Intro

Hey all,I hope I'm fashionably, rather than embarrassingly late on my introduction... Anyhow my name is Grant O'Grady, I'm back in London after two coop terms in Ottawa and am a little slow getting back into the swing of things, my internet is up now so I'm rolling and will aim to be more on the ball from here on in. As to this course I'm operating more under the principle of knowing my enemy. I'm terribly suspect of social software, both from a social perspective and from a privacy perspective. As a rule I try to keep my online presence to a minimum and constantly cringe when I see pictures of myself on other people’s facebook accounts. Beyond messaging software my only real experience with these technologies was research for a PowerPoint seminar I ran on social software while working at the Supreme Court. They were under the impression that I was "young" and "hip" and assumed I was using facebook and or MySpace. Consequently for research purposes I set up a number of accounts on different sites. Although I do recognize how helpful and useful these sites can be, I mostly had an uneasy sense of being violated. The intellectual property rights I was signing away alone made me cringe. I'll conclude then by saying that I'm looking forward to learning more about social software and hope this course helps to alleviate what I'm sure are mostly unfounded concerns. Ultimately I would like to believe that social software as a whole is a tool like any other that can be used to benefit or to harm. Grant