Olivia Gonzalez - Social Media Class Blog

The topic of this week's assignments was Social Bookmarking. I was exposed to three different platforms: Flickr, Delicious, and Flipboard. Of the three, I had never heard of the two latter, and I had never personally used any of them. Flickr is a photo storage and sharing site. It is extremely user-friendly and offers users with a basic account a Terabyte of photo storage, which was an extremely attractive feature to me. Delicious is a social bookmarking site. A user can save their bookmarks to their Delicious profile and from there, share their profile with friends and family, or simply access their bookmarks from other computers. Although this is a clever idea, I cannot see myself using Delicious in the future. Finally, Flipboard is a unique application that I enjoyed using. It allows users to bookmark topics that they are interested in, and then Flipboard provides news articles and headlines related to those topics. Users can Flip through headlines quickly, and if they choose to...

This TED talk about being connected, but alone struck a cord with me. I often find that I am addicted to my phone and the Internet. I find it extremely difficult to fully concentrate on a task without feeling the itch to check my phone for texts or tweets. I am beginning to practice restraint and self-control by dedicating an hour or two of my day to reading or writing or otherwise enjoying life without technology. I am beginning to become more comfortable with waiting for the subway, eating lunch, or riding the elevator without having my eyes glued to a screen as a sense of security. During this time, instead of staring at my screen, I adjust my posture, pay attention to my surroundings, and fully enjoy whatever I am experiencing, no matter how mundane it may be.

Through this week's lesson on blogging and starting my own blog page, I have learned about many of the ways to customize and post on a Blogger page. I really enjoyed being able to customize the fonts and colors of my blog page. I also really liked adding photos to the page. I think in the future I would like to add more photos to my blog and customize the layout further so that the images fit nicely together.