Donnerstag, 28. Juni 2012

Book Reviews

These are the two books I read for the Social Web class, the book reviews can be found at Amazon (I will post the links below) and as well in here. But beware, they are written in German ;-)

1. Social Web - M. Glaser, R. Heigl, A. Ebersbach



Dieses Buch eignet sich hervorragend als Einstieg in die Materie "Social Web" da es den Autoren gelungen ist,
die trockenen geschichtlichen Aspekte und die normalerweise schwer zu lesende Theorie mit guten
praxisbezogenen Kapiteln zu Wikis, Blogs und Social Networks aufzupeppen.

Man kann das Buch also sozusagen in 3 Teile aufspalten, die Einleitung mit historischen Aspekten,
der Hauptteil in dem es über Social Web in der Praxis geht und der Schluss mit Theorien.
Sehr gut am Hauptteil finde ich die Auflistung der Vor- und Nachteile der jeweiligen Social-Web-Anwendung.
Somit kann jeder für sich selbst entscheiden ob er die Anwendung nutzen möchte oder lieber die Finger davon lässt.

Lesenswert ist natürlich auch der Schluss in dem auch ein Blick in die Zukunft gewagt wird,
es ist sehr interessant darüber nachzudenken: Wie werden sich die aktuellen Social-Web-Anwendungen weiterentwickeln?
Welche neuen Anwendungen werden hinzukommen?
Inwiefern werden Realität und die virtuelle Welt noch weiter miteinander verschmelzen?
Leider reichen die Ausmaße dieses Buches nicht aus um all diese Fragen zu beantworten,
aber alles in allem bietet es einen guten Überblick über die Gegenwart und hilft auch Anfängern
 in den Bereichen einen guten Einblick zu bekommen.


2. Fundraising - Professionelle Mittelbeschaffung für Nonprofit-Organisationen - M. Urselmann


Ich hatte bei dem Titel eine trockenes wissenschaftliches Buch erwartet, bei dem es schwer fällt sich konzentriert mit der Materie zu befassen. Dem war zum Glück nicht so. Der Autor hat es geschafft mit seiner leicht verständlichen Ausdrucksweise den Leser nicht mit übermäßigen Fachbegriffen abzuschrecken. Mit fast etwas zu vielen Praxisbeispielen in Form von Abbildungen, Tabellen und Beispielen versucht er das Thema Fundraising zu veranschaulichen.
Für mich persönlich war aber das Buch zu lesen eher eine Qual, dies liegt aber nicht am Stiel des Autors sondern vielmehr an der Thematik an sich.
Das Buch ist empfehlenswert für alle die sich mit Fundraising auseinandersetzen wollen aber noch nicht tiefer einsteigen möchten.


http://www.amazon.de/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2AJMNK44IYLVL/ref=cm_cr_pr_auth_rev?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview

12.6.12 - Assignment

1. Crowdsourcing

Wikipedia says: "Crowdsourcing is a process that involves outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people. This process can occur both online and offline. The difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific body, such as a paid employee."
Well ok, thats sounds promising as a definition. Now everybody should have a good idea what crowdsourcing is all about.
A person who has a task to do can charge an undefined crowd with his task. Like in the case of Goldcorp, the person or company or whatever can offer that undefined crowd a reward for the task.
Goldcorp? Oh yes I should explain :-) In the year 2000 Goldcorp offered 575,000$ as a reward to people who can identify on a property undiscovered veins of gold. That lead to a so called "Gold Rush 2.0" as Goldcorp used the internet to make the geological data available to the crowd.

12.6.12 - Arts & Sciences

Until now you could read in my blog about how social web influences all kinds of topics like Teaching or Marketing. The last topics of my Social Web class are Science and Art.

In the science section social web improved the sharing of research papers and be able to collaborate online. 
Instead of using one super computer people replaced that by many computers and interacting between these many computers is something that is made easier with social web.

Human computing is another topic to be talked about. Humans are still able to do things that a computer can't do. The human brain can solve problems that computers cannot solve yet. I watched the first ten minutes of the video of the talk by Luis von Ahn on human computing:


I wanted to watch the rest but I have to say that I find it very hard to follow his talk without losing my concentration... In my opinion he isn't much of a good talker so I only watched the beginning to get an idea.

The arts are also inspired by social web, I watched those following two videos:

and

I would love to give a summary of those two videos, but the best thing to do is watch them for yourselves, as nothing I could write would show the funniness of the videos :-)

Dienstag, 5. Juni 2012

5.6.12 - Assignments

1. Protect your Privacy

In my opinion it is helpful to use different providers for all the things that people want to share on the internet. But it is important to keep track of what service belongs to which bigger company. But in the end, if anybody really wants to get information about you, they will.

2. Xing or LinkedIn

I have a Xing profile, but am not investing time into it at the moment. I think I will do so after finishing college and want to find a job that fits my career plans.

3. Yasni and 123people

I never notices Yasni but 123people always shows up.

4. Social Engineering


Phishing is the key word. I want to tell about a case of phishing that almost happened to me by my own e-mail provider Freenet. A few months ago I got a mail apparently from Freenet telling me, that my account will be deleted if I don't stop it. Fortunately I ignored that mail, I got similar mails every day for a period of about 4 days. Always saying that my account will be deleted and I had to click on the link provided in the mail and validate my login data.
I am really relieved that I ignored the mails, about 2 days after the last phishing mail I received a real mail from Freenet confirming that those mails I and lots of other users received were phishing mails, using Freenet to get information about their users.

5.6.12 - Privacy & Security

Everybody is talking about it... Privacy and Security are very important topics concerning the internet. First of all, lets check out the issue of privacy on the internet. Is there any privacy at all? Well of course there is, if you stay out of the social networks and don't share anything.
But with Facebook, Twitter and Google+ around, there are only few who can really stay out of all this. So we all need to find ways to protect our privacies, that is, if we want to do so.
There are people who don't care about privacy and share whole their lives on the internet with just everybody.
I for example am signed up in Facebook and Twitter. On Facebook I had to update all the privacy settings after the Timeline was introduced. Before I wasn't worried that much, but the Timeline didn't sound so well... I checked my new settings and found out that I had to change lots of things and uncheck certain permissions, otherwise Facebook would have the right to share my information with everyone. So everybody has to decide for themselves whether they want to share so many information or not.
As I mentioned there are people who want to share information deliberately. There are ways to share them professionally. This is called Personal Marketing. On websites like Xing or LinkedIn people can create a professional profile and look for jobs.

Security is another highly discussed topic when talking about the internet and its usage today.
There is no way to be online and be totally safe, that is just not possible as the hackers can find a way through any kind of security measurement they want to when they try hard enough.
But there are a few things everyone can do to protect themselves, like choosing complicated passwords or making use of security software when working on a computer with Windows on it or switching to a Mac as there are almost no viruses or trojans that can infect a Mac ;-)
I for myself am using Apple devices and until now never had a problem with viruses or trojans, I am using passwords that are really really hard to guess and hope that will keep me away from security problems.

22.5.12 - Assignments

Cyber War


Wikipedia defines Cyber War as following: "...refers to politically motivated hacking to conduct sabotage and espionage."
Well that gives a good idea of what its all about. Lets see where cyber war is carried out.
I found an article that is quite interesting, it is about the spying software "Flame" that is infiltrating Computers in for example Iran or Israel or other countries of the Middle East.

http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/webwelt/article106386129/Computervirus-Flame-verseucht-den-Nahen-Osten.html

22.5.12 - Government

What am I doing right now? Right, I am blogging about our Social Web class. I could also be blogging about all kinds of things. Blogging can also be a way of journalism, but people still have trouble recognizing bloggers as journalists. Well at least that is right for the countries of the "Free West".
But what about the other countries where the right of free speech isn't established?
Lets find out.
I had a look at this website:  http://cpj.org/reports/2009/04/10-worst-countries-to-be-a-blogger.php
There is a list where 10 of the worst countries to be a blogger are shown. As you can imagine these countries censor the media and do not allow their journalists to speak freely.
There are countries like Egypt where more than 100 bloggers were arrested in 2008, China where nearly 300 million people are using the internet - thats more than in any other country in the world - but the government is highly censoring the content or Vietnam where the government introduced a new agency in 2008 only to control whats going on online.