Friend Count

There's some interesting trends among Facebook user's that I've noticed over the past couple years. From high school to college, Facebook's utility seems to change. I can vividly remember for the early years it was my goal to obtain as many "friends" as I could on Facebook. The number grew and grew. People I met at camps or went to school with, everyone was getting friended. There was no discrimination. 

As time passed and I got to college I realized how dense my newsfeed was getting. I was getting updates about people I either hardly talked to in the real world or people I had no interest in knowing what their weekend plans were. With nearly 1000 friends, I wanted to start thining the herd so to speak. My goal was to whittle down the "friends" to people I actually cared about, or had some practical reason for a connection.

I sat down at my computer and started a mass purge. If I hadn't talked to a person or cared to talk to a person within the last year, they were getting "defriended." It got tedious clicking on each individual profile. I devised a new method. When their birthday notifications would pop up on my newsfeed, I would decide if they were going to stay or would be gone. 

How'd you like that? Happy birthday! You're not my friend anymore. 

I've found this method to work because it does not require a whole lot of thought and achieves what I wanted with a more "pure" Facebook. I found that by purging old aquatences that bothered my newsfeed I enjoyed my experience on Facebook even more. 

When I would go to scan my feed, I started to notice myself actually engaging in what I was seeing. Instead of seeing pictures of some guys family I had met once, I started seeing a lot more of my real-world friends and their activities. I feel that I lost a good chunk of aquatences but gained a better scope of my real friends and classmates.

Googlizing Our Lives

There is no doubt that Google is an integral part of the mainstream internet experience! It does everything from search engines to communication through google docs and google hangouts. However, does this technology juggernaut have too much power??

I think that there is a clear power imbalance on the web. Google runs more than half of the online advertisements and is one of the most poplar search engines. Google seems to be a part of every web page, whether it was the engine we used to find the page or the customized search bar in the top corner, or even the advertisements you see on the page that magically know what you want to buy.

All this being said I love Google, it provides a somewhat streamlined internet experience and their seemingly good natured intentions to provide the most relative and accurate search results makes it a valuable web resource. Though there is a huge company that knows what you look at on the internet, and may save some of your private information, there are few companies that provide the service that Google does.

There is an argument that states that Google is making us stupid, but I disagree. Though the company makes relevant information more accessible, we have adapted as a culture to learn how to find precisely what we are looking for. Though the machine does a lot of work for us, there is still the necessity on the human end to know what you are looking for. I would say Google is making us smarter in that it offers us the opportunity to discover more about whatever we are curious about.

Blogging about Blogging about Blogging

Megan Reardon was a featured blogger on Rebecca Blood's "Bloggers on blogging." Reardon was an early player on the blogging scene; she created her first website in 1999 and started her blog, Not Martha, in 2001. Reardon sat down to talk about blogging with Blood.

One of the really interesting parts about Reardon's blog blocks comments. She talks about how the general tone of commenters that she has observed on other blogs has been largely combative. "I started Not Martha as a way to keep track of links and ideas I was interested in or knew I'd want to reference later. It also worked as a place to keep notes on things I'd been doing," Reardon said. 

Maintaining a blog can be difficult and Reardon says that she burns out every no wand then. Trying to keep up with the demands of her readers, posting constantly can become a chore. She has toned it down now saying that she only posts when she finds inspiration and really getting back to the roots of why she started a blog in the first place.

Blogs give people a nice outlet. "People are much kinder and weirder than we allow ourselves to be in public," Reardon said. Blogs give people a nice place to put their own personalities out for everyone to see. 

Photo: Megan Reardon

My First Post

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