Tag Archives: Online

Thoughts//

Posted on by
Reply

Writing about Thought Catalog is extremely hard for me because every time I go to check something on the site I end up reading content for the next hour, or until someone jostles me with a text message. But I will do it, because it’s elegant marketing strategy is intriguing and deserves medal.

tc

If you must know, Thoughtcatalog.com is “a place for relevant and relatable non-fiction and thoughts” according to their own ‘about’ section. The premise is that the contributing writers to Thought Catalog are diverse and self-selecting. It’s writers range from students to established writers, and the written pieces are unlike anything you’ll find in mainstream media.

 

Thought Catalog is very popular among a mostly young adult age group. The content is relevant to twenty somethings because it is commentary on the underside of indie or hipster culture, and often focuses on twists and qualms relevant to young adults in transition. This is substantiated by the search referrals and hypertexts to the site, which mostly consist of topics like “how do I know I’m crushing on the right person” and “things that drunk people say”. It is most definitely fun, edgy, and as the Huffington Post puts it “illuminating.”

 

wh

It is a venue for anyone to explore their creativity and writing and also to gain insight into the life of other people. It is through thought catalog that many are inspired and will soon write their own stories to inspire other. It is technically  a form of blogging, except that the blog isn’t yours. Many people pour out stories, dreams, aspirations and advises. That is what makes Though Catalog so beautiful, the fact that so many people are able to talk about anything and everything without boundaries.

 

 

Thought catalog helps us to see our lives through the lives of other, and also to help us realise that we are not going through life alone. These are nothing that you can ever get from a magazine or a book. It is a form of expression, the voices of millions of young people around the world. What is Social Media? What are facebook statuses and tweets when there are soulful and inspiring posts up on thought catalog.

 

Blogging may be something that has already started years ago, but with the decline of social media in recent years, we are able to see where the next trend is heading towards. Give it a shot, Just hop onto the thought catalog site and trust me, you’ll find yourself going posts after posts reading up on and feeling inspired about whimsical tales and the realities of life. All in one simple yet beautiful site and maybe one day you’ll soon write in and inspire others as well.

 

Data Smog

Posted on by
1

data_smog

I recently read an article from a Singaporean blog on how data smog is now slowly consuming the internet. What is data smog you may ask. Data smog is a term coined by Journalist David Shenk.  It deals with the author’s idea of how the technology revolution would shape the world at large and how the incredible amount of data available on the internet would make it more difficult for the average individual to sift through and separate fact from fiction.

 

According to David,” with the advance of technologu, we have been able to progress in terms of society, economy, and even health. Communication is instantaneous, knowledge is abundant, and as humans we try to keep up with this expansion of data that continues to accumulate from around the world.

 

However, it is this overwhelming amount of information that is defined as data smog; “this unexpected, unwelcome part of our atmosphere, an expression for the noxious muck and druck of the information age.

 

The wealth of information that is so beneficial for us is harming some because of the sheer amount of it at such a fast rate, “The sheer volume of information which many of us are exposed to every day may actually impair our performance and add stress to our lives.

We may be unaware of this but each time we get onto the internet we are overwhelmed by too much information and date, accessing too many different opinions and having too many choice. This brings me back to hypertext for a little bit. Hyperlink has helped us run though internet pages more proficiently but because it connects us so quickly to so many pages and information is that beneficial to our health? Not many people are made aware of data smog. Because we are so unaware of the health issues that it may cause many people fall in, maybe not physically but fall into a state of bad mental health. I’ve done a quick research on data smog and found out that there are a few ways to avoid being overwhelmed by all the information we get online.

Ways in which to ‘beat the smog’:

  • Spend some time each week without your pager or cell phone.
  • Resist advertising – never buy a product based on unsolicited email (spam).
  • Go on periodic “data fasts.” A weekend in the country away from the telephone can rejuvenate a smogged-in brain.
  • Write clearly and succinctly. Verbose writing is wasteful and difficult to read.
  • Skim newsletters and magazines and rip out a copy of an article or two that you really want to read and digest.
  • Filter your email. Many email programs allow you to set “filters” which send unwanted email directly to the trash. It is worth taking the time to do this.
  • Do not forward chain letters, urgent messages about email viruses, or claims that Someone will send everyone thousands of dollars. These things clog up everybody’s inbox with worthless stuff.
  • Organize your Web bookmarks or favourites. Keeping these in meaningful folders will go a long way toward helping you really find that site you are looking for.

New age of Confessional Media

Posted on by
Reply

 

For most of us, the idea of sharing the intimacies of our life with a stranger would be anathema. Yet more and more young people are feeling compelled to reveal their secrets to everyone on the world wide web.

Let me introduce you to PostSecret. PostSecret, is an ongoing Community Mail Art project, created by Frank Warren, in which people mail their secrets anonymously on a homemade postcard. Select secrets are then posted on the PostSecret website, or used for PostSecret’s books or museum exhibits.

 

The concept of the project was that completely anonymous people decorate a postcard and portray a secret that they had never previously revealed. No restrictions are made on the content of the secret; only that it must be completely truthful and must never have been spoken before.

 

Entries range from admissions of sexual misconduct and criminal activity to confessions of secret desires, embarrassing habits, hopes and dreams.The secrets are meant to be empowering both to the author and to those who read it.

 

Now, from sending post cards, people are starting their own online blogs and blogging out confessions and secrets, without revealing their identity of course (some actually would). However, Why do they do it? And what are the private costs of putting up their secrets online?

 

Because of technology, the world has been made smaller. But the constant use of social networks and online platforms seems to have made us lonelier. It is ironic but it’s something that’s been going on for awhile now. Everyone’s always on their phones, we rather text than have decent conversations.

 

And I suppose this is the reason why so many people are turning to confessional media platforms like Postsecrets to tell their secrets to. Also, many people uses the computer as a privacy screen. Tell your secrets but no one will know who you are.

 

Confessional media is slowly on the rise, people are turning to blogs and strangers to post their confessions. It is an outlet for most, because most of us tend to keep our feelings in. This alarming trend is most definitely something for us to think about.

 

What’s a blog?

Posted on by
Reply

Blogs appear on the news pretty often these days. For example, a reporter is tipped to a story by a blog, or a blog reports another angle on a story. Blogs show up in magazines a lot, too. What are blogs? There are now millions of them — where did they all come from?

One of the things that is so amazing about blogs is their simplicity.

Think about a “normal Web site.” It usually has a home page, with links to lots of sub-pages that have more detail. Most traditional Web sites follow this format. If the site is small, it is sort of like an online brochure. If it is large, it is like an electronic encyclopedia.

A typical Web site has a home page that links to sub-pages within the site. CNN.com is typical of this genre. The CNN site contains thousands of articles all organized into big categories. The categories and all the latest stories are accessed from the home page.

A blog is much much simpler:

  • A blog is normally a single page of entries. There may be archives of older entries, but the “main page” of a blog is all anyone really cares about.
  • A blog is organized in reverse-chronological order, from most recent entry to least recent.
  • A blog is normally public — the whole world can see it.
  • The entries in a blog usually come from a single author.
  • The entries in a blog are usually stream-of-consciousness. There is no particular order to them. For example, if I see a good link, I can throw it in my blog. The tools that most bloggers use make it incredibly easy to add entries to a blog any time they feel like it.

In this article, you will have a chance to enter the world of blogging. You will even learn how to create your own blog and publish it to the world.