Blog Homework 3.14

Matthew Nickerson

LIBR1101

Blog Homework 3/14

                For this blog assignment I went on Google and searched for “Vegetarian Groups”. The first result that popped up was the “Vegetarian Resource Group” (VRG) which specialized in informing people on recipes as well as statistics and data on vegetarian lifestyles. Due to the fact that it was the first result from Google shows the relevance to people and how important and dynamic this group must be to people all over the world. VRG has an incredible site with categorical organization along the sidelines that are very helpful. Categories such as press releases, recipes, nutrition, ingredient information, and business information will be things I could very well include into my presentation.

                The great part about the VRG is not only the organization of the site itself, but the amount of information the site contains. Databases such as Galileo will be helpful in scholarly research, but other websites may be just as useful in the end in regards to my project. The nutritional facts that are provided are going to be essential in my project as convincing people about eating healthier using statistics will be just as important as conveying the topic in general.

Blog Homework 3/5

Matthew Nickerson       

LIBR1101

Blog Homework 3/5

In using these new sites I found two that were appealing in helping me along with my topic. The site “Reddit.com” allowed me to find some very useful articles right off the bat with a comprehensive library of user promoted articles. It was helpful because most of the results were due to votes by people on the site to promote better quality articles as well as well written pieces. Reddit allowed me to find news articles in regards to the title “Health” and listed some very clear and concise articles from nutrition all the way down to a story about a cured child of HIV, although the last one did not relate to my topic, it is still relevant in the sake of healthcare. Not only can you search through categories, but can also search through subreddit catageories that can take you from a major category such as “health” and direct you to subreddits such as “ADHD” and “Vegetarian” allowing users to go from category to subcategories of those categories.

Twitter is a great social media tool due to the brief nature of “tweeting”. Tweeting allows a user to put a few characters in a line and have that information accessible to millions of people across the globe. In regards to my topic, doctors and health professionals such as “Julian Michaels” or authors of vegetarian books may be useful in promoting better information. Twitter makes things public and accessible which is good for celebrities to get things out as well as products from businesses. If I was interested in including something from “Kashi” or “Whole Foods” in my paper, I could find information from their twitter page that may help me out in my resources.

I personally only use Facebook due to communication. I use very little social media as I see it mainly as a distraction and only wastes peoples time if there not using it in the right way. I tried using twitter personally but did not enjoy. I could see the benefits of a celebrity or business using twitter, but personal tweets by random people and seeing a timeline full of hundreds to possibly thousands of tweets every day is not in my interest. Twitter is a great social media tool, but It can be extremely distracting and can also lead people to be misinformed through the fact that you are not able to put over a certain amount of characters in the tweet box.