Reading Report #1

This reading selection discusses the occurrence of misinformation in our society today, especially when it comes to information that is found on websites on the internet. These fake websites are not rare, and are compared to counterfeit money, trying to pass its way into society unnoticed so that it can be used the same way as those that are not counterfeit. Also discussed is the fact that the term “misinformation” generally means wrong information. However, it is also common to have websites that share the creator’s opinions, rather than reporting facts that can be proven. In this way, the website attempts to scam the reader into believe that the opinions expressed within the website are actually factual, and should be regarded as facts. In addition, there are also scams that claim that they collect donations for a specified cause, but simply take the money and put it to their own personal uses. According to this article, there are a huge amount of counterfeit websites in existence.
I thought that this article was very interesting. It had a lot of good information, and I found it fun to read. I never realized the prevalence of these fake websites before I read this article. I feel like there was very good content of the article, because the article gave very good examples and occurrences of these websites that provide misinformation. The author definitely knew what he was talking about, because the article came across as well-written, and very well educated regarding the subject. I definitely enjoyed reading this article.

Assignment #1 for 1/20/2009

“Twitter-Yahoo Mashup Yields Better Breaking News Search”
January 16, 2009
By Scott Gilbertson
http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/twitter-yahoo-b.html.

In today’s society, many individuals turn to the internet to become informed about news stories, whether they be breaking stories, or stories that may be days old. The website Twitter is a popular site that people may utilize to learn about breaking news stories. Despite Twitter’s speed and convenience, the stories posted on the site are often misinformed or even completely wrong. Search engines such as Yahoo will provide sites with more comprehensive coverage of news stories that are much more credible and accurate. With this in mind, Yahoo engineer Vik Singh created TweetNews. This takes news results from Yahoo and compares them to topics found on Twitter in order to rank the stories that are so new that systems used by Google and Yahoo alone cannot yet prioritize them for searches. Resulting from this is a search engine that will track breaking news stories ranked by search results on Twitter so that the results will be more relevant and in-depth than either source by itself.
In my opinion, I believe that this mashup is very helpful. TweetNews will assist normal individuals in finding good news coverage with reliable information regarding breaking news. This is a very good idea from the engineer of Yahoo, and I believe that further exploration into the concepts introduced by this historic mashup will be conducted. Because of this exploration, I don’t see why other engines, specifically Google, wouldn’t come out with collaboration with a site comparable to Twitter, in order to created competition with TweetNews. I feel that TweetNews will be successful in its goals, and will end up being very useful and possibly popular.

My First Post

This is my first post. Screw the Baltimore Ravens.