Side note...

I wanted to mention that I thought the demonstration done in class on Wednesday was extremely helpful, at least for me. Although i post on my blog pretty often, it is really easy to do and not frightening. As for creating a webpage, now thats scary to me. Sophomore year all business students were require to take ACCT160 and 261 where some of our assignments consisted of creating our own webpage through our UDel accounts (I dont remember how we did it though). I liked the two classes but certainly not the html parts, it just seemed to go right over my head and as soon as that secton of the course was over I quickly erased all html coding information out of my head. So, when we started talking about it in class yesterday it was a good refresher course and having someone come up in front of the class and give it a try eased my nerves. Html isnt that bad and I do think that anyone could do it :)

Comment on a Teammates blog post

First of all, I wanted to say to Kathleen that I really appreciate her attempt to try and bring my webpage up in the rankings on googles results for stiuqxela. I will return the favor at the end of this 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

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 voilà! 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.

A message to google

Dear Google,
Please crawl my blog sometime soon, its been a month! What gives?! The stiuqxela challenge is ending soon.
Thanks,
Andrea

Sunsilk Edit #3 (aka the last one, woo)

Yup, this was my last Sunsilk edit :( and the only reason I am sad was because this wikipedia article was by far the easiest one I did out of the four. This is because, as stated before, I already had all the research done for it so all I had to do was choose the information I wanted to use and then put it into comprehensive sentence form. I originally came up with a guidline as to what I would write about in each edit and I certainly stuck to it. Normally I past what I wrote in each edit into my blog but this one was HUGE and it would probably take up the whole page. Therefore, you're just going to have to go to the article itself to see my edits!

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!


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Related to class...

In class, we recently were asked to subscribe to either Amazon's Associate program or googles affiliates as part of our blogging assignment. I opted to go with Amazon's simply because I thought it looked cool and official. Although I have an account with Amazon it was neccesary for me to sign up for their associate program separately, which was surprising, they even needed my social security number which I was slightly nervous about. However, once I convinced myself that Alex would not give us an assignment where someone could steal our identity I decided to go for it and sign up, it was easy. In fact, the whole process was painless and took me about 5 minutes to figure out how to get the links and attach them into my blog. Since the template is so advanced and knows from experience the type of links people put into their blogs they have specific template formats specifically for additions such as links to the Amazon affiliates program.

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...

Trust is at the Core of New Web Marketing

Its time for my last posting on our required blog readings, how sad. As I was going through all of the articles posed two caught my eye, one is Trust article I will be focusing on and the other is a tiny little blog from my keyword search... here goes:

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.

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