Photoshop Fun!

New Discoveries!

I have always just used Google to "Google" things. Sometimes I'll search for pictures or just on the web, but I never knew about all of the other features that Google offers. The "show options" tab is actually incredibly useful, and I didn't even know that it existed. I always figured that in order to narrow what you wanted to show up in results, you would have to change what you queried. I didn't realize that you could choose the source, size, or type of result that comes up by using the options side bar. I think the coolest feature was the "Wonder Wheel". It does all of you research for you! By typing in a main topic, the Wonder Wheel puts out different related searches and you can keep clicking on them until you have all of the searches that interest you on your topic. Its just like the mind mapping exercise that Bret has us do for 10 min on a piece of paper, except you just have to type in one thing and then keep clicking for maybe a minute until it brainstorms everything for you! This was my first real exploration of Google, and I can't believe what has been out there this whole time. I also am curious to see what I would find in 30 min more of exploration since I found all of these new features in just a couple minutes!!

Google Analytics

Opening up Google Analytics for the first time, I was hoping that I would be surprised with something like 20 views from a couple different countries. Instead I found that there had been five views, all from New York, South Burlington, and a town near Boston. The average time on the site was :00. 60% was direct traffic, and 40% was indirect. Also, 80% of the five users were new to the site. Looking at this data, I have come to the conclusion that no one has looked at my blog. This isn't surprising given that I don't have a link to it anywhere, and I haven't told anyone about it. Also, I must say that there isn't very much to see once you get there- one post about twitter. Not to say that that isn't interesting, it certainly wouldn't catch someone's eye if they were looking for cool things to read about on someone's blog. Hopefully as I continue to work on my blog, and add more articles, it will become a site that people visit regularly. But I guess I'm going to have to get pretty creative in the meantime.

I Was Wrong

I didn't know anything about twitter until Monday, other than that I figured it was just another time suck for people with tons of extra time to notify the world about what they are doing. It seemed pretty pointless to me. I think I was mostly wrong in that assumption. Now that I've gotten to know a little bit about it, I admit that is fun to use, and doesn't take that much time to tweet every now and then. I'm even starting to like it. In reading the article about the twitter revolution in Iran I realized that what I think of as a useless time waster has actually become a powerful political tool. It was amazing to read that the opposition protesters have used twitter as a method to circumvent the government's efforts to block their communication. I didn't ever think that twitter could actually have a legitimate use, and I was definitely wrong. This a great use of twitter, and I think that in the future, twitter will gain an even larger role in world communication and gain uses that we have never conceived before. We have only begun to take advantage of its potential.

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/4436340