I’m Sam. This is the third (fourth if you count Live Journal) blog I’ve created. The others all died a horrible death of lack of enthusiasm on my part. I’m starting this blog as a class assignment. My professor has stated that she’d like us to develop focuses for our blogs following our interests and hobbies.

But since what I’m most interested in at the moment is a book review blog, that doesn’t mesh well with the social media assignments I’m going to be asked to post here. So I think what I’ll do is keep this a blog purely for class assignments and create a second (4th?(5th?)) blog to review books on.

I missed the first week of class due to illness, but since I’ve been there, we’ve watched a video on the history of the internet from the History Channel (back when their programs were less likely to be about Alien Encounters and more likely to be about History), along with two YouTube videos discussing technology. Here are the YouTube videos:

Did You Know is one of those videos someone uploads with a series of interconnected semi-interesting facts set to a good beat with some keen graphics to spice things up. There are a couple dozen of these videos that make the rounds, and they’re all pretty entertaining for the 3-6 minutes they run.

The Machine is Us/ing Us is a video in the same vein as the Did You Know stuff… Good beat, some facts, text marching across the screen. Where it deviates is in its message. This video tries to explain what Web 2.0 is in an entertaining and graphical way. I think it fails to do more than just spout the same tired slogans people have been using for years to answer questions like, “Soooo…. what is Web 2.0, exactly?”