Tumblr, FB, Twitter Over Blogs

Ace! NewsFlash

Michael McDonald of San Francisco used to post his videos on a blog, but now he uses Facebook.

SAN FRANCISCO — Like any aspiring filmmaker, Michael McDonald, a high school senior, used a blog to show off his videos. But discouraged by how few people bothered to visit, he instead started posting his clips on Facebook, where his friends were sure to see and comment on his editing skills. “I don’t use my blog anymore,” said Mr. McDonald, who lives in San Francisco. “All the people I’m trying to reach are on Facebook.”

Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation.  The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said ina report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.

Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.  Blogging started its rapid ascension about 10 years ago as services like Blogger and LiveJournal became popular. So many people began blogging — to share dieting stories, rant about politics and celebrate their love of cats — that Merriam-Webster declared “blog” the word of the year in 2004.

Defining a blog is difficult, but most people think it is a Web site on which people publish periodic entries in reverse chronological order and allow readers to leave comments.  Yet for many Internet users, blogging is defined more by a personal and opinionated writing style. A number of news and commentary sites started as blogs before growing into mini-media empires, like The Huffington Post or Silicon Alley Insider, that are virtually indistinguishable from more traditional news sources.

Blogs went largely unchallenged until Facebook reshaped consumer behavior with its all-purpose hub for posting everything social. Twitter, which allows messages of no longer than 140 characters, also contributed to the upheaval.  No longer did Internet users need a blog to connect with the world. They could instead post quick updates to complain about the weather, link to articles that infuriated them, comment on news events, share photos or promote some cause — all the things a blog was intended to do.

Indeed, small talk shifted in large part to social networking, said Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder of BlogHer, a women’s blog network. Still, blogs remain a home of more meaty discussions, she said.  “If you’re looking for substantive conversation, you turn to blogs,” Ms. Camahort Page said. “You aren’t going to find it on Facebook, and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter.”

Lee Rainie, director of the Internet and American Life Project, says that blogging is not so much dying as shifting with the times. Entrepreneurs have taken some of the features popularized by blogging and weaved them into other kinds of services.  “The act of telling your story and sharing part of your life with somebody is alive and well — even more so than at the dawn of blogging,” Mr. Rainie said. “It’s just morphing onto other platforms.”

The blurring of lines is readily apparent among users of Tumblr. Although Tumblr calls itself a blogging service, many of its users are unaware of the description and do not consider themselves bloggers — raising the possibility that the decline in blogging by the younger generation is merely a semantic issue.  Kim Hou, a high school senior in San Francisco, said she quit blogging months ago, but acknowledged that she continued to post fashion photos on Tumblr. “It’s different from blogging because it’s easier to use,” she said. “With blogging you have to write, and this is just images. Some people write some phrases or some quotes, but that’s it.”

The effect is seen on the companies providing the blogging platforms. Blogger, owned by Google, had fewer unique visitors in the United States in December than it had a year earlier — a 2 percent decline, to 58.6 million — although globally, Blogger’s unique visitors rose 9 percent, to 323 million.  LiveJournal, another blogging service, has decided to emphasize communities. Connecting people who share an interest in celebrity gossip, for instance, provides the social interaction that “classic” blogging lacks, said Sue Rosenstock, a spokeswoman for LiveJournal, which is owned by SUP, a Russian online media company. “Blogging can be a very lonely occupation; you write out into the abyss,” she said.

But some blogging services like Tumblr and WordPress seem to have avoided any decline. Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic, the company that commercializes the WordPress blogging software, explains that WordPress is mostly for serious bloggers, not the younger novices who are defecting to social networking.  In any case, he said bloggers often use Facebook and Twitter to promote their blog posts to a wider audience. Rather than being competitors, he said, they are complementary.  “There is a lot of fragmentation,” Mr. Schneider said. “But at this point, anyone who is taking blogging seriously — they’re using several mediums to get a large amount of their traffic.”

While the younger generation is losing interest in blogging, people approaching middle age and older are sticking with it. Among 34-to-45-year-olds who use the Internet, the percentage who blog increased six points, to 16 percent, in 2010 from two years earlier, the Pew survey found. Blogging by 46-to-55-year-olds increased five percentage points, to 11 percent, while blogging among 65-to-73-year-olds rose two percentage points, to 8 percent.

Russ Steele, 72, a retired Air Force officer and aerospace worker from Nevada City, Calif., says he spends up to three hours a day seeking interesting topics and writing about them for his blog, NC Media Watch, which covers local issues in Nevada County, northeast of Sacramento. All he wants is to have a voice in the community for his conservative views.  Although he signed up for Facebook this month, Mr. Steele said he did not foresee using it much and said that he remained committed to blogging. “I’d rather spend my time writing up a blog analysis than a whole bunch of short paragraphs and then send them to people,” he said. “I don’t need to tell people I’m going to the grocery store.”

NYT 20 Feb 2011


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Increase Happiness By Sharing In Sorrow: says Stanford researcher

Ace! NewsFlash

Stanford researchers have found that people think their peers are happier than they really are, and this distortion of reality can make people lonely and dissatisfied with their lives.

Scrolling through Facebook or mingling at a party, you might get the impression that other people’s lives are full of job promotions, exotic travel and successful relationships. We don’t often hear about the sad times they’re going through. That can make our own emotional struggles seem worse.

Recognizing that our peers hit rough patches more often than we realize might mitigate our melancholy, according to a new study by Stanford researchers.

Before their work, “no one had shown that people systematically underestimate how often others feel sad or upset,” said Benoît Monin, associate professor of organizational behavior and of psychology and a co-author of the study published in December in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

This misconception is linked to loneliness and unhappiness, according to the researchers.

“When you think everyone else is having fun, you think your life is not that great,” Monin said. “So perceptions – even erroneous ones – matter a great deal.”

Part of the problem is that negative emotions – like feeling sad, stressed or lonely – aren’t usually displayed in public settings. For most of us, a night out with friends is better than a night in with the remote, so we tend to be happier when spending time with our pals. But even if people are in a rough spot, say from relationship or financial woes, happy hour is no time to bring up bad news.

The result is that “people look at their friends’ smiles in social situations and think they’re always happy,” said Alex Jordan, the study’s first author, a recent psychology doctoral graduate, now a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College.

To confirm the difficulty of knowing when your friends are feeling down, the researchers surveyed college students about their emotional experiences and how often they put feelings like laughing or crying on public display. They also asked how often emotional feelings were shared with friends. Negative emotions were nearly twice as likely to occur in private compared to positive emotions, and three times more likely to be intentionally hidden from others.

The results suggest that “you can’t take a happy face at face value,” Monin said.

In another study, participants were asked how often they experienced negative and positive emotional experiences, like arguing with a friend or having fun at a party. They were also asked to estimate how often their peers experienced the same types of emotions.

Most participants underestimated the prevalence of their peers’ negative emotional experiences and overestimated the prevalence of their positive ones.

These misperceptions occurred even among close friends. Participants in their first semester of college recorded their emotional experiences in private online diaries for 10 weeks. The participants also had three friends judge and describe how happy or sad they seemed. And time after time, those friends thought the participants were happier than they truly were.

Such emotional miscommunications might not seem like a problem, especially if you favor the “fake it until you make it” credo. However, our perceptions of the happiness of others may influence our own emotional states.

Based on their conclusions, Jordan and Monin have some suggestions for increasing happiness.

“It may be useful to remember that you aren’t as alone as you think,” Jordan said. “You’re probably not aware of the many challenges your peers are facing.”

So cry on friends’ shoulders and let them return the favor – chances are they’ve got some bad news to share also. And it might do you good to hear about it.

 Los Altos T.C. 15 Feb 2011

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Top Chinese Students Aim for Highly Selective U.S. Colleges

Ace! NewsFlash

GRINNELL, Iowa — The glossy color brochures, each crammed with photos depicting a Chinese student’s high-achieving life from birth to young adulthood, pile up in the admissions office at Grinnell College here.

Jonathan C. Edwards, seated, and Seth Allen of Grinnell said the college was handling hundreds of applications from China.

Interactive Feature

Packaging Chinese Students' Personalities in College Applications

“Hi Professors!” one young woman announced in her bound booklet, sometimes known in China as a “brag sheet,” which included a photo of herself as a baby. She characterized her childhood as “naïve and curious,” and described herself now as “sincere, kind and tough.”

The brochures, though they are almost never read by admissions officers, are a sign of Grinnell’s success marketing itself in China — a plan that has paid off in important ways, like diversifying the student body and attracting students who can sometimes pay full tuition. 

At rural Grinnell, nearly one of every 10 applicants being considered for the class of 2015 is from China.

Dozens of other American colleges and universities are seeing a surge in applications (and similar brochures) from students in China, where a booming economy means that more families can pursue the dream of an American higher education.

But that success — following a 30 percent increase last year in the number of Chinese studying in the United States — has created a problem for admissions officers. At Grinnell, for example, how do they choose perhaps 15 students from the more than 200 applicants from China? After all, the 11-member admissions committee cannot necessarily rely on the rubrics it applies to American applications (which are challenging enough to sort through).

Consider, for example, that half of Grinnell’s applicants from China this year have perfect scores of 800 on the math portion of the SAT, making the performance of one largely indistinguishable from another.  But the most accomplished applicants will have grades in the 70s or 80s, because Chinese schools tend to grade on a far less generous curve than American high schools. Few will have had the opportunity to take honors or Advanced Placement courses to demonstrate their ability to do college work, since such courses are rare in China.

Then there is the challenge of assessing an applicant’s command of English, since some Chinese families have been known to hire “agents” to write the application essay. These are the same advisers who counsel families to spend money on the fancy brochures. “They should save their money,” Seth Allen, the dean of admission and financial aid at Grinnell, said as he glanced at the full-color brag sheets stacked on a nearby desk.

Mr. Allen said that few would actually be read by the overworked admissions officers as they plowed through nearly 3,000 applications over all. In fact, the next stop for the brochures, said Jonathan C. Edwards, Grinnell’s coordinator of international admission, would be the recycling bin.

Mr. Allen, Mr. Edwards and their colleagues said they spend most of their time on Chinese applications trying to parse the essays — paying particular attention, as they might with an American candidate, to whether they detect the authentic voice and sensibility.

A young woman from Shanghai, for example, who had scored 800 on the math portion of the SAT, and nearly 600 on the main verbal section, impressed Mr. Edwards with an essay that described her volunteering at a rehabilitation center, where a young autistic boy captured her heart.  “Such a hopeless boy evoked my strong feeling to help him and love him,” she wrote. “As time passed by, I found he was interested in hearing the special sound of the piano and was gifted in playing piano.”  The applicant was admitted to Grinnell in its early decision round last fall.

Another Chinese applicant who wrote about her community service made a less favorable impression, at least with her essay, by writing about her own hardship while helping others after the earthquake in 2008 in Sichuan Province. “Every day, I showered and brushed my teeth using cold water,” she wrote. “It was unbearable.”

The admissions officers sometimes reach out to teachers and counselors at the applicants’ high schools — especially those that have emerged as “feeders” to Grinnell and other American colleges.  Such relationships have been further cemented during each of the last two summers, when Mr. Allen barnstormed China — stopping in Beijing, Zhengzhou, Changsha and Shanghai — on a recruiting tour with representatives from a handful of other liberal arts colleges, including Franklin & Marshall and Williams. (Grinnell’s applications from China were down slightly this year, as were its applications over all, but still greater than they were five years ago.)

For the colleges, such tours are motivated at least partly by money.  Grinnell, for example, is “need-blind” when considering American students — who are evaluated regardless of their ability to pay — but its process for admitting international students is “need-aware.”  So an applicant from China or another country could have an edge if he or she can pay full tuition.

And yet, in the name of socioeconomic diversity, Grinnell also has a dozen full scholarships set aside for international applicants, including those from China, who need help paying tuition.  “I realize what regional differences there are in China,” Mr. Allen said. “Lumping students into this amorphous Chinese applicant pool really isn’t doing them justice.” 

Grinnell started seeing a steady stream of Chinese applications in the early 2000s, and says it can point to strong academic accomplishments among those applicants it has accepted.  Their graduation rate has been comparable to the 1,600-member Grinnell student body over all — about 84 percent of those who enroll graduate in four years — and most Chinese students at Grinnell do “very well” in economics, math or science, the subjects in which they are most likely to major (and usually double-major), Mr. Allen said. Help with writing English papers is also available in a writers’ workshop.  “Chinese students are required to devote significantly more time to their studies than American students, and this generally carries through when they come to college in the U.S.,” he said.

Chinese applicants have also been learning about Grinnell and other American colleges and universities through a popular Chinese Web site, cu-us.cn — which stands for Chinese Undergraduates in the United States, but the letters are also meant to be shorthand for “See You in the U.S.”  “Grinnell in My Eyes,” an article written in Chinese and posted on the site by a recent graduate, is a big bouquet to the school; the writer pays tribute to Grinnell’s flexibility (“if you don’t like the current major, you may also choose independent major”) and the dining hall (“glorious French windows.”)

If there is an attribute that American and Chinese applicants share, it may be the ardor they often demonstrate toward Grinnell and the other highly selective colleges they hope will find a place for them.  “A girl from China called the other day after lunch, which was 2 or 3 in the morning for her,” Mr. Edwards said. “She said she was calling to make sure everything in her application was complete.”  “I had to tell her to go to bed,” he said.

NYT 12 Feb 2011

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The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship Offers up to $10,000

Ace! NewsFlash

The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship Offers up to $10,000

 

Dr. Anita Borg devoted her adult life to revolutionizing the way we think about technology and dismantling barriers that keep women and minorities from entering computing and technology fields. Her combination of technical expertise a nd fearless vision continues to inspire and motivate countless women to become active participants and leaders in creating technology.

In her honor, Google is proud to honor Anita’s memory and support women in technology with the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. Google hopes to encourage women to excel in computing and technology and become active role models and leaders in the field.

Google Anita Borg Scholarship recipients will each receive a financial award for the academic year. A group of female undergraduate and graduate students will be chosen from the applicant pool, and scholarships will be awarded based on the strength of each candidate’s academic background and demonstrated leadership.

In addition, all scholarship recipients and finalists will be invited to attend a retreat at Google. We know how important a supportive peer network can be for a student’s success. The retreat will include workshops, speakers, panelists, breakout sessions and social activities scheduled over a couple of days.

For more information, visit: http://bit.ly/icceeU

 
 

*** Ace! is a member of the EducationUSA global educational advising network affiliated with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. We provide free EducationUSA counseling services to students in the northern provinces of Thailand; our faculty of U.S.-trained Test Prep Experts can help you with cost-effective result-driven training programs for SAT-1, SAT-2, TOEFL, GRE, GMAT, GED, AP, IB, TOEIC, IELTS etc http://acethai.weebly.com ***