Web Design Journal: First Impressions of Social Media

One of the assignments for my social media course is to design an interactive website which makes use of embedded social media. The first steps to figuring out what sort of social media I'll want to use in my site design is to first sign up for the major social media networks

• Twitter
• Facebook
• a blog service (this one)

to become familiar with the purpose, audience, uses, positives and negatives, and to also sign up for my choice of at least one major social media news source

• Mashable
• AllTop (a news feeder/aggregator)
• ReadWriteWeb

to remain current in what is happening with social media, the latest developments and so forth. The first thing that I'll have to say is that I'm going to have to be very mindful as to my purpose to going to these resources so that I stay on topic and within my allotted reading time. (Only so much time for so much news.)

I say this because I love to surf the web and these resources are really good at providing interesting links. For instance, instead of wanting to read about Google+'s search engine changes to retrieve stuff that is "personal", I read about the Open Sourced Star Wars parody. Both of which are social media related. So I'm becoming more aware of my habits and telling myself stay on target, deciding beforehand what sort of news to look for, then seek it, find it, read it and move on.