Gyongyos

Again this article is also not very active the only edit that happend since my edits was a guy coming in and moving a picture around to make the article more aesthetically pleasing...

Salgotarjan

The Salgotarjan article is not very active, I was the last four edits for the article. There is a picture attached to the article that is supposed to be an aerial photograph of the town, however I think the picture is either only showing the edge of town or it is showing an entirely different town all together. I don't know if this picture should be deleted or not.

April Fool's!

The second article I edited was the article about my high school. This article is a pretty active one compared to the other articles I worked on, so a lot more changes were to be seen. As some people may know Charter is the nerd school of Delaware so I am not too surprised to see kids working with such intensity on this article. I think the most interesting thing that happend was on April 1st when someone deleated the whole article and replaced it with a quote mocking the school. Of course leave it to the Charter kids to come up with such a techy April Fool's joke... But to the April Fool's playing computer nerd's dismay the Wikipedia anti vandalism bot caught on to his scheem in literally a minute and the article was restored to its previous state.

Hysplex's Wikipedia History

I think my most exciting Wikipedia edit was the Hysplex. I actually created this article myself, including the picture which I drew and posted on Wikipedia Commons. After I posted the article 4 edits were made the same day to change the format etc. to make it more like the standard wikipedia articles. I was pretty amazed to see just how fast people were on top of fixing this article.

Employers on Google and Facebook

I was just reading Lydias post about employers checking up on their potential emplyees on google, and how its leagal for them to do that now. I made a comment on her blog saying that I don't agree with this parctice because how can the employer tell that its really you that the goolge result showed. Also a nother thing I heard about employers doing is checking on employees through Facebook. I think that employers have no right to go through their employees personal pictures and personal things. I feel that as long as an employee is a good worker and prefroms well there is no reason for the company to dig into worker's personal lives. what they do on their own time is their own business. I also read an article about Facebook and how companies use it to check on their student interns. If you want to learn more plese check out the article Employers scrutinize Facebook profiles.

Who is on the Internet

I read an article from the ClickZ Internet Marketing Solutions for Marketers blog about which counties are now increasing their use of the internet. The article stated that more people went online in Spain, Brazil and Japan, and less people went online in Germany and France,than previously in those countries. These figures were collected by Nielsen/NetRatings. This is important information for marketers to know because there are many opportunities abroad that companies need to take adventage of. With social media tools such as blogs the targeted consumer needs to, and be willing to access the internet to get to the message the marketer is trying to deliver. So it is important for the marketer to know who is online, and what their needs are to tailor the message to their cultural expectations. In the future we are sure to see an increase in social media fuiled by the web and marketer need to stay on top of this growing opportunity to stay competetive.
Article may be found here: Active Home Internet Users by Country, March 2007 .

Salgotarjan part III

Today I finished my wikipedia article for Salgotarjan. I added some more to the paragraph I edited last time. Now the entry more completely reads as "At the foot of Karancs mountain, in the Cserhát hills, 250 meters above sea level, 120 km north-east from Budapest, 70 km west from Miskolc. Salgótarján is surrounded by beautiful forests and hills topped with castle ruins, which are accessible by bus that may be taken from the center of town." I added the part about the bus. See Salgotarjan.

Salgotarjan part II

Today I added to the Salgotarjan article on wikipedia. I had a bit of trouble coming up with information for this one but I finally decided to add the fact that the town is 250 meters above sea level, to the location section of the article.
See the article by going to Salgotarjan.

Ecomagination

A few days ago I was checking the weather before heading off to class, when a video advertisement caught my eye on the side of the website. The video was from GE and it
was about their new wind mill they designed which is already implemented off the coast of Ireland. In the video one of the GE guys was running around the "Windy City" asking people what they thought about wind power. I think it was a really cool video for GE to make because after having watched it I wanted to learn more about their ecomagination campaing. I think its great that a company such as GE is making such an initiative to be socialy responsible. I think that companies need to realize that making profit in the short term is great but if they think long term and preserve the environment and show the customers that they do care about the community, not only will they have resources left to use but they will probably also have loyal customers who value their efforts for the community. So keep it up GE.

Visit Stiuqxela for a little fun

Poor Sea Turtles

Today I was browsing our required blogs and I came across an article about Glow sticks killing sea turtles. The article is from the National Geographic blog. The article states that sea turtles may be attracted to glow sticks, the same glow sticks kids run around with at birthday parties, which long line fishers are using to attract tuna and swordfish. The sea turtles apparently are also attracted to these light mistaking them for glowing jelly fish or perhaps instinctively being drawn to them. The problem with this is that they get tangled in the fishing line and many die. Scientists are now trying to figure out how to solve this problem to benefit both the long line fishers and the sea turtles. I think its interesting to learn that those silly glow sticks have practical functions like they do for fishing, but its sad to learn that its jeopardising the poor turtle population. Its always sad to learn how much harm we are all doing to the environment.

To learn more about the turtles read this article Glow Sticks May Lure Sea Turtles to Death.

On a brighter note however visit stiuqxela!

Salgotarjan

Today I updated the Salgotarjan article on Wikipedia. Salgotarjan is where my mom was born and is also where my grandparents live today. Its a small mining town in Hungary. My grandfather actually worked in the mine as an engineer. Today the mine is converted into a mine museum which I have visited as a kid with my grandfather. Here is what I added to the salgotarjan page: "Today visitors can see the remains of the mining industry by visitin the Mine Museum, which is located next to the main enterance of the mine."

Charter: last edit

Today I finished editing the charter school Wikipedia article, here is my addition to the general graduation requirements section: "Three years of history and four years of math, science and english exceed the state requirements for these subjects."

Wikipedia Gyongyos

Today I edited the Wikipedia article about my grandmother's home town, I added the part about a second mountin that is next to the town. "Situated at the foot of the Sárhegy and Mátra mountains, it is the home of numerous food production plants, including milk production and sausage factories."

Lets Have a Tea Partay!

Earlier in the semester we were talking about YouTube and the issues that they were facing with copy righted material. We were also talking about the new creative ways that companies were advertising. So when I came acrorss Smirnoff's Raw Tea ad on YouTube I just had to blog the hilarious commercial about New England gangstas. Smirnoff decided to try YouTube out as an advertising medium, but in order to do so they knew that they couldn't use the regular advertising techniques that we are all used to. People would reject the video if there was too much of the product in your face because they would recognise it as an ad and nothing more. So Smirnoff's strategy was to be entertaining so that customers would watch the video and pass it on to their friends. This strategy seemingly worked for Smirnoff with the video enjoying over a half a milion views. To read more about Smirnoff's Tea Partay visit this blog.

Stiuqxela

So after I made my post about stiuqxela on my blog I decided to go to the google search result for it to see who was on top of the list and i browsed the results to see what everyone on top did to get on top. I found this kid from last semester's blog about stiuqxela, he did a very good job on being on top of the search list. He really got into this competition and made all kinds of links to the search terms. You can check out his work on his blog by clicking here: stiuqxela
He also linked to another site that talked about Alex Brown's invention of the search term stiuqxela you can check this blog out by clicking on this link: Stiuqxela
The competition is heating up follow our progress by searching stiuqxela on a search engine today!

Search Engine Experiment: Keyword Stiuqxela

In class we briefly talked about search engine optimization, and Alex came up with an experiment for class. We are supposed to blog the term stiuqxela and link it to the Green Bay Packers hompage. The point of this is to show that if we all link to this site it will show up in a search engine with a completely unrelated search term because the google bot looks for links. The person who's blog comes up at the top of the search result gets a prize at the end of the semester. So wish me luck! and visit stiuqxela

Wikipedia Edit

I decided to finish editing my Hysplex article. Here is what I changed: Each racer stood behind his own hysplex and all of the strings were centrally connected behind the runners held by a referee. I changed this sentence around a bit to make it more understandable

Charter

I again decided to update the Wikipedia article for my high school. Here is what I added: "Advanced Placement
The school offers many advanced placement classes which allow students to earn college credit while still attending high school. Advanced placement courses include computer scinece, Literature, Language, Latin, French Language, French Literature, Spanish Language, Calculus AB, Calculus BC, Statistics, Chemistry, Physics, Environmental Science, Government, and US History."

The Charter School of Wilmington Wikipedia article

Today I decided to update the Charter School of Wilmington article on Wikipedia. This article was written about my high school. this is what I posted: "Charter studends continually score high on the Delaware Standardized Test Program every year, leading the State statistics with the most students scoring a 5 (the highest grade on the test) in several subjects including Math and Science." Yay for Charter. Here is a link to the new and improved article on Charter.

Vanity search

So today I was reading through my team members' blogs and I stumbled upon a fun article on Lydia's page. She wrote an article about Vanity Searches on Google. Here is Lydia's article on Vanity Search. Since we are supposed to take one of our team mates' articles and continue the blog about it on our site, I thought this would be a fun article to do.
When I searched my name on Google here are the things that came up: The first thing was the UD sailing website, I am the fundraising chair for the sailing team and my name is on the officer's roster. The second thing on the list is my blog for Info tech class!! Yay for extra credit points! The Wikipedia article I created is next, I was a bit surprised that this showed up on the list. Followed by several pages that show sailing results from regattas i sailed in. My high school graduation as well as articles in the school newspaper in which I was quoted.
It is fun and interesting to do a vanity search on Google to see what exactly the world can find out about you at a push of a button. This is an important thing to keep in mind anytime you add content on the web because you don't know what the Google bot can find and how far the Bot will journey in cyberspace to find those incriminating photos of you that may cost you your next job. It is becoming a trend for people to use this tool to find information on others before going on a blind date, or hiring someone for a job opening. You never know who is looking.
Aside from being paranoid that people will find out all of your information, this may also be a useful tool. For example if you have a blog, like me for example, and want the world to see the work that you have done on making that blog oh so wonderful, it pays to have to Google bot find you. For more tips on how to get Google juice read my previous post. (Look at that! I even used one of the hints I mentioned in that article where I said link to your old posts to generate the juice! I'm on to you Google bot...mmwahaha)
In the mean time its alright to admit that all of us are a tad bit shallow, so hop on to Google and see what secrets the little bot dug up about you.

Google Juice

Toby Blair's Skype presentation in class inspired me to find out more about Google juice. Her blog Diva Marketing comes up very high on Google if you search the term "marketing blog" and I decided to look into this subject. The whole point of blogging for marketing purposes is to get your word out and get it out to a lot of people. The best way to do this is to make sure that your blog shows up high on a search engine's search results, so I decided to search how to get Google juice on Google. The heart of search is the Google bot that crawls the depths of cyberspace to find every single web page on the Internet by hopping from link to link to link. When this guy finds web pages it takes them back to Google to have them Indexed according to a very specific PageRank algorithm. This algorithm gives the site a weight depending on the amount of links on the site and the quality of those links. So for example if a high traffic site with a lot of links themselves is linked to your site you would get a higher rank on Google's page rank system as opposed to if you linked to a site with a few unimportant links. I also found a blog talking about this subject. This is Bernie Zimmermann's blog. He has a step by step article telling you how to provide your own blog with Google juice. The first step Bernie suggested was linking to other sites because like I mentioned above, the Google bot that ranks search results checks to see sites that are often linked to. The second thing Bernie suggests is to link to your own site every time you have the opportunity. So if for example you are on a relevant site and commented on someone else's blog you could leave the URL for your page. Or sign all of your e-mails with the URL of your blog and soon people will notice your blog. Also you can link to your older posts to let readers and the Google bot know that your older content is still relevant. In the third update about Google juice that Bernie did, he gave more tips on fueling your web site's Google juice. He has links to other sites talking about this subject, like buzzle.com where a second article about Google juice can be found. This article suggests that you should register your website for longer than one year because spam websites usually only register for a short period of time and therefore the Google bot generally assumes that these short subscriptions are all spam.
For more information about Google juice and how exactly the PageRank algorithm works you could read John Battelle's book Search which is about search sites, including Google, and how these sites are changing the Internet.

Gyongyos Article

This week I decided to update the wikipedia article for Gyongyos. I added to the section that describes the name of the town and what it means. This is what I wrote: "The 16-17th century historian Miklos Istvanffy wrote that the name of the town comes from the Hungarian word for mistletoe (literally "wood-pearl"), which is abundant in the local woods." I found this information in a book that I have about the town.

Click Fraud

So Friday we were talking about click fraud in class and Professor Brown was showing us an article about it on one of our assigned blogs. And of course I had to ask a stupid question about detecting click fraud and the Professor Brown quickly assigned me the task of reading the article and blogging about it. So here it is...
Click fraud is when people make programs whose only purpose is to click on advertisements over and over again, and thus these clicks do not represent authentic traffic to these advertisements. Advertisers are concerned about this problem because on many sites such as Google, advertisers are charged for their adds based on the number of clicks they receive. To appease these angry advertisers, Google devised a three step program to try to cut down on fraudulent clicking. The first two steps of the system are referred to as proactive click detection and the last step is reactive click detection. In the proactive steps Google devised a set of algorithms as well as other techniques to detect fraudulent clicks and catch them before the advertiser is ever charged for these fake clicks. Most of the fraudulent clicks are caught in these two steps. In the reactive step the advertiser complains to Google about a potential problem and Google goes back to investigate those clicks, this represents a small percentage of fraudulent clicks that Google catches.
The article goes on to say that the problem with click fraud is those clicks that actually effect the advertisers by making them have to pay more versus those clicks that just happen and are caught or otherwise do not cause any other harm for the advertiser. So click fraud is only a problem if it effects the advertiser, if it just happens and the click protections systems catch them there is no harm done and its irrelevant that the clicks happened in the first place. So the goal is not to stop click fraud necessarily, but to make the blockers more effective.
Out of all the clicks on ads, only a small percentage are actually fraudulent, but to be extra careful Google rules out a number of probably not fraudulent clicks as fraudulent with out ever charging the advertiser. This actually ends up costing Google hundreds of millions each year in forgone advertising revenue. For example as a rule Google rules out double clicks and deems these clicks invalid. This is the proactive part of the system. As for the reactive approach, when an advertiser believes there might have been fraudulent clicks on their advertisements they askGoogle to do an investigation. If Google does find these clicks to be fraudulent after their investigation, the advertiser is credited back for the invalid clicks.
Even though there may be fraudulent clickers out there Google is trying hard to curb this type of activity by catching as many as possible fraudulent clicks, as it is the pay per click payment structure is beneficial to advertisers because they are only charged when a customer clicks on their ad and also this is a way for the advertisers to gauge the performance of their ad campaign.
Read the article at: Invalid Clicks – Google’s Overall Numbers

Painful Picture

I decide to add a picture to the Wikipedia article I made for Hysplex last week. I myself made the image so I didn't have to worry about any copyright issues with the picture. Making the picture was the easy part, but uploading it on Wikipedia was such a pain. I had to read a whole bunch of instruction on how to legally upload pictures so I don't violate any copyright laws and what not. I didn't think the instructions explained how it all worked too well because I was a bit confused after reading them. They told me to upload it onto their commons, which is a site Wikipedia has entirelly dedicated to images. After I did that I assumed I could go ahead and upload it to my article, but then I ran into sharing violations because the picture was already present on the commons site...So it took me a few tries, but in the end I finally figured out the logistics of this whole picture uploading business and now my article has a wonderful picture of a Hysplex!

S.O.S

I was reading some blogs on Clicz.com and found one that sounded interesting. It was about the S.O.S or Save Our Selves campaing. This global environmental campaign headed by MSN, intends to raise global awareness about environmental issues. The effort will be launced by a 24 hour concert, Live Earth, with preformances on all the 7 continents of the world. MSN teamed up with former vice president Al Gore as well as other clebrities to help promote this global event. The concert even will be brodcast on television as well, and the organizers are hoping to reach billions of people in this way. All proceeds from the event will go to The Alliance for Climate Protection which is chaired by Gore. This event is an amazing opportunity for companies to market their products to billions of people world wide, and its also a great opportunity for companies to connect to a positive movement and build their character. The whole purpose of the event is to introduce people all over the world to the issue of global warming and educate them on what they themselves can do for the world. This concert is inteded to be a kick off for a much larger campaign to focus on these environmental issues.

I believe that this concert has a very nobel cause and I support educating people on environmental issues 100%, however my concern with this whole concert nonsense is the amount of natural resources that will be spent, the amount of waste generated and the amount CO2 that all of this will produce. Yes, its a good cause and people should be educated, but is it really necessary to hold a concert on ALL of the continents? I'm sure the pinguins will enjoy the music on Antarctica however, I think an alternative method will be much more environmentally friendly and that is what the cause is all about in the first place. If they set up a totally internet based campaign and let people do the Blogging (as we have already learned from our Info Tech class) people will get involved and no resources will be wasted. People can link to eachother's bloggs and generate word of mouth buzz and the campaign will reach millions in no time.

But all in all I think that caring about our environment is a very important cause. We have to clean up the mess that humanity has already made so our children can enjoy the world like we have.

Picture by: Christian Mehlführer provided by Wikipedia Commons

New Wikipedia Articles

I have decided to add a few more articles to update on wiped, hysplex and halteres. I am taking a Greek Sports and Recreation class in school and we are learning about a few interesting objects that the ancients use to improve their sports performance.
The one I updated this time was Hysplex which is an elaborate starting mechanism used by the Greeks in horse and foot races.

The Internet

So this week in class we were talking a lot about the internet and how it works. To me it is all such a fascinating concept and I can't imagine how people could ever come up with something so complex. One of the things I was wondering about is how the Internet is it phisically connected, and how is it connected globally? So I decided to search some articles about it.

On Wikipedia I found out that the Internet is a collection of interconected computer networks linked together by copper wires, fiber-optic cables and wireless connections. See Internet
With a DSL connection for example, the information is sent through already existing wiring like the telephone line or cable lines.
Wireless networks send information through a transmition of electromagnetic waves. Another less popular option uses satelite dishes to transmit data from a computer to satelites in outer space that retransmit the information back down to earth. Finaly dial-up modems transform the information ito sounds and the sounds back into data.
Information itself gets transformed into little packages of information called packets and these packets are transmited from one computer to the next. The set of rules for the formulation and reading of packets is called the IP or the internet protocol. This protocal enables computers to understand and interpret the packets of data arriving to their computer. The IP also recognizes any malfunctions in packets and requests that packet to be sent again before it is executed on the receiving computer. The hardware devices that receive the packets read the packet headers, which tell the computere where the data should be sent, are called routers. The information thus travels in packets from router to router. And the Internet is born!

Why Blog?

Now that I have figured out how to make a blog all thats left is posting entries. I'm not a computer person so of course I was not thrilled to take this class...however this does not seem like it will be too difficult. So here we go.
The purpose of this blog is to fulfill the requirements set forward by my Marketing class, the website for that class explains the project in detail. Alex Brown's Blog
We will have to post on blogger once a week for a semester as well as read articles that we subscribed to on bloglines.
We also have to update 4 articles on wikipedia. At first this proved to be a hard choce because the articles that I looked at seemd to be very well written. I did however settle on 4 articles that I think will be fun to update. I chose my high school The Charter School of Wilmington, they also have a very extensive article, but having spent 4 lovely years there I thought I can add something of value. I was born in Hungary, so naturally I thought something from Hungary would be fun to update. I ended up picking my two grandparents' home towns (Gyongyos and Salgotarjan)being that those articles were very sparse. And lastly I picked one of my favorite movies The Right Stuff. Should be interesting to see how my updates end up.

My First Blog Post

This is my first post on my very first Blog! Wasn't as bad as I thought it would be...
Here is a link to the University of Delaware website.