Microcosms of Intelligence

Looking back on my blogging practice over the last few weeks, I can only state that it is dismal.  When Dr. Burton asked us in class to do a reflective post on the blogs we've written lately, the only posts I could fall back on were 3 blogs I wrote in early January, 3 drafts that I never finished, and two pages of written ideas that I wrote on paper and never transferred onto the internet.  Not much to refer to, however, I managed to find one word that kept cropping up: "connecting".  It seems that I am rather obsessed with the topic of how to hook people together, and create microcosms of intelligence.  Let me walk you through what I mean.

Social Proofing and Getting A Job

A few weeks ago, in class, my attention was drawn to a blog post about social proofing.  The blog touts the following four actions as the basis for public relevance in writing:

• finding people
• contacting people
• interacting and collaborating
• others' use of one's published content

In thinking about these actions, I found a correlation to getting a job, something which I have done several times.  The economic value of each student is directly based on knowledge of how to get a job, so I find it valuable to put my experience here.  The process of getting a job, namely: networking, applying and being interviewed, working together, and shipping products, has been built into our society and is the basis of our modern economy.  It seems to me that there is a correlation between these two topics, for example:

Networking = Finding People
Applying and being interviewed = Contacting People
Working for a company = Interacting and Collaborating
Shipping a product = permitting others to use my published content

With these comparisons, I can see how social proofs are a valuable thing to learn as a student before being exposed to the job market.  Perhaps other similar connections exist.

Chat With Grandma

I just had the wonderful opportunity to spend the day at my Grandma's house.  We had some excellent conversation, and I got her setup using Google Reader.  This post is going up in part to show her the use of Google Reader in action.  I'll post some of the insights she gave me on the 20th century later.

Forums as Connecting Points

Earlier today I had a few minutes to myself.  As I sat at my computer, I contemplated my life goals, one of which is to build a Convention Center, complete with several Auditoriums wherein I could host music camps for kids.  I have had this goal for several years, but left it on the back-burner because it seemed fiscally ridiculous on my current budget.  Earlier in the day, however, I perused the BYU Career Fair, and found that many companies will pay exorbitant amounts of money to people with my background in Software Design, and it prompted me to again think about my goal of building the "Williams Harmony Hall."

Fair Use Explained

On the topic of Copyrights and Openness

Intentional Illiteracy

My history with the internet is deep.  I've had accounts with hotmail, gmail, juno, aol, myspace, comcast, apple, battlenet, paypal, ebay, youtube, facebook, netflicks, hulu, BYU, BYU - Computer Science, and many more websites that I can no longer remember.  I have dumped countless hours into many of these accounts, some with great pay off to me personally (time spent using my Computer Science account on campus at BYU), while others have been nothing