Okay, so let’s say I want to make a comment on the NCAA decision to issue Penn State a “stark wake-up call,” a news story that came out this morning on CNN. So I read the full story and I’ve highlighted the section that I’m going to be responding to right here. And I go down to the bottom. The rhetorical choices start almost right away. You can add a new comment either through CNN or Disqus or you can connect to facebook. Personally I’m going to use Twitter. I think Twitter will allow me a better venue in which to share what I want to say and make the connections I think are the most meaningful. So I’ll go ahead and click on the field to add my comment. I’m going to quote the article. And I’m going to go ahead and type in the rest here.
[0:52]
Okay, a bit of a trite comment. But I’m going go to ahead and post that comment. And I’m going to track how many responses I get. As you can see, there are people in this forum who are getting plenty of responses. So I’m interested to see exactly what that does.
[1:14]
Okay, so almost right away we begin to see there is some type of conversation going on in here. Now I’m going ahead to reply to 3tds’s comment. [Typing.] Okay, so we see here more than an hour later my comment has already started to get some likes and people have already started conversing about it. So this is one way to start building rhetorical velocity—seeing where a comment you make in the blogosphere actually goes. We can start kind of predicting what is going to cause a trend. We can look at verbiage; we can look at, you know, active quoting.
[2:00]
In another vein you might be looking at anywhere you can direct people to your blogsite. So in the last example you saw that I was able to driect people to my Twitter by using my Twitter Identity on CNN. Now I’m looking at, well, okay, this is a Twitter account so how are people making use of hashtags and the connections and the bit.ly urls? And so in this example provided here by @visually we see that “human rights” is first of all, a hashtag, so people can search that on Twitter by typing in #humanrights. But also there is a connection to the visualization that they’re talking about in this tweet about visual rights—er, about human rights. And so we see it takes them to the blog page. So they’re able to connect people and they’re actually able to direct them to view something by connecting it through their Twitter.
[3:00]
Okay, and so let’s I actually want to record what I’m doing online—I want to record my digital footprint. What I’m going to do since I’m on a Mac, this is easiest way to record what’s going on. I’m going to open up a program called Grab. You can just go to Spotlight and type in Grab or search for the program. And there it is. And you’ll see that it opens up up here. And you can either do the window or selection. So first of all I need to move the selection window out. But whatever is inside this red box is what I’m recording. And so I’m going to take a picture of it and save it to my desktop. And that’s how you take an image using Grab.