When taking into consideration the quality of websites when they have the same function, is considering the ease of finding that information without difficulty.  If one can't find what they're looking for within a few mouse clicks from the home page, the website may be badly laid out and difficult to navigate in.  If it has a few drop down menus for specific categories from the home page, the user can easily select a category and find the page they're looking for without a scavenger hunt, thus making it a better quality website.  A second aspect to take into consideration, is the visual appearance of the site. If it is colourful (to an extent of course) and contains a bit of graphics to illustrate each topic without cluttering the page, it boosts the visual appearance of a website, thus the quality.  I find that if a website is all in Times New Roman, in black, white and grey and is void of graphics, I immediately want to leave the page no matter what good information it may contain.  One thing I find makes a website more appealing and professional-looking, is when the website has a catchy title and logo, like Twitter (fun name) with a cute bird logo, or Picasa (clever play-on-words) with a colourful camera-lens logo.  We may not be able to say that a gas station is warm and happy, or relate Starbucks with health and growth, but logo colour does generally effect a website's connotation and should be taken into consideration as well as a fun title.

When asked to list all the ways I communicate via electronic medium, I would have to say that text is most used by myself.  I like to keep in touch with friends socially in school and electronically outside of school. The second most used form of electronic communication of choice for myself is through social media, specifically Instagram, through pictures depicting the highlights of my week or funny things I saw and and want to share with the world and the comments they receive. Outside of that, I can honestly that I don't communicate electronically any other way, besides the occasional email from my dad when he's abroad or my tennis coach saying that practice was moved and whatnot.  So yes, I'm boring and don't communicate in many fashions, but I'm just happy being able to talk to the people I love when I can't meet up with them physically.

Internet Privacy
I recently read an article by NBC about the truth about internet privacy. It discussed how the government is tracking every little thing you do; which stores you go to, how fast you're driving at any given time, and of course where, what time you get home every day, what time you wake up, and even your heart rate.  All this information is available to the government at the touch of a key, also making it easily accessible to hackers.  What's my standpoint? I would think it's obvious - no individual nor group of people no matter who they are, should have access to that much information about your daily life, even when you're offline, with that much ease.  I know at this point its unavoidable, but that shouldn't stop anyone from putting their foot down to this level of distorted privacy.  We can start by turning off location services more often when we don't need it, and degrading to a lower intelligence phone - I'm not saying buy a Nokia brick-of-a-phone, just something that does everything you need it to without excess intelligence - and being more cautious when using free public WiFi, as it's easy as pie for a hacker to mimic the WiFi signal and slide through the privacy barrier of your phone or device.  I know that at this point its too late to put a stop to all this creepy madness, but I'm gonna do what I can to limit how much personal information is swimming around in the cloud.