Online Shopping and Me

I have to start this off by saying that a I don't do an extraordinary amount of shopping online and when I do, it tends to be on Amazon.com.  I use that site because of the vast inventory of items, security and availability.  I have bought books, speakers, DVDs and harder to find music on Amazon, but don't tend to buy much else online.

The thing that I buy the most online is music and my go to is iTunes.  Just another way that Apple is so much cooler than everyone else (wink wink, nudge nudge).  I love iTunes because you can usually find anything you are looking for including obscure band, live albums, "imports", EPs and so on.  I also find the more-often-than-not price of $9.99 for an album to be a great price compared to the standard $15-$20+ for a CD when I was growing up.  Some albums are even as low as $5-&7 and you know that the digital file is clean and won't harm your computer.  I feel this was the positive payoff of the settlement between illegally downloaded music and music stores.  Instead of getting endless amounts of music for free, albeit lower audio quality and a potential virus carrier, I can now download the safest and highest fidelity music at a much more reasonable price.

The convenience of iTunes is also a huge selling point.  Not only can I shop from home, but I can listen to samples of the music before purchase, read customer reviews (although skewed and inaccurate at times) and load it directly on to my iPod with no real technical issues.  As a music lover I find this to be the service I have always wanted.  Fast, easy, accessible and reasonable.

Horizon What What!

Way to go Horizon... stick it to the man.  After the earth shattering effects of a negative tweet about said company, a just and fair lawsuit was created to punish the evil doer.  In today's high-tech society, a single tweet can be responsible for social uprising, political upheaval, and corporate espionage.  Does the defendant even know how irresponsible and damaging her tweets were?  Does she have no sense of dignity?  The defendant made malicious and unforgivable comments about Horizon reality that was made available to the millions, if not billions of unsuspecting tweeters that will never think of Horizon in the same light again.  This act of ignorance has cost the company an uncountable amount of sales dollars that may never be recouped.  I only wish we lived in ye olde London times so that we could give her a good tar and feathering in public, which would immediately be followed by a stoning ceremony and a prolonged period of extreme name calling.

She should consider herself blessed that she only being sued for a mere $50,000.  What is this world coming to?  All of this technology with the intrawebs and the www's makes my head spin and I feel that it will bring the end of days.  If she could do this much damage and hurt on twitter, just imagine if she had wrote a blog or made a post on facebook.  I motion to hack the planet and end the injustice that twitter is causing!  If there was no twitter or public forum to spit this venomous hate, our friends at Horizon would still have a job.  Tweeting breeds sneak thievery and shenanigans. Harumph!

Blogging n' Journalism

I think that it is fairly obvious that blogging has influenced and affected modern journalism.  For starters, the media in which we get our news has changed drastically over the past 10 years.  T.V., radio and the paper were the norm before the the internet hit... obviously.

Now, newspapers have been condensed because of online papers and most news papers have an online counterpart that will most likely take over eventually.

I think a good example of the contrast of old journalism and new blogging journalism is the  events of 9/11.  It was only a matter of time until multiple conspiracy theories  surfaced and blogging and internet journalism was the soap box for these theorists to tell their opinions.  If you search online, you will find numerous blogs and sites dedicated to these amateur detective's search for the truth.  Ideas, footage, news articles and interviews can now be shared instantly creating a communal data base for the people to share and build upon ideas.

Could you imagine if the net and blogging were around for the Kennedy assassination?  Back then only one piece of footage truly captured the deathblow to our President and the public had far less information about what happened (or could have happened) other than the official report.  If that had happened to day, much like the 9/11 attacks, there would have been numerous videos taken from all angles and bloggers would have used all of that footage and info from the net to build cases or theories as to what happened.  These ideas would have reached many more people by way of blogging.