Since a lot of people use Facebook now, more information is becoming public. This makes it easier for stalkers to track their preys and get information about them. Cyberstalkers mostly do this by creating fake accounts to monitor friends, colleagues and even family members (according to http://www.onlinecollegecourses.com/). If you think of stalkers, the first thing that comes to mind are dark and creepy persons that secretly watch girls or boys they like. Ex-relationships may also have a large share in the stalker industry. However, because Facebook is getting more popular by the day, stalking becomes more easy for everyone!

Research shows that Americans use Facebook 2 hours a day. In this time they also spy on friends and family members. Is this stalking? Only if the person doesn’t want the other person watching (so if they are not friends on Facebook). However, due to the fact that you can make dummy Facebook accounts (up to 10 before Facebook blocks your IP address), you can gain access to your  prey which you want to stalk.

According to the Inforgraphic below, 3% of Twitter usage is stalking other people. Youtube only has 1.5%, but Facebook has a whopping 16% of stalker usage. 88% of students that use Facebook admits that they check on ex-relationships, and 74% admits that they look on the Facebook page of the new lover of those exes.

The Infographic below explains it all it a good way!

TED is a social platform based on ideas. Where Kickstarter is based on projects, Threadless is based on clothing and Facebook is based on social contacts, TED focusses on ideas. It gives people the opportunity to share ideas, and comment on them. These ideas are in the form of talks (TED Talks to be precise). These talks are mostly conferences about certain ideas that scientists have. An example is a talk from Johanna Blakley about the downfall of gender due to social media.

She argues that the gender based advertising is going to decline due to the fact that social media targets persons, and not groups of persons. This idea can be very interesting to some people. This is mostly discussed in the comments, right below the video. But even more, there is a special TED Conversations page in the navigation bar of the site, which allows users to start their own discussions. Say for instance you agree with what Johanna’s view on the change in society. This can be brought up in these discussion groups, in which everyone can agree or disagree with the starter. It also gives a structured view of comments, so you can see who is reacting to whom. Basically, it offers a platform to debate certain ideas that users of TED have. Of course, the ideas that you have don’t have to based upon the TED Talks, you can also put in your own thoughts (which most users do).

Something new on TED is TED-Ed. This is short for TED Education. These are not ideas worth spreading, but lessons worth spreading. So basically, if you think a certain lecture is good, and you want to share it with everyone, you can recommend it on TED-Ed. The beauty of this platform is that it offers a lecture (in the form of a video), but also offers questions after the video, so you can dig in to the material. After that there is a discussion group, in which you can discuss the lecture. It is basically a short lecture (including questions) for everyone to watch. The level of these lectures is mostly pretty easy, but it gives you more information than when you look up a subject on let’s say Wikipedia. It is hard to embed this in a WordPress post, so I will just post a link with an example. Be sure to check one of the lectures out!

http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-breathing-works-nirvair-kaur

We all know the days when there’s nothing on TV and all the regular sites on the internet have nothing fun to report. Mindlessly staring at your screen, clicking on some links, bored to death. After you’ve read this, this will never happen again! Welcome to the magical world of Stumbling!

First of all, an introduction video, so you don’t have to read 🙂

So basically, it is a search engine only showing the best links. This works by users rating the particular sites. If you need some information about games, just type in games in the StumbleUpon search engine and you’ll get the results that other people prefer. This isn’t like google, the more you pay, the higher your link is. This is based on user ratings. A new way of searching. This is however not my favorite method of stumbling.

Google works just fine as a search engine. It is however when you don’t now what you want to search for, you’ll start Stumbling. Just register and download the toolbar for your internet browser. This will give you a large stumble button in the web browser. Press this button and it’ll take you to a website that is interesting for you (based on your settings). The website’s you’ll stumble upon differ from person to person. You’ll need to set your interests in the settings menu for the best results. For instance, i like music, sience, technology, web-humor, photography. In this setting I will mostly stumble opun sites that have interesting ideas about these topics. Quite easy if I may say, but believe me, it gets really addictive. Time flies when you’re stumbling.Therefore I will close with a warning. DON’T STUMBLE WHEN YOU HAVE EXAMS, it may seriously hurt your results.