Weavrs

As preparation for the start of the final brief next week, we were set the task of setting up a Weavr.
A Weavr is an automated bot that you create and can link to twitter, which then sends tweets related to a list of interests and likes that you enter when setting it up.
I decided to create a 50 year old divorcee called Barbara Taylor who loved to go out, dance and just have fun. I enjoyed setting it up as when you were entering details about its life you got really into it and got into their mindset. 
I then linked mine to a twitter, here is the link: https://twitter.com/#!/BabzyTT
The whole experience of setting up a weavr was very unusual as real people followed her thinking she was also a real person and it made me realise just how companies can advertise extensively using automated bots like these.

Deforestation Wiki

Another week, another brief, and unfortunately for me, another wiki. I've already stated my dislike of wetpaint as a medium for writing about issues on this blog before, so it comes to no surprise that I did not enjoy this task either. 

The task was regarding social issues, and using wikis as another form of collective intelligence and gathering information on different areas of topics such as censorship, welfare and my topic, deforestation.

I had a very limited knowledge of deforestation before this wiki. All I knew was that it involves forests, and that's only from the forest being in the actual word! But doing background research I realised that it actually a very pressing issue in today's world.

My area of discussion was regarding the creation of communities so I took this to mean groups who actively campaign about it, people who have come together to stop deforestation happening, and in the process had an effect in the world. 

I didn't find deforestation the most interesting topic to read about but I found it fascinating to see how people had came together on a range of social networks to find likeminded others and communicate with people on the other side of the world yet still make a massive difference.

Here is the link to our wiki where you can read about what I found and what the rest of my group also found: http://contemporarymediaissues.wetpaint.com/page/Deforestation