Life in the Network

This picture was my view from my hotel room in Spring Break 05 in Cancun, Mexico. I had an excellent time! I remember all but about 4 hours of the trip. Not bad for that trip. I went with about 6 of my close friends and we all enjoyed our time there. The weather was really nice everyday. It was around 85 degrees everyday which didn't make it too unbearable. I have gone to Cancun 3 times now and the funny thing is that we stayed at the same hotel, the Royal Mayan, every year and you see the same people you saw there before and you also see the same DJ's in the clubs as well and they remember you!

Flickr is something really new to me. I hadn't even heard about the site before. Tying it in to our readings really goes hand in hand. In Sturtz article, Communal Categorization: The Folksonomy, the article talks about categorizing and classification. In practical terms, Sturtz goes on to say, a folksonomy is the complete set of tags-one or two keywords-that users of a shared content management system apply to individual pieces of content in order to group or classify those pieces for retrieval, (Sturtz, 1). This is exacly true with flickr. We use tags to put a name to the pictures that we have so we, and others, can identify them and retrieve them easier.

The first chapter of the book goes on to say that, survey after survey show that Internet users are at once excited and nervous about the potentials of this new technology. The issue of online privacy illustrates this point, (Gurak, 11). The first part of this chapter talks about privacy issues that arrise from using the Net. I know that privacy issues are a major thing when surfing the Net. It's strange to think that when you surf the net, someone could be watching what sites you go to, who you chat with, or even what you buy. I think that privacy issues have gotten a lot better since the induction of the Internet. I believe that more work needs to be done from hackers and identity theft which many people become the victim of everyday.

In summary, flickr is an excellent way for family members to reach others with there pictures if they live in different parts of the world, or even in the same state. It's a good way to get people connected in there experiences together with the different pictures they have taken. Flickr, among many other sites, really have a good way to categories the pictures in a way so it's easy to locate them with the millions of pictures that are out there. Online privacy is a big issue that effects everyone using the Net.