas offer you cool drinks mixed with ice, DD's Smoothies are made with real fruit and low fat yogurt. Flavors include Straberry Banana, Wildberry, Mango Passion Fruit, and their newest addition Tropical Fruit.
- Although Dunkin' Donuts has always served up Hot Chocolate, they have recently put a new spin on the beloved beverage and have created their very own New White Hot Chocolate. The new drink is rich, smooth, and buttery with a hint of vanilla and then topped off with whipped cream.
- Recently Dunkin' Donuts has come up with a great new way to add flavor to your favorite coffee. With their new Flavored Coffee syrups they can now add flavor to your coffee as it is being poured to ensure freshness. The flavor options are: French Vanilla, Hazelnut, Cinnamon, Toasted Almond, Caramel, Coconut, Raspberry, Blueberry, and Chocolate. Each of these flavors can be added to a variety of coffee beverages including Originial Blend Coffee, Dunkin' Decaf, Iced Coffee, Iced Lattes, Hot Cappuccinos and Lattes, Hot Chocolate, and even to Coolattas. You can even combine two flavors into one drink!
- Turbo Hot and Turbo Iced offer an extra kick to its drinkers by adding an extra shot of espresso to its contents. This drink is offered in a variety of flavors and owns up to its slogan that "Turbo provides you the boost you need to power you through your day".
- Going along with the current trend towards healthy eating and lifestyles, Dunkin' Donuts has created a new Latte Lite. To make it a healthier alternative to their various other lattes DD creates the Latte Lite by combining esrpresso with skim milk and then splenda for sweetness. This combination makes for a low calorie, delicious drink.
- Dunkin' Donuts also offers its drinkers another latte choice: their Indulgent Iced Lattes that come in two flavors: Iced Caramel Swirl and Iced Mocha Swirl. Each of these drinks is made with real espresso, mocha or caramel syrup, and milk. They are then topped off with a heaping mound of whipped cream and syrup is again drizzled over the top. DD says, "indulge yourself!"
So thats a lot of information, but it doesnt even include facts about Dunkin' Donuts bagels, muffins, breakfast sandwhiches, donuts or any of their other food items. Perhaps someone else will come along and add them to the list of featured products, or maybe this will be the outcome of my third and final post? We'll see. But for now, I definitely feel like this edit to the wikipedia article is a great addition that many people will benefit from.
Saturday, May 5, 2007
A message to google
Please crawl my blog sometime soon, its been a month! What gives?! The stiuqxela challenge is ending soon.
Thanks,
Andrea
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Sunsilk Edit #3 (aka the last one, woo)
This time around I wrote about Sunsilks new and current campaign that they are running called "Get Hairapy", which I'm sure most people have heard of, if not, check out some of their commercials on youtube. Basically the purpose of the ad is to make the Sunsilk brand young again and make it appeal to a 20-something year old crowd. This is the main reason why I actually came up with editing this article in the first place. When I had to do my project in a different marketing class we simply had to pick a company and talk about their marketing campaigns. Sunsilk was an easy choice becasue their ads were relatively new and they were entertaining. Although the sunsilk products are not new in the slighest bit, their ad campaign is new and I always see their commercials on tv and their print ads in magazines.
There was a lot of information out there on the sunsilk products and brand and so choosing this topic was quite easy to reaserach and present about. And, since their wikipedia article was completely lacking, choosing this product fit in perfectly with both of my classes!! I have definitely contributed a great deal to this wiki artilce. This time around I wrote everything under the heading "new campaign" and then when I was done I created a heading called "other information" to separate what I have written with what was already existing, which isnt very good. Anyways, enjoy!
and of course, stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Related to class...
The books that I chose to post on my blog were the two required readings for the course, The Search and Naked Conversations as well as two books that I have read recently. The books are The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime and Bringing Down the House. Both of these books are quick reads and ones that I would recomend for pleasure reading.
The great thing about this associate program is that it is like the concept of Digg. If you like something, promotote it to others right? These are all books that I enjoyed so I might as well pass on my opinion to others and if they are interested then I am helping them (while possibly getting paid). On the other hand, if I think a book was horrible, I would not provide a link to it on my page, but perhaps I would instead blog about how much I disliked it. The bottom line is that I get to choose which books (or music and any other items Amazon sells) on my site, which I think is pretty cool!
To think that I will make money off this is not very realistic because this is a class blog and not many random people will come across it, see the link and purchase the book. But if they do, yay for me! In the meantime, I am certainly not going to hold my breath waiting for a check from Amazon to pay me for all the business I supplied them with...
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Trust is at the Core of New Web Marketing
The ClickZ article that I found is titled "Trust is at the Core of New Web Marketing" and basically what it is about is how the world of search marketing, and Web marketing in general, is becoming more and more like old-fashioned marketing. Originally, search marketers would buy links and create massively optimized webpages that naive searchers would access. However, now everything is changing. While both ends are changing (the searchers and the algorithms), algorithms can only go so far. People on the other hand are getting really smart and link building is the new way to gain attention and value on the internet, webmasters are getting more and more savvy about the importance of outbound links...
In online communities such as Digg gaining "google juice" is all about joining the community. You contribute to it, especially with material that is primarily non-promotional. You develop relationships with many users, including top users. By building this trust among the community you become a respected writer and your page goes up in rankings, and vice versa if people in the community think you and your webpage is a bunch of crap, you will be shuned and taken out. People at Digg are intollerant and do not like to be gammed. Essentially, in the world of Digg and other online search communities, you are building a personal brand, an image, and you are building relationships.
Basically I believe this is a huge step in the world of online search. Now, it is no longer important how much money one company spent over another to buy search terms or created a webpage with key terms embedded in its html code. The ranking of each site in a community such as Digg relies solely on how people respond to it. If it sucks or if it's a scam, it goes to the bottom, but if it offers high quality content up it goes in the rankings. This is huge. I know that often times when I search on google the first few pages of links are all ridiculous, irrelevant results that someone made to scam people into clicking, and this does not even apply only to the orgainic results. The sponsored links are often times the ones that seem the most relevant for your search, and for good reason... people spent a lot of time and money to make them look that way. In the world of trust this does not happen. Just like in traditional marketing, webmasters must now prove themselves trustworthy on the internet and build up a brand and an imamge to gain respect from the community. Overall, I love google, but sometimes you just cannot trust the websites that are out there and it is difficult to determine which sites are scams. This is why I feel that this article is right on about the value of Digg and similar services. On the web everyone is going to try to promote themselves, but there is no better opinion out there than that of an unbiased internet searcher/reader such as yourself. Because they have no affiliation with a website in question, they have no reason to lie and make its rankings go up, and that is how trust becomes one of the most important qualities in being a successful web marketer in todays world.
I mentioned that there was a second article that caught my eye, it came from my keyword search on JP Morgan, where I will be interning this summer. The blog post that came up stated that JP Morgan would be opening a new branch and will be hiring in the Boston area. This was huge for me because I am from right outside of Boston and have been thinking about moving back there after school. My fear was that if I liked JP Morgan so much that I wanted to stay with them I would have to remain in the DE area or perhaps one of their other locations, none of which were in Boston. Now this is no longer true! The purpose of me writing about this is just to show that I would not have known about their expansion into Boston if it was not for my Bloglines keyword search.
also, stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela stiuqxela