But, of course there are those who do not use Twitter wisely and get themselves in trouble. There is the infamous story of the person who got a job offer from Cisco and tweeted about it and, seemed to lose the job. It went down like this:
Even after this, you still see an amazing number of people post negative comments about their work place and other situations on Twitter. I think part of the problem is that people don’t realize how big Twitter is becoming and they don’t realize how public Twitter can be if their profiles are not set to private.
Well, now we are getting to a point where people are being sued over their tweets. I guess this was inevitable, but we entering into a new dimension of the Web 2.0 world. Here is the summary of the story:
Now, we know that Horizon is a “sue first, ask questions later kind of organization,” so I don’t want to get in trouble with this post. (Although this philosophy makes me think the tenant probably was in the right here.) But rather I’d like to talk about the idea of being sued on the internet.
Since this company filed a suit, I looked up what exactly what libel is to see if this was justified:
So, technically it seems this lawsuit would fall under this category. One aspect I am unsure of is if a company can file a libel suit. The FAQ above mentions when a person is wronged, but maybe it can go either way. In this case, the comment was made about a company. But, in this case the statement was definitely made to more than one person and it was clear who the comment was about. The question I guess would come down to whether or not there was mold in her apartment and if Horizon did anything about it. (Was the statement false or not?)
I think what blows my mind is the mindset of the management company here. Now, this tweet happened on May 12th, and the lawsuit happens two and a half months later. That seems odd. Why bring it up now?
Next, this news story, and their law suit is doing more damage, in my mind, to their company’s name than that tweet, that I never saw, ever did. I got the impression from the story that Horizon doesn’t even really care or want to address if there was mold in the apartment or not. Maybe this tweet was necessary and accurate. Continue Reading…
I don’t like to brag or anthing, but the credibility of my blog is growing. I was looking through the referring sites to my blog and I found that I have been cited as a source in a debate about video games. As a former collegiate debater at Northern Illinois University, I was thrilled to be included in as a source.
I realize that this is just some guy borrowing my blog post to help support an argument and that my post has know actual authority to it beyond my personal experience, but the reason I do this blog thing is to be a part of the internet community and share what I am thinking. So, it is exciting when what you are sharing is used and shared by others. It makes the world feel smaller and make me feel like a member of a larger community.
While implementing Twitter in my classroom I have been doing a lot of research about the topic. I ran across a good article today about teens and Twitter. The basic premise is that teens aren’t using Twitter yet because they are using Facebook to accomplish most of the other purposes of Twitter. When I even mentioned Twitter in class the kids didn’t get the point of it and they thought it was “creepy” to follow someone (as this post also illustrates) but it no different than reading your friends’ status updates. The article states that one of the biggest uses of Twitter is marketing (or self promotion) and most teens don’t need to do that yet.
I will go one step further and say a lot of the adult users of Twitter are people who don’t have Facebook pages and if they did they would probably use Twitter a lot less. Also, I think teens don’t use Twitter as much because cell phones are treated like a cancer in high schools. If we tried to embrace this technology rather than shun it, we might fine that we can make good things happen.
As I began implementing Twitter into my classes this week, I gave my students a long talk about internet safety and the fact that EVERYTHING you put on the internet is public. This is why I dispise the wall on Facebook for a lot of things. People use the wall to basically have public conversations and they don’t realize what they are saying or doing sometimes. This cop Continue Reading…
Last week I attended the Illinois Computer Educator’s (ICE) Conference in St. Charles, IL. This is the second year I attended the conference. Last year, I went to a pre-conference workshop on how to use pivot tables in Excel, which was interesting, but this year I attended the actual conference. They are many sessions to choose from, and I chose to focus mostly on sessions about new web 2.0 tools (which aren’t all actually web 2.0) and how to implement them.
On a side note, I would like to define web 2.0. Web 2.0 technologies are technologies that utilize two-way information. Continue Reading…
Today’s goo thing is that I had time to finish the redesign of the blog. I had installed the sliding frames theme a week or so ago and today I was finally able to turn it into a three column theme after some internet searching. This project has consumed far more of my time than I had intended, but I got a little OCD about it.
Today I am trying to use two new sites that I heard about on the internet. The first is http://yourfonts.com. This is a site where you can create your own font by downloading a template, filling it out and then uploading the template back to their website. Below is a copy of the template that I filled out.
I also was playing with http://scribd.com. This site is designed to let you post items that you write and display them on what they call iPaper. This is a format that will help protect your content from theft and let you embed it in a web-site as shown below.
This site was very easy to use and it accepts OpenOffice.org which I appreciate as an avid user of open source software. I don’t know that I completely have a use for this, but I could write and publish class notes on Scribd. which would allow me to get feedback on them and share than easily with students. I still always have a slight fear of putting too much storage online because sites may vanish tomorrow, but I am creating it online, just uploading it, so this would be a safe altenative.
As always I am astounded by the amount of free software and helpful tools out there. Soon I will post a review of on-line whiteboards that I found.
This is an interesting article from a few years ago that finds that children are as likely to encounter a predator waiting for their bus as they will surfing on line. I think that makes a lot of sense and is really interesting. I am glad that somone has done the research to prove this.
Recently I finally discovered two web programming techniques I have been trying to figure out for a long time.
Last Updated Web Page Time
The first was to figure out how to automatically include the last updated date in a web page. I found this information in kind of a round about way at . The problem in finding the code is that it is a server side script which means that the page has to have a .shtml extension. However, if you view the page source, you only see the results of the script, not the actual script. Well, after a lot of searching, here is the code.
Last Updated:
I am not exactly sure how the date formatting works, but your can probably figure it out. This will save me a lot of time.
Different Cascading Style Sheet for IE, Firefox, or any Browser
Another problem I was recently having was making my page display properly in both FireFox and Internet Explorer. I tend to code my pages to work in FF because it is closer to W3C compliance than is IE. But, both count pixels incorrectly, (I think) and more annoyingly, they both count pixels differently! So, I was able to code my page properly for IE and properly for FF, but not at the same time. After some searching I found the answer (although I don’t remember where). You have to code something like this:
Because CSS is Cascading the second CSS takes precedence if the user is using IE and not something else.
So, this morning (at the un-Godly hour of 8:30), I was roused from my sleep because Gina’s car was broken. I had to get up and take it the dealer. Well, I am at the dealer and I walk into the waiting room (which has wireless internet which my day a LOT better, thank Gary Lang) and there about 10 adults (9 men, 1 women) watching stupid children’s cartoon on TV. Honestly, can’t we at least put on Sesame Street if we are going to watch children’s show. But I was just surprised that 9 men didn’t put on ESPN.
And literally, everyone was staring at the TV like they were riveted to the show. Makes me wonder if the term idiot box is justified.
I also wonder this when I am watching TV. The people on TV shows (Friends comes to mind) have such exciting lives (at least 22 minutes a week) and they watch almost no TV. Maybe if I didn’t watch TV, I would have a more exciting life.
And usually the TV shows about people whose lives are “not as good” (Al Bundy, Roseanne) are always watching TV. Maybe there is a correlation. Hmm…
