1. Connecting: Introduce yourself and tell me why you want to connect

I would like an introduction from my new followers introducing them to other followers.

2. Follow, add, friend:

You can follow anyone you want but if you have the same followers as someone else everyone that is a mutual friend of you two will automatically be followed.

3. Privacy, boundaries and safety:

Privacy is your decision. You can choose who can see what and who can access it. So make wise choices because the outcome is based on what you decided to share.

4. Signal to noise:

I am not annoyed by too many status updates or how random people can follow or unfollow you. But I am annoyed when someone follows and unfollows you many times.

5. Personal data and sharing:

I want this social network to connect people through interests and shared views.

6. My networking needs and uses:

I use Facebook once everyday but I use my Twitter at least thirty times a day because it is more common to have more status updates on Twitter than on Facebook. And my MySpace I usually don’t do anything to it except sign in and accept friend requests then log out.

7. Your criteria here:

My social network is used for networking in the real world.

So I went home and looked up podcasts through my Itunes and I was listening to the Michael Baisden radio show in the background. Then I thought just maybe this radio show might have a podcast. So I put the name Michael Basiden in the podcast search bar and there were plenty of podcasts by my favorite radio host. I subscribed to them all.

Then that day I had to drive back to Augusta so for the two-hour drive I listened to the podcast and it was like listening to his radio show whenever I wanted to. But I thought podcasts would be different because his podcasts were just tapes of his radio shows. I wasnt disappointed but I did expect more.

So the next day I decided to subscribe to The Onion podcasts because I thought it would be a lot better and iatually was. I really liked The Onion podcasts so I will continue to subcribe to them.

My second favorite blog is VerySmartBrothas.com. This website is by two black males who like in Texas and they talk about everything you can think of in a black man’s perspective. They talk about politics, love, music, fashion, and many other topics. They authors never want to give away their identity so they go by “The Champ” and “Panama Jackson”. They love to talk about new topics that are in the news and always gives a humorous and funny take on the certain subject. This websites poked fun at celebrities and politicians in way. The creators of this blog is so good at their writing that they won a lot of awards and are always being recognized for their website.

There are many other blogs I like to read but those are my two favorite.

The thing that he talked about the most that interested me was how that even though he is not married and doesn’t have any kids he already has a college fund set up and money put away for retirement. He stated that he started saving money for his future, and his kids’ futures, during his teenage years. He might not have the best car or the best house but if something tragic was to happen to his life he would not have to worry about money.

After hearing his speech I went to Bank of America and started up my own savings account. I want my future to be secure and I don’t want to have to worry about money ever in my life.

But in my FYE class it was an assignment to make a twitter account and “tweet” for a whole week. Now I didnt want to fail so I made the account and started using it. At first it was boring because I was following random people and only a couple of people were following me. On the first day  I tweeted once and left the account alone for a couple of days because it already seemed boring. But around Wednesday I logged back into my account and my follower’s list doubled literally overnight. I started to look at other people’s twitters and some accounts had 300, 700, and some over 1,000 followers. I didnt even know that many people used twitter and followed random people. But then I started to read some of their tweets, especially celebrity tweets, and after reading them I also followed them.

Twitter overall wasnt as bad as I thought it was. It’s a website that will soon be as big as Facebook and probably as big as Myspace used to be. And even though the assignment is over I have yet to delete my Twitter account because I will probably continue to tweet until I get 300, 700, or maybe even 1,000 followers.

We didn’t climb or jump from anything like a regular obstacle course would have made you do. It was a course that was more mental than anything. You had to think and pay attention to what your instructor said or you could never complete the task.

We played a name game which was easy…if you could remember everyone’s name.

Then we played a game in which we had to stand on a log and line up according to the size of the animal we choose.

The last game was a blindfolded maze game.

Overall Southern Adventures was better than sitting in class for almost two hours and I liked it so much that a group of my friends signed up for the harder version of the course we played during the FYE class.