"How twitter will change the way we live"

Time Magazine published an article June 5th, 2009 about how Twitter is affecting the way we live and interact daily.

What is #HACKEDEDU?
#hackededu is just a small example of how Twitter affects our day to day lives. "40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about the future of schools." Participants were encouraged to post anything about the conference on twitter and just adding #hackededu. What does that do? Well, if you go to www.search.twitter.com you can just type in #hackededu and you would get all the posts that included #hackededu. At first it was only participants present at the conference who were tweeting, but half an hour into the conference, people that weren't present began to follow the thread and commenting, offering suggestions to those in the room at the actual event.

how is real-time search affecting search engines? what moves are search engines doing as a reaction to growth of real-time information and search?
"Websites that once saw their traffic dominated by Google search queries are seeing a growing number of new visitors coming from "passed links" at social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it's just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit.
At its heart, Google's system is built around the slow, anonymous accumulation of authority: pages rise to the top of Google's search results according to, in part, how many links point to them, which tends to favor older pages that have had time to build an audience. That's a fantastic solution for finding high-quality needles in the immense, spam-plagued haystack that is the contemporary Web. But it's not a particularly useful solution for finding out what people are saying right now, the in-the-moment conversation that industry pioneer John Battelle calls the "super fresh" Web. Even in its toddlerhood, Twitter is a more efficient supplier of the super-fresh Web than Google."


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1902604,00.html#ixzz0hnGybfBb


what type of content do you suggest we hashtag with #lausocial?
Argh...this is a difficult question...eno what are we supposed to hashtag with lausocial besides stuff related to class? Our class is about new media, so shouldn't any content that we hashtag with #lausocial be about new media??

Another wonderful assignment…woohoo… :-| Second week of the semester and I’m already starting to hate looking at my laptop.
So..An event outside of LAU.. Alright a night out. Saturday me and a couple of very awesome people headed up to Broumana to a restaurant called Calvados. Best Hawaiian pizza ever. I’m telling you, it was WONDERFUL. I would recommend it to anyone. And I do. Please if you have time, head up to Calvados and try their food. You’ll fall in love with the atmosphere, the music, and especially the food. Food is LIFE. Well, sometimes.
Anyways, we decided to head down, and of course, it had gotten much colder in the couple of hours we had been inside. And guess who didn’t have a very warm jacket on? Yeaup you guessed it, yours truly!
We headed back down to Beirut and decided the night was young. What shall a couple of extremely awesome people do on a Saturday night at 130? Hit up the Gemayz? I think so! And that is exactly what we did! Hello Gemayz <3 (Ps, for those of you unfamiliar with Beirut, Gemayz is a street filled with pubs and restaurants in Beirut. It’s actually called Gemayzeh, but because we are super cool…we call it the Gemayz. By the way when you say Gemayz, you have to suddenly develop an accent. You can’t just say it normally. That’s the rule. I didn’t make it up, that’s just the way it is. Compliments of Ayman Abdel Hadi of course. Thank you very much ayman for the wonderful word and the rules. Life would be pointless without you!)
A couple of equally awesome friends of ours were already in Gemayz so we decided to join. Yay hurray for Jukebox. For those of you that don’t know where jukebox is, well..don’t ask me. My sense of direction is terrible. It took me a good two weeks to figure out how to get home from university. And I live right at Upper Gate..I’m not joking. I still can’t figure out how to get to a lot of places that I visit often. SO, I’m sorry to those who wanted to know. But ask someone! And then..GO! It’s another wonderful place. Kind of small, but eh, whatever :p
Anyways, that’s basically it. Mashroo3 um…what’s the opposite of fashil?? Anyways that’s about it. I hope you enjoyed my wonderful narrative of “A NIGHT OUT”.

We came, we saw, we conquered

Down at the Safadi Fine Arts building of LAU, we sort of have a reputation for being..weird. We're not, I swear. We're just way too cool for anyone to understand us :)
We sit around smoking (most of us), some of us play instruments, and we take pictures. But don't be fooled...we don't take any ordinary pictures. We ACT out scenes and such for pictures.
Don't worry, what you see here isn't a real fight. Just a couple of us Fine Arts people...posing. There are actually maybe 50 pictures playing out this sequence of hilarious events, and I’m just going to share one with you guys. Even one picture might be too much. Yes we are all adults attending a well known university in Lebanon but we do have our moments. Doesn’t everyone?
So basically what happened is a “fight” between Khaldoun (Kay) and Ramadan (Roudz). Starting from the first shove, to the ending where Roudz ends up on the ground, Kay holding him down and Khaled counting to three. AH but there’s a catch! The first time Kay pins Roudz to the ground, Roudz ends up getting up. And it happens again. And again. And again.
The fight actually got quite boring after a while cuz it WOULDN’T end…I mean COME ON IT’S A FAKE FIGHT! Let’s end it!!
Finally the fight ends, as you can see in the picture.
FINALLY!!!

Haha while we are on the topic of the coolness of us Fine Arts people, we had Club day last week. There were tents set up around the Fine Arts area and there were bulletin boards in each tent so that the clubs could hang their posters and such. Well, we were bored, so..what did we decide to do? We made a room out of the bulletin boards in the tent at around 7pm and a bunch of us (about 8 of us wonderfully cool Fine Arts people) sat inside the room and decided to call it our house. We all just smoked and then Roudz decided to tell scary stories. MASHROO3 FASHIL!! Hahaha he couldn’t get through even one story because everyone kept interrupting with their input.
Yes, we seriously are THAT cool.

Blogging Cook

"Being Lebanese is not a hindrance, but not and advantage...I have a great advantage of being born here and living here until I was 21. Being an Arab is a hindrance, not a MAJOR hindrance, but it's not something I play out" -Anissa Helou
Chef and Food Expert Anissa Helou came to speak to us about promoting through new media on thursday. Personally, I was more interested in the food. Food is an obsession of mine (as you can tell by my figure, sadly).
One point I definately agreed on? Presentation presentation presentaion. "Everything has to be well arranged...if it looks discusting, I don't want to eat it" TRUE THAT!
How many times have you looked at something and been like "ew..." Okra for example...the way it's cooked just..makes me kinda wanna puke :/ (if my mom read this she'd yell at me and tell me not to make fun of my food. She probably is reading this...hi mom...I'm sorry I don't like okra..)
So I've managed to stray completely off the topic..Anywas Ms Helou uses new media such as blogs, twitter and a website to basically promote. Kinda like a PR agent but no extra money being dished out. And she spends quite a lot of time doing it. I don't know how though, I mean I personally can't stand blogging (sorry to all those committed bloggers, once again, just letting you know I'm blogging because I HAVE to, not because I want to..) I admire her dedication to such a time consuming method of PR.
Anyways, I'm starting to get hungry...Ciao mis amores! I'm off to find something sweet to nible on!

PAUL VAN DYK

Paul Van Dyk graced us with his presence on February 20th, 2010. It was...an okay event. Nothing "wow". PVD, while being one of my favorite DJs, didn't really turn it on until maybe half an hour into his set. But all in all, a pretty decent rave :)

AVB (Armin Van Buuren) NYE-1

So December 30th, 2009, Armin Van Buuren came to Lebanon and well...pretty much dj-ed the greatest rave ever. And yes, that is me covered in glitter and confetti. It's a long story :) Well...not really. The confetti started to fall from the ceiling and instead of doing what normal people did which is not pay it any attention, I looked up. And as a result, was covered in confetti and glitter (which I continued to pick out of my clothes and such for two weeks after the event..so strange). Below is the official Mix FM video for the event, just so you can get a taste of what happened! And then y'all might come visit :D :D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN9Y3wplcA8

I'm back!

So...I'm back! It's been over a year!! I don't really know what to say. The first time I started up a blog was for Communications Media class...and now I'm writing here again...for the same reason. Another Comm class requiring a blog. Blah. AND I HAD TO SIGN UP WITH TWITTER. Ever since twitter came out, I was SOOOOO against it...but I guess now I don't really have an option... :( It's the rape of new media... So expect to hear from me until the end of the semester! woohoo :)