Monday, April 28, 2008

Social Networking Goes Shopping @ Wetseal.

Have you read this?

Wetseal has started an online community.

In the spirit of Cher Horowitz from Clueless... AS IF!



How hilarious... now we can go and create, share and buy our favorite wet seal outfits!

What a great way to get all the Miley fans out there to spend some time online & spending money.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

How GOOGLE and APPLE saved my life... this week

There is less then one month till graduation.
ONE MONTH.

How and when did that happen ?

Everyone I speak to asks me the same question.. " Can you believe it's your last semester already?"

I always answer this question the same way... "I know, it's absolutely crazy... time is flying."

The truth is.. TIME IS FLYING.
EXCEPT WHEN I GOT A BIG PUSH BACKWARDS LAST WEEK.

This past weekend I was in florida for my grandma's birthday and my computer crashed. Specifically, my hard drive failed... MACBOOK users: beware! This IS an epidemic.

God forbid my life should be easy, right?
But this catastrophe was not a complete disaster for a few reasons: aside from my external drive - Mainly I have been saved by GOOGLE & APPLE.



*this is the story of the past 2 weeks of my life and how I have been putting my computer, semester and life back together. piece by piece. document by document.

1. Thank god for Google. Well, google and the fact that my piece of sh*t printer doesn't work. Let me preface this with the fact that for the last YEAR I have had to basically email myself every document that I wanted to print... SO ALL MY WORK IS ONLINE.. very interesting...

With all this talk of earth day and a Steve Rubel's paperless office and the macbook air, this week I really valued having all of my documents online because surprise surprise, all my stuff was easy to find.

In all honesty, I never thought of all my stuff being on gmail/googledocs as something I did for a purpose or something that would ever help me.. I believe that this move was simply evolution. No one said to me, "Danielle, use googledocs... or email EVERYTHING to yourself." I just did it, because it was natural and because it was easy... ANOTHER PERK TO BEING A DIGITAL NATIVE?

In the old days (as my father always reminds me) we (he) was afraid to keep important documents, calendars and emails online because he was afraid of servers crashing and loosing everything. Today, as our technology continues to pave the way for keeping local and network copies of our documents, it seems that this fear will soon be erased. Just as we looked at floppy disks as crucial revolutionary devices, maybe soon our harddrive, as we know it today, will be a clunky waste of space since everything will be online?

Just a thought.

Google isnt the only thing that saved me during this recent episode.
THANK YOU APPLE.

What I have learned throughout my history as an Apple customer is that when apple is good, they're REALLY REALLY good!

Say what you want about their culture, their brand, their products: I don't care.
In my opinion Apple's fabulous in store customer service amazes me. over and over.

Sure, first I got an idiot to help me... which really rather annoyed me. But the MAC Genius that handled my computer was AMAZING.

These people know what they are talking about and that makes me happy and VERY IMPRESSED.

They loaded my computer with Leopard, which I had been holding out for. I am getting used to spaces and all the other cute new programs. Yes, I am the loser who took the guided tour and then watched it again with my dad when I showed him the cool new features, which he thought were great.. (like father like daughter)

My story ends here: But my suggestion is to mess around on the APPLE MUSEUM WEBSITE. A very cool site to play... even though it kinda stops around 2004 or 2006 ... but for a cool girl like me, its a fun resource.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Bloggers: What are you listening to? How are you feeling?

For my Mass Communication Research class, my final project is focused on college-age student's blog readership habits.
My group has started doing a lot of research and the results we are finding are startling and scary. (but more on that later)

However, what we have quickly learned is that our generation used to blog before they even knew what blogging was.
cue the music please: ENTER LIVEJOURNAL



Live journal was this great tool that many high school and middle school students were using (circa 2002!) to stay connected to friends and update them on cool things going on. Not only did it serve as a micro community, where you could connect to your friends, and see what other people were doing, but for a melo-dramatic HS student (as so many are) it was an awesome place just to vent.

My friend and I were talking about livejournal the other day and she reminded me of a cool feature called "Current Mood Current Music?"

At first we laughed at this idea because seriously, Is there anything more childish than listing your mood on a blog? Like how much more punk'ed out, melodramatic could this idea be? But then we thought about the idea of sharing your feelings. Sure we share ideas and feelings on our blogs today, but LJ gives us a a medium to spread an EXACT message.

What I remember being obsessed with was the music choices.
I loved starting posts with the following musical-theater-obsessed album art: some popular shows and rare geeky gems.



Sure, this might seem childish.. but its kind of a cute idea...
Oh and what I'm listening to / watching right now: ( I guess I've sort of grown up!)