Final Week 12 post !

     This is the last week of the college semester, and we have been finishing up our group app project as well as all other aspects of the course. I learned a lot over the twelve weeks in this module. Social media is a vast modern field field and is a part of most people's lives nowadays. It's place in the workplace is essential in terms of marketing and advertising as it's where the public will see your ads. We have made an app which was very interesting as none of us had every made one before and it's brilliant to see the finished result (a working app!).
     This week we discussed in the lecture what is in store for social media in the future, new apps being developed, improvements in existing social media and new breakthroughs in the field! We had ups and downs in the project but we learned a lot from it and overcame the difficulties. The e-labs and tutorials that took place in the semester were very useful and it let us gain practical insight into the topics at hand rather than just knowing the theory. My favourite was making the mash-up using google maps.

Augmented reality in social media is a likely possibility in the future. 

Social Media for Business

   The topic this particular week was how effective social media can be for a business. We learned that it can be very effective, although i already knew as it's used by most brands and firms today as a method of advertising and increasing their customer numbers. It's really useful for any business if it's done right, you have to be active online whether it be a facebook page or twitter profile et cetera. The big brands like Coca Cola, Adidas and Starbucks are seen a lot on the various social networking sites, and it does help increase revenue as people use hashtags to talk about them, they post cool photos and posts which people like and so on. They use social media as a platform to connect with their customers as you can access the majority of people this way. The concept is still quite modern but had only grown and improved more and more in the past few years. A lot of companies nowadays have their own social media teams who come up with strategies and plans to promote the company.

Visual social media: Flickr (Wk8)

  We focused on visual social media for that week, which is where images are the main focus of a social media site. In our e-lab we learned how to make a Flickr account and manage it as well as posting photos to our page. We had to use images that allowed us to post them on our page (copyright).

 Flickr is easy to use once you get the hang of it, but it takes a while to get your bearings on the site. I prefer Instagram in this photo-based social media genre, but that is mainly focused for phone use, whereas Flickr is focused more for use on computers.

 Here are some images I posted on my account with the theme being scenic landscape photos in Ireland;

Week 7: Mash-up !

  Our final lab before our mid-term college break !
 
    The yellow stars  and the blue and orange balloons represent the Oak trees and the blue people represent the Sacred trees.
 
  Here is a mash-up i created by following instructions in my lab this morning ! I had to enter some spreadsheet data from excel that was given to me which contained information about Oak and Sacred trees in Ireland. I edited and fixed the information so it would be complete and appear correctly on the map. It was difficult at first but the instructions were very clear and easy to follow.

  I embedded the map from the map making site on Google. It was interesting to see how you can edit and combine information with a map and how useful this skill is to have. You could really narrow each marker on the map down to such detailed information such as height and give it a correct symbol so people will know what it's for or to make the map more appealing to the eye of the user. It's a great system.

Using Video as a form of Social Media & Screencasting !

Videos are everywhere on the internet, they are one of the main things shared on social media sites, from videos on an iPhone of a prank to the News on tv3's website. You Tube is the main and most used platform for videos. I myself use it mainly to watch music videos and such, but everyone i know uses You Tube.


Screencasting is another use of video, you capture information from your computer screen then add an audio element to create a video. It is used by some of my lecturers for e-tutorials and also plenty 'how to' and educational videos on You Tube use this format.

- this website shows you how to screencast : http://www.screencast-o-matic.com , the demo video is very helpful and clear to understand !

You can edit your 'screencast' video on You Tube such as adding effects, music and narration.

Week 3 !

So we've been coming up with ideas for the app in our group! One of the girls has suggested the idea of an app that helps for this example..
 you're in your house you look in the fridge and in the cupboards you don't have a whole lot bought so you want to know what you can make with what you have, so if you have this app you can type in your few food items you have and a list of recipes that only use these items will appear!

We all seem on board with it but are still brainstorming.

The actual making and designing of the app will be through the MIT app inventor programming tool. In my first lab i couldn't get it to work on the computer i was using so i couldn't properly create the app HelloPurr but i did start practicing on the design page and it was very hard to understand how to work it at first. We had to try and do a screengrab of it but some of us haven't been able to get it working properly so are using other laptops to do it.

 We all have the programme inventor installed on our laptops now and we will be using it to create our app! You can also use the programme on your phone if its an android but not iphones which caused problems also.

 In class this week we discussed user generated content which involves reviews online etc, it is basically information created by users of an information system. We took part in a questions and answers excercise in pairs and posted our notes to blackboard notetaking.

First post !

 This is the first post of my blog for IS20110 Social Computing and Media. This blog counts towards are overall grade for this module.
 
 We had our first 'Face2Face' lab today and it was interesting to see how we would be able to create and design an app for our group project. It was hard to actually find the lab room at first because we hadn't been to Newstead before.

 In the first two weeks we have started to look at social media, communication and internet users. It has been interesting and we have learned a lot of cool facts such as how many people are online in each county which had some surprising figures for a few countries. We also have been assigned our groups from the first lecture so we could get organising the group project immediately which was a good idea. Our group met up before the second lecture and we all got on and discussed ideas for the project.