Today's Exam and what I've learned thus far

Well, we had our first Info Tech exam today and it was a bit surprising I must say. I put in quite a bit of time reviewing my class notes and print outs, but I felt that I didn't focus my studying in the right direction. The exam was kind of all over the place and didn't pay much attention to the concept of why we blog, or how blogging affects different aspects of marketing. There were a few statistical questions that were a bit rough.. hopefully I chose the correct answers! However, I do feel that I have retained a lot of information even if my exam score does not reflect that fact. I am now more interested in online marketing and pay more attention to different forms of personalization (which I was extremely surprised not to find on the exam today..). The whole process of rss and news feeds make more sense now and I think it's interesting to think of different markets online being disruptive such as retail, auto, and software (I can't believe this wasn't mentioned on the exam either, because I think this is a big deal!). Well, I'm glad I studied hard, if only to become more knowledgeable in my field. :)

Second Wiki Post!

I just finished up editing "The Last Five Years" article on Wikipedia and it was even easier than the first time! The Last Five Years is one of my favorite musicals and I added a bit of information Wiki had left out. My edit told that "the show received a 2002 Drama Desktop award for outstanding music and lyrics". You can check out this great article here. Goodbye until tomorrow! (<-- musical theatre joke)

gCensus

I read an interesting article today on Slashdot entitled Making Sense of Census Data With Google Earth. The author of this post explains how Imran Haque has created a new program for Google Earth that takes information from the US Census Bureau and creates different layers over maps of the earth. Viewers can check these layers out to discover demographics of that area such as population ages, family size, race, etc. I am a huge fan of Google Earth and this new addition makes it even more incredible than it was before. Check it out for yourself!

An interesting topic from today's class

In class today, Professor Brown discussed how researching is done in the blogosphere. His question to us was "how many of you have used customer feedback on the web about a certain product?". I personally use this sort of information regularly, whether it be consumer reviews of cd's, movies or restaurants. Usually when I am purchasing a product I will check it out on Amazon (even if that is not the site I am buying from), just to read what other customers had to say about it. By allowing consumers to comment on products, businesses are opening up a whole new level of communication that not only is extremely helpful, but it can act as a form of free publicity if the item has been "favored" or rated highly.