Although I was exempt from the blog posts last week, I think I will write about Kiva after all. I had never even heard of Kiva before this semester, but after a little reading up on the site I am extremely intrigued.

Kiva’s tag line is “Loans That Change Lives” and, as evidenced by its users, this is a very true statement. Kiva is a micro-loan site — anyone can browse through the many profiles of people in need of loans and their reasons behind them and decide to loan money directly to that person, and earn a little bit of interest along the way. There is no middle man, there is no bank. You know that your money is going directly to the person in need. Not to mention many of these people couldnt get to a bank anyways, and even if they could they would probably not qualify for a loan. “Kiva’s mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty.”

Kiva and its participants are helping people who can’t get the help any other way. I have not lent any money through this site yet, but I fully intend to.

Digg is social news website, and the first of its kind. I have known what Digg was for a while and have seen Digg applications on other websites, but this was the first time I have perused the Digg website itself – It’s addicting. I just spent an hour looking at “Celebs With No Photo Shop,” “Lady Gaga Before She Went Gaga,” “Crazy Tattoos,” and “15 Surprising Logos,” among other things. Its great if you just want to waste time looking at cool or funny posts, but you can also narrow your searches to things such as World & Business, Technology, Entertainment, and Sports, etc…

With this site it is easy to keep up with current events and you can see what your peers are reading and enjoying as well. If you find a post particularly interesting, stimulating, hilarious, informative or what not, you simply “Digg” it. The posts with the most Digg’s are on the front pare and the rest are ordered accordingly.

With Digg I was able to easily find the latest on the new healthcare bill by clicking on “World & Business” and then “News” – sure enough, there it was, the third post on that page.

I will definitely be returning to this site regularly.

Online fame is everywhere, weather its a popular blogger, a YouTube star, or a up and coming model. Everyday, people set out to become famous, its a pretty common dream, its the American Dream, actually.

There is a whole slew of stars that got their start on the internet. If you have any real talent in, say, the music industry, chances are if you post enough videos someone will discover you. Take Justin Bieber for example – a 15 year old who currently has four songs on top 40 radio stations across the nation. He got his start on YouTube (roughly 3 years ago) singing covers of popular hip-hop songs until one day he was discovered by Usher. Just the other day I heard his new song playing on the radio and it is featuring Ludacris! According to Wikipedia he is “the only artist in Billboard history to have four singles from a debut album chart in the Top 40 of the Hot 100 before the album’s release.”

If I could sing I would be all over the YouTube trend – why not? It gets you the most exposure the quickest, and it obviously pays off.

YouTube is  the second largest search engine on the web, behind Google. This statistic doesn’t sit well with me – I don’t know about you, but I would have never considered YouTube a search engine. I don’t go there when I want to research a topic or learn about new things. YouTube is NOT a search engine, but it is a resource, nonetheless. It is self-contained – it only has so much “information” to offer its users. When you search for a key word, YouTube brings up results that have been uploaded to their website only, rather than searching the entire web for related results like search engines such as Google and Bing. According to Wikipedia (also, not a search engine because it is self-contained) the definition of a search engine is:

“A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are usually presented in a list of results and are commonly called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike Web directories, which are maintained by human editors, search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human input.”

When searching for the key words “desk chair” on top rated “Search Engines” the results are:

Google: 13,100,000 results

Bing: 15,700,000 results

YouTube: 4,290 results

Yahoo: (number of results not given)

Do these even compare? Why is YouTube considered a search engine rather than a database?

(Wikipedia: A database is an integrated collection of logically-related records or files consolidated into a common pool that provides data for one or more multiple uses. One way of classifying databases involves the type of content, for example: bibliographic, full-text, numeric, image)

You may have seen this headline on the internet “Mom’s White Teeth Trick” and been tempted to click on it, and those of you who did may have even been further tempted to act on it and sign up for the free sample. I would be one of those people. BIG MISTAKE. I got the whitening trials, but I was charged nearly $100 in membership fees for things from teeth whitening gel to weight-loss tip websites.

Most of us have been taught to spot scams, ignore pop-ups, and be skeptical of online ads. If its too good to be true, it probably is. Well, the newest scam that is apparently roping in quite a bit of people is disguising ads or scams as blogs. The specific trap that I fell into was what appeared to be a mom who found a great deal online and wanted to share it with others. It didn’t sound like a scam, it didn’t look like an ad, it didn’t sound like it was written as a promo. It looked like a blog and it read like a blog. It started off with a woman telling her story – coffee drinker, smoker, single mother, middle age, along with some other relevant and irrelevant filler sentences.

She  talked about how she found two different websites selling teeth whitening products that were offering free samples. These samples, used back to back for two months, were supposed to accomplish what $50 in Crest White strips would get you. And it wasn’t just a site wide offer, she had coupon codes which made it look like a “secret deal” – you got the sample for free and just had to pay $1.99 in shipping. I figured even if the product was never delivered I was only out 4 bucks. Looking back, it was the coupon codes and the fact that she was mentioning two independent companies that made me trust that what she was saying wasn’t a scam. Turns out there are several of these blogs with the exact same story just slightly reworded and a different woman claiming to be behind the blog. The ones that I have seen even had the exact same blog theme so they look identical.

I later learned that the two companies were in cahoots with each other, which proved to be a brilliant tactic. Why would there be a single ad for two competing companies? Thats exactly what I thought, and thats exactly why so many people fall for the scam. Now all you have to do is Google it and you will be able to figure out that it is a scam, but last year, when I fell for it and Googled it there were no warnings out there because it was fairly new.

My point is: Stay skeptical, do your research (I did and STILL fell for it).

My other point: What does this mean for blogging? Will blogs become less credible? Hopefully a stop can be put to this kind of scam and we can better learn to spot them.

(P.S. I got my money back)