And So It Goes

It’s amazing how much things can change in five years.

Today I was out shopping and picked up a new 4GB jump drive for about $14. This got me thinking back to when I bought my first jump drive back in 2005, which was almost five years ago. Back then I was taking a class called “Style and Design in Public Relations Messages.” The course naturally involved a lot of computer assignments, so we were required to have jump drives to store our work. I bought one with 512MB of storage for $150. Today I don’t think they even make ones that small, and for the amount I spent on my old one you could get 32GB or more of storage. Amazing.

Looking back, I have realized just how far technology has come since 2005. Here are just a few examples:

Then: All of my music was organized in Winamp, and when I wanted to go on a trip I burned several mix CDs.

Now: My music is organized in iTunes and all I have to take with me on trips is my iPod.

Then: I had a little silver flip phone that I adored because it had text messaging, a camera, a cool color screen, and polyphonic ringtones.

Now: My phone has a touch screen, GPS, video camera, internet browser, mobile email, mp3 ringtones and photo editing capabilities, among countless other features.

Then: Facebook had just opened up to high school students and was still very basic.

Now: Facebook is open to everyone, has millions more users and myriad features that it did not have in 2005, such as notes, gifts, news feed, status messages, chat and applications.

Then: Most people had never heard of YouTube.

Now: YouTube is one of the most popular sites on the web and has more than a billion views per day.

Then: Gmail was invitation only. I had gotten an invitation and signed up, but wasn’t sure if I would actually use it.

Now: Gmail is open to everyone, has more than 100 million users, and is my primary email service. Also, Google Wave is on the way.

These examples represent only a fraction of the ways in which technology has changed in the last five years. I can’t even begin to express how much these changes have impacted the way we communicate with each other and experience the world. With the way technology is growing exponentially, I can only imagine how different things will be a mere five years down the road. All I can say is that I am glad I will be along for the ride.

In college I had a blog where I would occasionally post photos I had taken especially ones that made me particularly proud. Though that blog is no longer in operation, I would like to continue the grand tradition here, starting with a few pictures I took on a recent trip into the mountains. Enjoy!

Matchless Mine in Leadville, Colorado

Matchless Mine in Leadville, Colorado

Maroon Bells near Aspen, Colorado

The internet never ceases to amaze me. As such, I feel compelled to give a shout-out to some of my favorite sites. For this post, my choice is Etsy.com.

I first learned about Etsy nearly a year ago when one of my students gave a speech encouraging people to use the site. Etsy is an internet marketplace where people can buy and sell all things handmade. These items range from artwork to clothing to jewelry and even furniture. People wishing to sell their wares can create stores to showcase and sell their work while people looking to make a purchase can search for a specific item or browse by category. There is also a blog, chat, online classes, news articles and other community-building tools.

One of my favorite features of the site is alchemy. With alchemy, people who are searching for something specific can post the specifications of what they want and then artists can put in bids to create the piece. I used alchemy in November when I wanted a painting of the family cats to give to my sister for Christmas. I got nearly 30 bids and was able to browse the works of all of these artists as well as compare their prices. In the end I chose a great artist called brigittemarie. I sent her a picture of my cats and she went right to work. Through Etsy, we were able to discuss the specifications of the picture and she was very dilligent in sending me in-progress photos to make sure I was getting exactly what I had wanted. In the end I recieved this beautiful painting:

Etsy is such a great site because buyers and sellers can interact directly with each other. If someone has an issue with a purchase, they can go directly to the seller without having to sit on hold for hours or fill out generic feedback forms. Just visiting the site makes you feel like you have entered a close-knit community rather than the site of some entity trying to make money off of you. Whether you are looking to buy, sell or simply browse, please take a moment to visit this amazing site. You might just find that perfect handmade gift for a loved one or even yourself.

Meet Chloe.

A little over a year ago, Chloe was a stray cat living at the Maxfund No-Kill Animal Shelter in Denver. My sister, who had been a volunteer for Maxfund for a while, decided to become a foster parent for Maxfund cats. Her first charge was Chloe, who was so stressed out by living at the shelter that she would overeat, making her one very large cat. Going home with my sister allowed Chloe to live in a much less stressful environment while she waited for someone to adopt her.

While fostering an animal is great for that animal’s overall health and peace of mind, it makes it much more difficult for that animal to be adopted, since it is not at the shelter where most potential pet owners go to find new family members. To help out with this process, my sister decided she needed to give Chloe some kind of visibility beyond her Maxfund profile.

The solution? She started a blog.

The Purrfect Companion gave my sister a chance to write in greater detail about Chloe’s personality and progress in her new setting. Though she only made a handful of posts, the results were astounding. Over the next year, nearly every person who wrote to express interest in Chloe mentioned how much they loved the blog. Chloe’s web presence drew quite a few people to come meet her in person. Unfortunately, Chloe is a rather shy animal who failed to seal the deal because she often hid when people came to meet her. Without the blog though, she might not ever have been given the chance to meet so many potential owners.

Eventually, the blog paid off. Chloe’s story attracted the perfect match and she now has a happy new home with her new owner.  My sister plans to continue blogging about future foster animals, so keep an eye out. You may just find the purrfect companion.

Inspired by my brilliant web portfolio, my sister has decided to embark on an epic quest to build her own website. She comes from a background in interior design and consequently has absolutely no web design experience. Naturally, being the gifted web-savvy person that I am, I headed to Denver this weekend to unload upon her my wealth of internet knowledge.

I’ve been putting my HTML skills to use for several years now and working on my own website is pretty much second nature. When I got to my sister’s place for her crash course in web design, however, I had absolutely no idea where to start. I have to give major props to the people who teach web design courses, because I found it incredibly hard to explain. I rambled on endlessly about HTML, Dreamweaver and CSS without really knowing if anything I was saying was making sense. It’s weird how something can come so easy to a person yet it can be so difficult to explain. Fortunately, I had the benefit of being able to open Dreamweaver and actually show her how things work. I can’t imagine trying to teach it any other way.

“Ok so now find that color code in your cascading style sheet and change it to the code for the color you want. Then if you want to add a line break, type the less than symbol and then br and then the greater than symbol…”

Somehow I don’t see that one working out very well.

She claims that what I had told her made sense, but it is possible she was just being nice. I suppose the effectiveness of my lesson will be put to the test when she sits down to build her site. With any luck, my instructions will serve her well and she will soon have a site almost as fabulous as mine.

In order for you to understand my knowledge and experience with social media, I feel you must learn when and how it all began, and how social media and I have progressed over the years. To start, let me tell you how it all began.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I’ve been an active social media user since before I knew it had a name. Actually, I have probably been a user since before it even had a name.

When I entered college, I was an active user of popular forms of online communication such as e-mail, instant messaging and chat rooms. Naturally, I was an avid user of MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and of course AOL Instant Messenger. These were the means by which most people in college seemed to communicate.

During sophomore year, one of my roommates discovered something amazing: Xanga. Xanga is an online journal that lets you publish your thoughts so that all of your friends can log in and see what movie you just watched or what you had for breakfast that day. I was thrilled. Here was a site that allowed me to write out all of the most boring details of my life for all of my friends to see! Plus, I could read about their lives and we could all comment on each other’s posts. It was fantastic. My roommate and I could keep each other up-to-date on our lives without ever having to get off of our chairs and walk down the hall to see each other. Hooray for technology!

Xanga and I spent two beautiful months together before I was introduced to something even more delightful. It was site called Livejournal Livejournal was basically the same concept as Xanga, except now I could include a little smiley face with posts to indicate my mood, as well as let the world know what music I was currently listening to. Plus, I discovered that I knew a lot more people who used Livejournal than who used Xanga.

Livejournal and Xanga gave me my very first experience with blogging. I maintained my Livejournal through all of my undergraduate career and then became bored with it in grad school when I decided that perhaps I shouldn’t plaster the most intimate details of my daily life all over the internet. Using Livejournal and Xanga was a great experience for me overall because it gave me my first experience with blogging and also had me writing every day.

Around the same time that I started using Livejournal, I also signed up for another site that would drastically alter the way I socialized and kept in touch with people. The site was called Facebook. Here I could create a profile with my photo, my contact information and my interests. I could connect with people that I had lost touch with since high school. I could comment on other people’s profiles. I felt that I had never encountered anything so wonderful. The Facebook I joined back in 2004 is drastically different than the Facebook I use today, but I will save a discussion of that for another post.

In the span of a few short months I had gone from communicating online on a one-on-one basis to communicating simultaneously to an entire network of people. At the time I had no idea how drastically this type of communication would change the way I interacted with the world and how important it would become to the public relations degree I was pursuing.

But I will save that story for Part 2.

Welcome to my new blog. Here you can learn more about me, my experience with social media, and some of the wonderful things that can be found on the web. Enjoy.