Quorum

Sept. 27: What's in a Blog? (Kevin Champion) If such key phrases as "web 2.0" or the "democritization of the internet" are appropriate for our internet lexicon circa 2007, then blogging must be a part of the conversation that got us here. This talk explores the concept of the blog in real examples, from creating a blog, to basic blogging, to expanding the definition of what a blog is. From community portal, to dynamic database, to collaborative organizer, along the way we will find out that a blog is not just a "web log" anymore.

Oct. 4: Social Bookmarking (Adam Bohannon) Social bookmarking is used to collect and organize on-line research materials, allows groups to collectively gather Internet information, and is an easy way to keep and access your bookmarks on any Internet-connected computer. This presentation will show you the conveniences, benefits, features, and even how to create a social bookmark using tools such as Diigo, del.icio.us, and Digg.

A jury on Wednesday ordered an anti-gay Kansas church to pay $10.9 million in damages to relatives of a U.S. Marine who died in Iraq after church members cheered his death at his funeral.

The federal jury determined the Westboro Baptist Church, based in Topeka, and three of its principals invaded the privacy of the dead man's family and inflicted emotional distress.

The jury awarded Snyder's family $2.9 million in compensatory damages plus $8 million in punitive damages in the first civil suit against the church, which has demonstrated at some 300 military funerals the past two years.

The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.

1) Americans overwhelmingly believe that global warming is occurring. 2) They don't care. "dealing with global warming" came 20th out of 23 policy priorities. 3) They won't give anything up. The cost of energy is more important than global warming.

I wasn't surprised by most of their findings, but one of them did make me raise my eyebrows: Teens from lower-income are more likely to blog. Because of how Pew collects data, they cannot answer the question "why?" when they find such correlations, but I figured that my qualitative data might provide some insight and so I went back through my data. When asked about blogging, most of my MySpace-dominant users would immediately talk about the blogs that they kept on MySpace while my Facebook-dominant teens would talk about how Xanga was "so middle school" and that "everyone stopped" because "it just felt really weird writing about my day to people that I didn't even care about." And then it clicked. As I pointed out last summer and Eszter saw in her survey, the MySpace/Facebook split is correlated with socio-economic status. Because MySpace supports blogging and Facebook does not and because many of the teens who were once on Xanga are now using one of the SNSs, it makes sense that teens from lower-income households are more likely to blog now. They are blogging on MySpace. Now, that outta be interesting when these kids hit college where blogging is used as an educational tool.

Caroff's parents blamed their daughter's death on hallucinations brought on by the mushrooms, though the teenager had suffered from psychiatric problems in the past.

Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can "sponsor a business" and help the world's working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you've sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

Kiva partners with existing microfinance institutions. In doing so, we gain access to outstanding entrepreneurs from impoverished communities world-wide. Our partners are experts in choosing qualified borrowers. That said, they are usually short on funds. Through Kiva.org, our partners upload their borrower profiles directly to the site so you can lend to them.

Kiva provides a data-rich, transparent lending platform for the poor. We are constantly working to make the system more transparent to show how money flows throughout the entire cycle. The below diagram shows briefly how money gets from you to a third-world borrower, and back!

According to recent reports, there have been significant privacy concerns at the Facebook HQ. It seems that Facebook employees get a great perk – spying on whomever they want. It seems that an employee can learn a lot about you, without you ever knowing it. Not only that, but they can see information on whose profile you’ve been looking at. Do you really want that information tracked?

Every time you sign up to play Texas Hold’em or hit your friends with rotten pumpkins (if someone makes this app), you’re giving away all of you personal information to these application providers. How often do you when you play games on yahoo, or MSN first give away all of your information? There are even more applications that exist solely to extract your personal data, and to be used for whatever they want.

Now, although not a surprise, the latest deal with Microsoft may make the internet a smaller place. Next time you’re searching on the internet and you find yourself being served advertisements for beer when you’re on a random florist website, it may be thanks to your Facebook cookie. When Facebook launches their new “SocialAds” platform on November 6th, it will unleash a network of sites with information not only on your browsing habits, but on all of your personal information.