Informative Media

   Like most post secondary students, after completing a lengthy paper, I often sit back and think to myself "What the heck did I do before Wikipedia?".  I remember when Wikipedia was first gaining momentum and it was banned from being used in any research for our papers, as it was not a reliable source.  How things have changed.  Today I use Wikipedia for academic papers, as well as finding out the name of that actor, you know, the one with the brown hair who was also in Die Hard?  I can't imagine a world without Wikipedia.

   Wikipedia is run by a non-profit organization called The Wikimedia foundation.  I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Wikipedia accepts no funding from the Government, nor any other corporate investors, rather it is strictly run by the people for the people.  This actually led me to make a small donation to the website.  It is nice to know that there is no agenda behind the site, and is upholding their non-biased rule themselves, by not accepting any outside corporate or government funding.  For more information visit:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Overview

   I am fairly new to Reddit.com, but I have become hooked.  Reddit is a social news and entertainment website.  Users post news stories or silly pictures and others are open to post comments or commentary on the stories.  It is also an outlet for politicians and celebrities to communicate to the masses.  Often these people of importance will tweet that they will be on Reddit.com for the next hour answering questions, at this point their fans/voters can go onto the website and interact with the "famous" politician or actor.  It's a really cool idea.

  Reddit was created by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2006.  Reddit.com currently operates as a separate subsidiary of its parent company Advance Publications.  Advanced Publications owns many credible news papers in the United States.

   I, like many people, use Google every day.  I doubt there is anyone in North America who doesn't use Google on a regular basis.  One thing I find a little bit scary is just how big Google has become.  When researching who owns various companies they are nearly all affiliated with Google in some way.  For instance YouTube was bought out by Google in 2006.  I recently watched a documentary on the search engine and it is scary the power it has.  We can see our houses from space using Google Maps, and somehow whenever I go to search something Google seems to know what I'm looking for before I finish inputting my search.  It is also interesting to note that every single search you have ever done or will ever do is saved in Google's database in California for LIFE.  Think about that the next time you go to Google something.

   I also use GMail as my primary email provider.  I noticed that whenever I received or sent an email, a new ad would pop up on the side of my browser that eerily pertained to something I had just wrote in an email or received in an email.  This leads me to conclude that Google is definitely selling our information to other corporations.

  The search engine was created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996 while they were PhD students at Stanford University.  Google is now a publicly traded company, with big time investors such as; Kleiner Perkins Caufield &Byer, venture capitalists who also have a hand in Amazon, Electronic Arts, Netscape and Segwey, to name a few.

  Google is also partners with companies such as; Microsoft, Nokia, Fox News and the NASA Ames Research Center.  For more information visit:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google