#2

So a few days ago, the students of SP DMC had the pleasure of having Pat Law from Ogilvy guest at our lecture. Ms Kwa baited us with, and I quote her, ‘lots of cookies‘ to attend the re-scheduled 8 AM lecture.  Our Wednesday lectures are usually at 9 AM. Trust me, 1 hour makes a lot of difference to the sleep-deprived students clawing for survival in Singapore’s pressure cooker society. But cookies!!!!!!111 Her cookies brings all the kids to the yard~ hahahaha ok.

Anyway, dang those cookies were good and double dang because that was an interesting lecture. Everything is interesting when you have that much sugar (thank you very much Oreos) in your bloodstream at such a godforsaken hour, right?! Half-right.

The other half to‘interesting’ was from the lecture itself. Pat Law showed us an entire slew of social media sites. How to search for news on the blogosphere, how to monitor specific topics on Twitter, find out how popular your (or anyone else’s) site is, how to find and meet people on Twitter whom you share similar interests with etc. I linked the sites that I found intriguing or particularly useful. Zam of citysand has very kindly compiled the entire list of sites that Pat Law mentioned to us during the lecture.

Having learnt about all these, the internet seems like a far scarier place. Anything or everything you say (or type, for that matter) is indexed and can be tracked. Protected Tweets? Nope. Private Facebook profile? Nope. Friends-only or password-locked online journals? Nope. I am guilty of doing all of the above, I wonder why I even bother anymore. Nonetheless, please be wary of the views you express. Anything with negative connotations should probably be kept to yourself.

Additionally, she taught us about Google Reader and Google Alerts! I started using Google Reader a few months ago, it is an amazing web-based RSS reader. I love how easy it is to scroll through my various subscriptions. Google Reader also allows you to group your subscriptions so that you don’t have different sites all over the place in Google Reader, it is so much easier to go through things category by category, no? Google Reader also features this read/unread function. If you scroll past it, that particular post will be marked as read. So you don’t actually accidentally miss any post!

So what exactly is RSS? RSS (Really Simple Syndication/Rich Site Summary) is a format that retrieves web content and syndicates all of it so that it appears in one location. You can then read all your subscriptions in that one location! Forget about the hassle of going through your 123456789 bookmarks to get the latest updates. Convinced? Here is a really short run-down on how to get started on Google Reader if you’re interested

Google Alerts is something that I have not explored extensively as of yet. But I can see myself using it a lot in the future (ie. When I want stalk Hello Kitty, lol no just kidding). With Google Alerts, you can track any one topic. So let’s say I type in ‘Hello Kitty’ in the search terms. Every post or article that has to do with Hello Kitty and appears in Google will appear under this particular Google Alert I customized! You can customize it even further by entering more keywords, choosing the region and/or country of the sites which appear in your Google Alert etc. You can then choose to have this customized Google Alert delivered to your email inbox or delivered to a feed! Ta-da, there you can have a Google Alert in your Google Reader! So I can surf all the latest Hello Kitty news in my magical gorgeous sweet amazing Google Reader.

All you need in order to enjoy these awesome sauce Google products is a Gmail account! Don’t I sound like a complete Google stan… but Google is really that useful, except that I still haven’t figured out how to use Google Wave and I have no friends on Google Wave and also no invite wave so I can’t invite friends to Google Wave very lonely like a pony.

In summary, the internet is a scary place haha-ha, its so easy to stalk people/topics on Twitter, Google is 20 different kinds of awesome and I am sleepy. Goodbye!

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