The Walker Art Center, PBS and Social Media

For a paper in my Museums and Media class I explored the uses of social media and iTunes by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. While the use of social media by businesses is a hot topic, the use of social media by non-profits is not as big of a topic of conversation in media. I was really impressed with all of the ways that the Walker has reached out to use social media and iTunes. It's great to see all of these resources that can be considered places for solely for socializing or having fun used in an educational and cultural capacity.

Museums in Suburbia

This semester in my Museums As Media class we've talked a lot about interactive media in museums and on their websites. Many of my classmates and I live in urban areas. This weekend I am visiting my parents in the sprawling suburbia of southern New Jersey. It gives me a different perspective on the features of museum websites.

This Digital Life

This semester one of the classes I'm taking is about social media. It's not quite what I expected. I feel as if we've been reading serious, conservative articles written by people who I just don't relate to but then again I'm often impatient about building the background and learning about things that have no immediate practical use to me. This week I feel the connection and am starting to see what I need to do in regards to social media.

The importance of books in a digital world

While on my morning walk today I listened to Jesse Thorn's interview on The Sound of Young America with the author of "The Invention of Air", Steven Johnson. I now have a new addition to my list of books to read. During my K-12 education I never liked history classes. They seemed to be just a jumble of dates and wars. If there were interdisciplinary connections made and history was told more like the story that it is rather than the dry (so-called) facts, I think I would have enjoyed history much more! With new media there are so many options for education. Teachers can gather information with ease and students can do research and find more interested things than before but as Steven Johnson and Bill Clinton state, books are still important. Social media is a tool. As I read recently in a marketing blog, social media enables us to have conversations - remember those? And what can you meaningfully converse about if you don't read books? Darnit, I guess my 10th grade Language Arts teacher, Mrs. Vircillo, was correct when she said that it was important to read the classic books (that I found so boring at the time and have since gone back to read) because otherwise you would feel left out in a conversation when someone refers to Romeo & Juliet or The Old Man and the Sea.

Bacon Bacon Bacon

Through the wonders of Facebook my love of bacon has been encouraged! In these times of economic hardship it seems that indulgences in the food spectrum make us feel better.

Several weeks ago Downtown Boulder posted a note about a news segment on Bacon-Chocolate cupcakes.

I couldn't help myself. I had to have one of those cupcakes, and sure enough before taking the first bite I felt the need to take a photo with my phone and post it to Facebook.

After proclaiming my love of bacon in my status several days in a row on fb, friends posted bacon related stories, and today my friend Charlie posted a New York Times article about Bacon Explosion.

Oh the wonders of social networking! While the NYT article is certainly about this concoction called 'Bacon Explosion', it is also about the ways social networking was used to spread the word about this pork bonanza. It was mentioned on Twitter, multiple websites, and Stumbleupon.

Someone please help me recall how I learned of social trends before the advent of social media?

Social Media and its Future

Tim O'Reilly discusses the evolution of Web 2.0 and its future.