PAC Website Evaluation

I found this assignment very interesting as I never knew before to look for when researching the credibility of a Website. One of my hobbies is entering sweepstakes. People think I am crazy when they hear this but I have won hundreds of prizes including $10,000 cash last April and many vacations.

Three of the Websites I visit on a daily basis and are all related to my hobby are: Sweepstakes.com, Onlinesweepstakes.com and Sweepsheet.com. They inform the public on how to become a sweepstaker and the purpose of all these sites are to teach the average person the simple rules of how to begin the hobby. There is detailed copyright information listed on all these sites. Every site is updated regularly except for Sweepstakestoday.com, it had last been updated in 2004. There is individual owners listed for each site.

The next two that I researched were: Facebook.com and Yahoo.com, I am on these two sites several times a day to either send a email or chat with friends..

Facebook definitely has many purposes including sharing information and entertaining the masses! Its a great place to connect with friends and family and play games. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook but there is several names listed as owners. It has been updated today so its very current unlike some of the others. Their is detailed information on Facebooks copyright laws.

Yahoo.com
Has many purposes, mostly looking up anything you would like to know! You can chat with friends, look up movie times, weather or directions to destinations. They have several owners listed. Their site is updated daily. They are definitely credible and well known as one of the top search engines.

All of the sites I visited were organized pretty similar. They all had breadcrumb trails, site maps and search utilitys. The only site that had obtrusive ad spaces was Facebook, of course I am sure they need ads to generate revenue for their site. One thing I did notice is that none of the sites offer phone#s for contact information, only e-mail addresses. I understand peoples needs for privacy but for the bigger sites such as Facebook, I just recently encountered a problem with my husbands business page we could not fix and there is no one to talk to and the problem wasn't listed in their help page! I think if your serving millions of people a day you need phone personnel!

Cheri Zaras-Reflection

I learned alot in the video and slides on Social Networking sites. Classmates.com was one of the first social networking sites I have ever used a few years ago. It was exciting to find people I hadn’t talked to in years but it was short lived for me because it seemed it was hard to stay connected because of a monthly cost to be joined to be part of the site. MySpace always has scared me being the mom of a teenage daughter and hearing so many negative things about the dangers of it. I monitored my daughter’s use of it when it first came out and now it’s already obsolete in our household because Facebook is the new replacement for us. I consider Facebook a curse and a blessing. I was introduced to it by my 55 year old friend about a year ago. I consider myself a participant user, it’s fun and I like checking it briefly a few times a day but I don’t feel compelled to have it connected to my phone so I have to know everyone’s status updates, that’s just too much! I wish I never introduced it to my husband because now he is borderline obsessive with it! Twitter holds no interest for me; I feel it’s intrusive to have my phone sending me messages all day letting me know what my friends are doing. If I want to know what my friends are doing I call them or I just check Facebook. I don’t think Twitter will last long. There are so many other better social networking sites. The concept of Ning is scary to me. I just have no desire to talk to someone unless I know their identity. I guess it’s just the cautious side of me. I think that the Bebo panic button sounds like a great idea. I would just be worried about it being used for the wrong reasons, but I think it’s a great idea to protect our kids. But parents need to take a more proactive role in guarding what their kids are doing. I don’t think its snooping but having the computer in a public place is the best way to monitor and keep them safe! I found it very interesting that the creator of Facebook, Mark Zucherberg is only 23 years old. That’s amazing to have thought of this technology concept that has changed all our lives was created by such a young guy. I didn’t know that Microsoft has invested $240 billion in Facebook. That shows once again that Microsoft once again is keeping ahead of the game in technology and sees that Facebook is an awesome tool in making money and connecting millions of people. I haven’t really had anything personal affect me in the use of Facebook but I have heard of several acquaintance that have gotten divorced because of direct personal information they posted to Facebook that should have not been advertised. To me posting personal information on Facebook is like screaming information to the world and you have to be careful what you say or it will come back to bite you! If you are a very private person and do not like people knowing your business then you have to very careful what you post because once that information is out there pretty much anyone can access it!! I guess I’m amazed at how peoples judgment is so lapsed when they are posting negative information about employers while they are working, that’s just blatant stupidity to me, are you looking to get fired?