HW 25: Baghdad

After reading the foreword and introduction to “Baghdad Burning” by Ahdaf Souief and James Ridgeway, I found it very interesting about what was really going on in Iraq today. The forward, written by Ahdaf Soueif, was a very brief description of the blog written by “Baghdad Burning” by Riverbend. Soueif tell us what we can expect when reading the book Riverbend’s blog talks about how she feels about living in Iraq and how it has impacted her. It also states the effect it has on her family, war has on her country as well as her daily life. In the introduction Ridgeway tells us facts about what is happening in the war and how Iraq has advanced over the years. Ridgeway speaks about the background of Riverbend's culture, as well as telling us about the struggle Iraq was going through since the Gulf War up until the war that is currently going on. Reading the introduction and foreword to the book really helped me to understand the Iraqi war in an view that I won’t be able to view first hand. I had can never a picture or even think about what I would do if there was a war in my neighborhood. I am looking forward to reading this book because I want to know if this war really was worth it.

HW: 21 Danny

Dear Danny,

Since you are my best friend and you are in the same class that I had, I guess I will help you out. Chapter one is hard to understand at first and I am still not to sure but I will try to explain what I thought it meant. Virginia uses words to express and describe her feelings. I think she starts off by explaining that women need two things, Money and a room to work in. Virginia talks about women authors. Virginia also tries to change people’s opinions that women have become inferior to men. She touches on different author’s histories. That’s all I really got out of the chapter. I wish I could have helped you more but I hope this still helps you. If you ever need anything else please feel free to e-mail me anytime.

Your buddy,

Tim

HW 19 Media and the truth?

After reading “Web of Influence” by Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell I found out about what the blogosphere represents and what it does to the media. I think the second paragraph seemed to be really interesting because in March of 2003, Salam Pax, a blogger from Baghdad, was the lead story on the blogosphere when on the TV the lead story was the death of Saddam Hussein’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid. Reading this paragraph made me think that their must really be two different kinds of media. I think the main problem that the world faces in any media today is the unknown. A person can believe in what ever the news tells them but is it actually true? I feel that the saying “You have to see it to believe it” is the best saying because it’s the actual truth. I feel that certain things on the news is completely true, I just feel like the media says things to “juice” up the story. I feel that most media is the truth but I still would like to the story personally.

HW: 18. Raped 4-5 times!

After looking through Jezebel, I would have to say that the article that disgusted me the most was entitled “How to Rape 100 (Cute, Educated, Upper Middle-Class) Woman and Get Away with It” I feel that the Philadelphia jury needs to be helped because if they can’t call him a rapist after he was charged ten times with rape and possibly hundreds more, then where is the world coming to? It all has to do with Social Networking. All the girls that Jeffery M. Marsalis met on line came from Match.com. People who use Match.com and other dating services need to be careful because this is a possibility that happens more often then one thinks.
After reading the article, I read some of the comments that people posted and I feel the same way. Some people said they felt sick after reading it, and others confessed that they too were raped. This one person’s comment said they were raped 4 to 5 times and never reported it. I feel that if a person who has been raped should tell the police so that other people would not get raped. If this guy gets off the hook, then the world would have another criminal on the loose.

HW: 17b Politics Stink!

After reading this weeks assignment I would have to pick “Blogging the Presidency: An Interview with Markos Moulitsas Zuniga” because not being in any real party (not Democratic or Republican) I feel that because Zuniga spoke to the millions of people and they got Senator Trent Lott to resign is just sad on not only his part, but on everyone’s. On the other hand I think that if anyone who makes $48,000 per month in ad revenue is really smart. I think that politics is really stupid and it just makes the world argue. I think after September 11, 2001, or the days right after, I felt that Republicans, and Democrats came together and wanted to get the people who where responsible for those horrific attacks. Now, just over six years after, they went back to criticizing President Bush. I think Bush did the right thing and sent troops over. It has come to a point where I do say we should start to pull SOME troops out but we still need to find the terrorists. I do not like it when people bash our president so I would vote for Republican party again.

HW: 16-B, Pillars

After reading “Blogs: Humanizing the Face of Corporate America” an interview with Robert Scoble, the five pillars of conversational software. He say that RSS (which means “really simple syndication”) “is a teache’s way of saying it allows a blogger to offr his weblog for people to subscribe to, as well as to integrate links and news from other websites.” His five pillars include: one, is the “ease of Publishing” meaning it would be really easy to publish integrated links and news from other websites and post them onto your blog. Two, which is “discoverability” allows you to personalize and customized a blog for a companies own site (http://feedster.com/corporate/). Third is “cross-sire conversations” which allows a person to see who linked theirselfs to trackbacks. Fourth would be “permalinking” which is just allowing a person to isolate a website that will directly link you to a post. Finally the fifth is “syndication” which just means that everything just joins together. It is kind of hard to understand what Scoble means but once you learn RSS, its not that difficult.