Technology and Writing

I just wanted to thank everyone who posted his/her comment on the blog.

It was a pleasure taking this class with such unique group and I wish you all the best!

Good luck to everyone of you!

Farhad.

Here is the weekly video message for this last week of the class.

Another Bebin.tv and Farhad

This week’s update of Bebin.tv reminds us and informs us about the need for those who are going through bone marrow transplant programs. The Los Angeles Persian community has teamed up this year for the second time to help the people in need of this procedure to volunteer and donate.

I never knew how the process works until now. Thanks to Writing 330, I’ve been more involved in the process of blogging and web 2.0 by doing more researching and keeping up with the RSS format pages.

As we have learned a white paper brings  about a general problem and then proceeds to find ways in which you can go about and solve the issues at hand. They are meant to help void of problems as well as help people make different choices. White papers are informative and necessary for organization, but the collaborative factor can help people work together in a team and learn how to work with one another. This is a vital aspect of most of the work you will do when you get out of college, and it is helpful to start getting practice as quick as you can. For our particular assignment we are going to focus on the once purely, fun and social facebook that has become more threatening and serious not only to your character but also can affect your entire future.

It is no secret that these days you can complete a large publishing (or other) project without ever meeting your collaborators or editros face to face. In fact, I have done a couple of those long distance collaborations myself. But this article about outsourcing copyediting to India, from Businessweek, drew my attention nevertheless.

The We 2.0 White Paper wasa good example of a relatively simple way of informing users about these new techologies and the implicatons they have for the busiess and professional communities. Prior to this class I mostly understood White Papers based on my past experiences in policy or internationa relatons classes. I came to see these types of papers as informative tools for addressing policy drawbacks vs. their benifits. This White Paper showed me how they can be used much more generally to illuminate certain issues, technological or otherwise, pertaining to the ability of people to use new technologies in their everyday lives.

I read the white paper that explained how companies can harness the new Web 2.0 tools that have emerged, and why it is beneficial for companies to adopt these new technologies.  The main audience for this paper were businesses, both big and small, but the focus tended to be on bigger companies that still used older non-Web 2.0 ways to solve customer service issues.  This paper's purpose was to explain how tools like wikis, blogs, and RSS could save the company money, improve customer service, and ultimately help boost the company's visibility on the web and on search engines like Google.  Although the paper uses research, it is much less formal than a scholarly research paper.  There were no formal citation entries like a full bibliography.  Rather, the paper cited various companies tha