RSS Feeds - Internet Activity #2

Rss feeds are useful to me, primarily because it enables me to have a very generalized summary of what I am about to read. Normally you would have to go to a given website and while attempting to ascertain what you information is relevant to you, you are bombarded by advertisements. So it "cuts the fat" so to speak and enables me to fully utilize my free time by only reading what I would consider to be relevant in the first place. It allows the user to control what they are going to be reading/watching prior to doing so.

There were a few ways in which to approach adding an rss feed to my blog. The first is to manually search a website for their rss feed. The second was to google search "rss feed website name" and you were immediately given the url for their respective rss feed. The third was to simply click on the rss link image on a website which took you immediately to that websites rss feed.

The rss feed technology is definitely useful for a variety of reasons. It enables people to control what media they are exposed to. It serves as a way of organizing information so that it can be easily searched by search engines such as google or yahoo, providing a "searching infrastructure".

Blogging in a nutshell - Internet Activity #1

Blogging has enabled the expression of the working class within our cultural structure. Historically, the means to express ones self creatively for everyone else to view and enjoy did not exist in the manner which blogging provides. Also, it's free, so anyone can do this if they desired to do so. In a larger context blogging is a method on the internet that society has evolved in order to express their thoughts and opinions. These are all positive things, however it also brings some negative aspects along with it. Blogging and the internet in general enable globalization to take place in a much more accelerated way. The world is comprised up of many different and unique cultures, but the more dominant cultures will assert themselves through mediums such as blogging on the internet.

Twitter is an example of capitalization exploiting people wanting to express themselves in a globally social setting. It attempts to provide the most "popular" way for people to utilize as a means of expression and the motivation for doing so is monetary.