Online shopping is now, for many people, something that has taken the place of going out and physically buying goods in stores. It has become so popular that the Monday following "Black Friday", the insane sales day following Thanksgiving, has been named "Cyber Monday". Cyber Monday is basically the equivalent to Black Friday only it is strictly online. This is just one way that proves E-Commerce has changed dramatically. From small businesses to large corporations and franchises, almost everyone has a website and is involved in online sales. For only being around close to 13 years, web shopping has gone on to earn over a $200 billion through online transactions. It is said that many of today's consumer stores earn close to, if not over, 50% of their revenue from their online sales. When online shopping first began, it had an estimating cost of anywhere between $7000 and $12000 to host a website. Now, you can own and operate your own online store for as low as $1000. E-Commerce has taken a huge role in computer use, I know that from my personal experience a majority of elders in my family don't know how to use a computer to do anything except shop. Over the past few years even, e-commerce has blown up, from Ebay to Amazon.com, shoppers are now bidding, buying, and selling things online with no recollection of how it has changed. One big thing that many retailers are doing to help shoppers, and help themselves is making the online shopping experience very interconnected. They are making the buying process in the fewest amount of steps possible, as easy as possible for the consumer. This is great for the consumer because there is less of a chance to get confused and it is great for the retailer because the less confused the consumer the less likely they are to want to call the company and get help or talk with someone. Overall, there are many stats and numbers that you can look at to tell that the growth of e-commerce has been huge, but it doesn't even really take numbers to know this, it would almost take a comparison of people raising hands or a survey. Honestly, even just a few years ago the amount of people who even browsed the internet has probably doubled. I believe that e-commerce is the best way to shop, now that they are becoming free shipping and the same sales as stores there is no reason not to shop online besides patience. Even in the corporate world, it is more green to complete orders over the internet and use e-commerce to do business. I believe that e-commerce has grown tremendously, but I don't believe it is anywhere near finished.
Password Protected
Having something password protected should mean that it should be safe from harm, hidden, and only people with restricted access can get to it. Unfortunately, this day and age things are getting a little bit more tough. Something that is password protected, may now just be protected for a certain length of time until someone is able to crack that code and get into what used to be private information. This is becoming a common occurrence around the globe, there are many people who get their information hacked or stolen everyday. Although, there are many good reason or uses for being able to crack into someones files, for instance having your files recovered if you forgot your password, or your computer has a virus and you need someone to get your files or programs off. The only thing is, I've never really know to many people to have only positive experience with passwords. Usually passwords are made up of a significant ones names or a pets name even a special date, or a combination of many things, and honestly the people who want to get into your files and into your accounts know this. Many people who break or crack into people password protected accounts know the general makeup of a persons password, and there are many easy ways to find what these significant people, places, and things are. Think if you have a facebook or any sort of social network page, you have your name, pictures of loved ones, in significant places and the pictures are dated. This almost just turns it into a guessing game. There are many different ways that hackers find your password, there is weak encryption, guessing, and even a dictionary. Each of these ways are usually successful in breaking the code. There are also many other ways to crack or break into accounts or steal things without finding the password. You may also be able to just get the information out of someone from just talking to them, or using pretext to help lie to someone and get information from someone that will help you get things from them without them knowing. One thing that may help them is that many people use the same password for many accounts, such as bank, email, social network, computer login, and the list goes on. What companies and sites have begun to start doing is creating a more diverse trickier code for passwords. Many sites and companies now have you enter only a certain amount of letters, a few numbers and maybe one or two special characters. By doing this it diversifies and creates a larger to infinite amount of combination's the hacker will have to try before he/she is able to get into your account. Also the longer the password the longer it will take to figure out. Just going from 5 characters to 6 characters it could take days longer to crack. Overall, it is better to constantly change your passwords, make them diverse, create unrecognizable patterns such as lower and upper case letters, numbers and even characters and try to create them as complex as possible without constantly forgetting them.
The World is Flat
Thomas Friedman decided to write a book called "The World is Flat: A brief history of the 21st century", this book mainly talks about the globalization of the 21st century and how the world is becoming figuratively flat. It is almost a hard concept to originally grasp, but the more you think about it, it is almost scary to realize. When he talks about how the world is becoming "flat", he is basically saying that the world is becoming more connected, and intertwined with each other. This is a very true statement, now more than ever before we are connected to every place on the globe, and not only connected, but at rapid speeds. Our parents never knew what it was like to skype with friends and family when they are in Europe or Asia, they never had the opportunity to chat someone who was all the way across the world and in seconds get a response, this is a new generation of technology and it is infact causeing the world to become "flat". As a college student it is difficult to be in the position to enjoy all of these things, but at the same time be scared to death of them. I understand that by having all these means of communication we are allowing ourselves to save money and be able to converse with people we would never get the change to converse with if the technology was not there. The technology also has its good points because we are able to use it as a resource to answer questions or do work, find things which we would never before be able to find. It even has been able to help us when we needed something fixed, like tech support, we arent able to reach someone in America we just call and someone in India or some other country will answer and be able to fix our problem. The only thing is that all these great things can also be seen as bad. By having this easy communication and connection with the rest of the world it also can take away opportunities from us as graduating college students. One of the ways Friedman suggests that the world is going flat is because the global job market is now becoming level. Some one is China who may be more qualified can now go on the internet and apply for the same job and I apply for. It is scary to think that as the world becomes more flat it also becomes way more competitive. As a college senior I am not only competing with graduates in the area or in America but qualified graduates all around the world. Overall, I believe Friedman's article is very true, and almost nerve racking, but should open our eyes to see that we need to work harder to compete with the new flat world.
Michigan Attorney Gen. assistants blog gets him in some touble
Michigans Attorney Generals assistant, Andrew Shrivell, started a few debates after blogging about Michigan University's student assembly president for being openly gay. There are many arguements that deal with this compromising situation. There is the situation that a government and state official made a blog publically calling out a college student for being homosexual, and theres the debate that the assistant did this on his own time and not at work, which is covered by the first amendment. Michigans Attorney General sided with his assistant, saying that his actions to post this blog showing his opinion and views against the gay student leadering, saying he had a "radical gay agenda" were his right, and he had every right to say what he did because he has the freedom of speech. The assistant continued by saying more things about the student president, things such as he helped morph a conservative white male into a radical gay activist. I truely believe that I would have to side with the Attorney General on this one. Although, Mr. Shrivell is in the public eye, he has the right to speak his mind when it is on his own time. I believe that he could have gone about doing this in a more professional way, but he is protected by the freedom of speech and if he wants to speak out against gays and homosexuals then so be it. Shrivell also came back to say that he was a Christian and therefore he believes that homosexuallity is wrong and is a sin, and once again he is right again, according the Christian beliefs homosexuallity is a sin and is severly frowned upon. Overall, I know that since he plays a large role in government and state affairs this was kind of a shock to many, but again as long as he did this on his own time and not on the job I believe he shouldn't be criticized for doing anything wrong, wrong meaning against any rules, personally people may think what he did was wrong, but legally he was inside the lines.
Green IT
"Going Green" has now become a huge phenomenon, and has made a significant impact on companies and industries world wide. Many companies use green solutions to help represent their brand name as being more energy efficient, other companies go green to just create less waste and scrap, which it most cases leads to creating more profit. Many people when you mention going green, you think of recycling and usually plastics such as bottles and cans, well now as the "green revolution" has grown in finding what we can do with recycling or becoming more energy efficient, computers and IT have been able to tap into ways they can conserve power and become more energy efficient. Some of the ways that IT can become more green are by creating more energy efficient chips and disk drives, also you can switch large personal computers for more thin energy efficient ones, and to help even more you can power all computer equiptment from a renewable energy resource. The government has also help in making it a point to create more green IT processes by regulating laws and helping enforce standards that go along with the green initiative. Many computer companies have done research to find the most helpful way to go green, one that they came upon was to make the life of the computer longer. By creating a more durable and more energy efficient computer the life expectancy of the computer would go up because it would not have to work as hard to do all the functions. Manufacturing new computers has a huge ecological footprint, how they are using IT to help this situation is by giving the opportunity for upgrades in computer, keeping the same computer, but upgrading or buying new RAM which has a far less ecological footprint. There are larger ways as well that IT has made an impact in the green world that many people overlook. By using IT you are able to cut out a large amount of paper usage. Using IT such as online banking, email, chats, and other forms of communication, you are able to cut out a majority of your typical paper usage. Overall, I believe there is a lot more to come from the IT green movement, I think this is something that many companies and industries are going to put as their main focus. It is profitable, and helps the environment, and I know many people overlook ways that IT has created green solutions, but I know personally I am going to look for them and try to take full advantage.
LONGTAILs
Long tails are the makeup of the extremely small niche markets that are searched for on the web. It is the statistical distribution of the "other" things that makeup the Google searches or advertisements on the internet. Long tails are found in everything, whether you are searching top places to vacation, top places to live, or top Google searches. You find these long tails by seeing what the top few items are most popular in the search or the topic and the long tail makes up the rest. This is something that many advertisers use to help market new products or new services. Many marketers can use long tails to find what searches are the most popular to be able to market that product or to that particular market, others can use the information to find what else is being searched in the long tail and make a profit off of that. Excite.com was able to find the top 3% most popular searches and try to market to that crowd, they weren't able to find out how to make a profit off the other 97%, Google on the other hand was. Google was able to find the niche markets in the search engine and make a whopping $50 Billion off of this market. Many companies are able to use this technique to help build their profits and grow their products and services. Many companies such as Netflixs, Amazon.com, and Rhapsody music use long tail to help build a majority of their sales, a few of these companies makeup over 80% sales due to long tail marketing. By using long tail marketing companies were able to not just stock the top products but find what ALL people wanted and stock the most products in their market possible. One example is Rhapsody.com has an inventory of over 700,000 songs, and Wal-Mart only has 39,000. That is an amazingly huge difference is what you are offered as a customer. By using a long tail or examining long tails companies and individuals, depending on the data you're looking for, you will be able to satisfy everyone's needs and have a larger market willing to return.
Google Docs
Honestly I don't really know to much about GOOGLE DOCS, I haven't heard of them very much until this class. I have always had to write my papers and do my presentations, and have used Microsoft Office. After learning the perks of Google docs, such as the free price tag and the ability to use it whenever you have internet access, this is something that I might have used more if I just knew about it. Although Microsoft Office applications may have more to them, where you can add more things and be able to customize them a bit more, the Google docs are still very useful and versatile, you have the same ability to create a presentation or spreadsheet as you would using Microsoft. I believe Google should make this more known. I use the computer for a majority of the day, and had never really known of the usefulness of Google Docs, or even the existence of Google Docs. I believe that if Google is proud of this creation and application, they should show people that it is out there, and have people advertise a little more. I know that the price of the application may not help its credibility, because whether it is nice or not I believe that the hundred dollar price difference between the Google Docs and Microsoft Office applications helps show that MS is a bit more credible, "you get what you pay for" and when something is free you are always looking for a catch, it may be that it is difficult to use or it may just be not as great as the other application, but all you know is that the one you pay for you will be able to get a little more out of. Google Docs is definitely something I will now be able to consider when writing paper or doing something that MS office might have originally done for me. MS office may find this to be a threat to their applications, but overall they still hold a majority of the market. I don't necessarily think that Google Docs could become a threat, or atleast a major one, MS office has always, as long as Ive know it, had a HUGE share of the market if not the whole market and for something else, even if its Google, to come and try to compete I would be skeptical. Many are just used to using MS office, which can easily enough be the breaking point for users to go with MS office.
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