I think that at first glance a lot of information out on the web can seem empowering. It is really nice to have all kinds of information right at your finger tips. You can find out just about anything whenever you need it. Say you heard about something and you weren't really sure what it meant, so just for you own personal information, you go onto the internet just to get a basic understanding of your topic. This is one thing Wikipedia is good for. For example, if someone had no idea what a "blog" was, they could just whip open Wikipedia and get the basic idea. If you are looking for just a basic idea of something for personal use, the web can seem very empowering.

When it comes to school, and I am doing a project or paper that requires research, I tend to find the web overwhelming. It's nice to be able to go onto Google and have thousands of options to choose from. A lot of options, though, can be dangerous because sometimes its not good when you have to much information. Once I start digging deeper, and comparing websites I sometimes find that different websites will have slightly different information. When this happens it is hard to figure out which website to trust. The good thing is is that there there are ways to find out which websites are credible and which are not.

Blog Entry # 2:

Writing your profile:

I did my profile on Pele. Pele was a huge soccer star in the 50's and 60's. Although I already new a lot about his accomplishments, there were still a lot of them I was unaware of. I learned more about at what points in Pele's life time he did certain things. The thing I learned and found the most interesting about Pele, was more of his personal life. I read a lot about how he grew up in a very poor family, and how how coming from that has turned him into a huge legacy.

While I was writing this profile I discovered that I write a lot better when I am writing about things that I enjoy. I really wanted to make the reader understand the impression I was trying to give off about Pele, so I wrote the paper one sentence at a time. That could be a good thing or a bad thing. I have done papers like this before, but I had never really heard of them as being called a "profile" or giving off a "dominant impression." It was kind of cool to really focus on the impression I wanted to give instead of just focusing on the facts.

I started writing my profile by just doing the introduction. I didn't do any research on that part because I wanted that part to be just about the things that I already knew. After that I started to read a lot of things that would back up what my introduction said. After I read a lot of different things, I started to write the paper. The one thing I think that hindered me a lot in the paper was that I over analyzed everything. Like I said, I literally wrote it one sentence at a time. I also felt like I left a lot about his life out of the paper, but I was trying to focus mainly on creating the impression. There is also a ton of information on him to write about, that it was very hard to keep it to 3 or 4 pages. One other thing I probably did wrong was all of my citing, I didn't really understand completely how to do that. Over all I think I accomplished what I wanted to, which was give off this impression of "greatness."