Ning.com Update

My group has decided to create a Ning Network dedicated to creating awareness of animal abuse. We are already well into the project and everything is going very well. Our forum has four topics. Our blog had three the last time I checked. Our welcome note, mission statement, and site design are all congruent.

Along with a general cause (animal abuse), our group has succeeded in choosing a specific tone for our network. There are many, many organizations that exist to oppose the mistreatment of animals. We discussed this as a group and came to the agreement that we are most used to seeing aggressive statements and communications from these organizations that do more to invoke fear and disturbance than awareness. In order to differentiate ourselves and get our message across in our own way, we have taken on a more lighthearted approach. The songs, videos, and design of our network are all focused on how much fun and joy pets can bring to us, rather than the hurt and pain that occurs when they are abused.

Discussion Forum Topics

1. What can I do to get involved?

2. Where can I find organizations dedicated to the cause?

3. Adoption success stories

Topics in Animal Abuse

1. Ethics of Animal Testing

2. Uses of Animals in Research

3. Limitations of the Animal Welfare Act

Ning.com

After messing around on Ning.com for a while, I must say that I'm surprised that this is my first time even hearing of the site. It appears to be extremely useful for both concentrated and extended social networking. What sets Ning apart from sites like Facebook and Myspace is the option for specific purposes. People can create any type of network on Ning and be reasonably assured that the people in their network care about the subject matter at hand. This is not especially true for Facebook groups, for example, where people will join anything and everything with little to no consideration.

I was intrigued by the option of free networks and paid networks. Obviously, free networks will have bare-minimum features, but they are probably all you really need. It would be interesting to see what kinds of things you can do in a paid network, though. It might be possible to create a true, active organization on Ning. I don't know enough to fully comment on this, though.

Boyd vs. Bennett

Both of these articles focused on the roles of people using Social Networking Sites and their activism (or lack thereof). Boyd and Bennett seemed to agree that the young people of recent generations are not being as active as those of older generations. Boyd attributes this to a lack of motivation while Bennett believes that it is due to a difference in motivation.

Bennett believes that while people used to participate in political activism due to a sense of duty, people are doing it nowadays in order to pursue self-actualization. This need for self-actualization mirrors the narcissism that Boyd spoke of. In Boyd's critique of SNSes, the common subject matter of online discussion is primarily self-indulgent rather than working towards any sort of social or political goal.

Where Boyd and Bennett differ is the idea that people are involved in serious matters at all. Boyd seems to content that there is little to no motivation whatsoever towards political subject matter, and I might agree. Bennett argues that people are involved, but in a more passive manner. They are doing it for themselves, rather than for a greater purpose. I also agree here. People are certainly becoming less active politically, this can easily be proven by voting rates. Whether or not they are bothering to be involved at all is another question.

Social Networking Sites

The article, "Social Networks: History, Definition, and Scholarship" served to accompany the knowledge I already had about SNSs and fill in a lot of the gaps I always wondered about. I had never even heard about Friendster, and it was interesting to read about its successes and failures. The info about Friendster also illustrated a very important aspect of SNSs, as well. The article discussed that the site experienced some technical difficulties. I believe that the success of sites like Myspace and Facebook are largely due to rock solid technical work and maintenance. Once in a while, Facebook will be down for an hour or so, and I'm sure it angers a LOT of people. If this were to happen more frequently, they could lose a lot of users.

The article discussed the uses of SNSs and stated that users are really supporting existing relationships rather than finding new ones. I agree and disagree. I think most refrain from "creeping" on randoms, but I also think small interactions that never would have lead to friendships (or whatever) have the possibility of turning into deep connections due to SNSs. For instance, I don't talk to too many people in most of my classes, but it is very common to become "friends" with someone on Facebook because they're in the same class as you. A couple of wall posts and ten minutes of chat later, a real friendship is made that exists in the offline world, also.

5 Issues

Five issues that concern me are:

1. Nuclear Weapons

2. Nutrition

3. Medical Ethics

4. Hate Crimes

5. Global Warming

Revised Site Finished

Our final site revisions and all that go along with them are due today at 2:00PM. I've just looked over our site, and I am very pleased with how it's turned out. John did fix the spacing on the home page, and I made the font for the 5 questions landing page more consistent with the font on the home page. Overall, the design flows better and looks much more professional.

Joan finished the proposal memo and we're all very happy with it. Even her first draft proved that she was definitely the right person for the job. Kayla's site maps were also very effective, and she also ended up being very proficient with editing the site. She was able to figure out a few things (like image placement) that we were having trouble with.

In the end, this project was both easier and harder than I expected it to be. Google sites makes it very easy to get everything up and functional. It was a matter of minutes before we were able to transpose all of the information from the original site to ours. However, making everything exactly right and considering all of the elements of web design (proximity, repetition, etc) is very important and cannot be taken too lightly.

Peer Review (Web Site)

On Wednesday, we spent our class time getting into our groups and peer editing another group's work. We had a list of questions that we were to carefully consider and then answer about what the other group had done, effectively and ineffectively. One thing we were instructed to do was to rate the work out of 10 and be very, very honest, and sure not to inflate the scores, because in the end it would only make the group work less hard and end up with a lower grade. This makes a lot of sense to me and is something that I've noticed about peer reviewing in a lot of classes. People tend to not want to make each other feel bad and have a tendency to just say "Wow this is great as it is, good job," when they might actually have useful criticism.

We told the other group that their main problems were in their proposal memo. Their web site was awesome and actually fairly complete and polished as it was. The memo, though, needed some work. It read more like a list of creative devices than suggestions for change.

When we received our peer review comments, the criticisms were not very surprising. The design of our site could definitely use some tweaking, particularly in spacing (proximity) and font continuity (repetition). We're in a good position now because we know exactly what we need to do from here and how to do it.