WEEK FOUR - SHARING 'STUFF' ON LINE

This weeks lecture, delivered by Alexis was on Media Sharing, Social Bookmarking & Tagging. Thankfully the technology was working just fine this week!

It would appear that the use of media sharing is exciting and boundless, and is opening knowledge and resources to everyone. We share media on a daily basis with Face book, Flickr, Digg, Upcoming, Myspace, Twitter etc. So how can businesses use this technology to share media, bookmark certain pages of interest and tag the bookmark to remind yourself of the content of the bookmark?

Time Magazine has recognised the phenomenon of You Tube and the prospect of sharing media files which has grown massively since its launch in 2006. Although it may not have originally been designed for business or even education, there is an increase in people using the likes of You Tube to advertise videos which are either informational, educational or entertaining. Businesses are using You Tube to get feedback on video adverts prior to releasing them. By uploading a video to You Tube and embedding it into a blog or website you can increase the number of times the video is seen. The following advert from Virgin Atlantic is very entertaining however the feedback would suggest that it is to be banned!



Pod casting became the next step in blogging with individuals recording an audio blog and uploading to the Internet. Followers could then download the pod cast, onto a computer, i-pod/MP3 player. An example of Pod casting can be found on i-tunes which split their pod casts into categories ie, sport, music, radio etc. Starbust Magazine Pod cast offer hours of movie and TV news and reviews on a weekly basis. So how can this help businesses? Small Business Trends Radio have sourced 100 Best Small Business Pod casts from 2009 which vary from interviews with entrepreneurs to advice for rural small businesses in America!

Prior to this lecture I may have looked at a website and added it to my favourite list as it would be a site or pages within the site which I found of interest or would surf regularly. The lab this week looked at software which would not only mark a page of interest so that you could go back to it at a later stage but also so that you could share your saved pages and make them available to others - Social Bookmarking! Prior to the lab we were asked to join Delicious, Social Bookmarking Software so that we could search different categories and find topics of interest. A link to this topic was then saved and a number of these links created a stack. Each link was given a tag to remind the user what the link or topic was about. Once we were happy with the stack we had created then we published the stack ready to share with people within the Delicious Community!

I created a stack based on links and topics related to my move to Virginia. My stack included links to Realtors, schooling, job sites and car hire or car sales. This is a tool which will benefit me during this course and would be beneficial to any project! For example, the Proposal Document for Research & Consultancy Methods for Business - a stack could be created with links to various sites based on the topic and on-line referencing. Bupa was given in the lecture as an example of how a company could use bookmarks, which provided links from employees on bookmarks for staff and clients. A further example of a company who use bookmarks is Google, they face the problem of being able to merge Google Bookmarks with Chrome Bookmarks. Now I was understanding all this to this point, but when you start going into who uses folders or labels it starts to get a bit confusing!