Facebook Ads

I just had a rather unnerving experience with a Facebook ad, similar to what we were talking about earlier today during the final exam discussion. I was on Facebook just now and I noticed an image of the top of a mountain that looked strangely familiar with a caption that just said "Manisa". I clicked the photo and it brought me to a page talking about the city that contained "Niobe's Rock" on Mount Sipylus. I realized then what I had recognized about the image and the reason why it had appeared as an ad to me. I had recently made a project for Latin about the myth of Niobe where she is transformed into this very rock, and Facebook must have noticed some post I had made about the project. I am a little worried by this because in the past I had believed that Facebook only pulled information from things I had chosen to like or groups I had joined, not any post I may have made on a friend's wall or a status update. This experience really made me realize how much information Facebook actually pulls from your profile to make more directed ads.

Final Meta Post

When I think about the most prominent skill I took away from this year of blogging, drawing connections is really what comes to mind. Almost all of my most recent posts have been about how I noticed that something in class related to or reminded me of something I have experienced elsewhere in life. I have come to see that this is a very useful skill in writing, and it has definitely helped me in essay writing recently. I also noticed that blogging has begun to affect my writing in general. For example, when I was writing our final exam, the "Winnetky Cycle", I kept reading what I had just written and thinking "wait, is this formal enough? This has the feel of a blog post, not an essay..." (hopefully this is a good thing). I also learned the only way to write blog posts that works for me. Until recently, I had been planning a time each week where I would sit down and write a blog post. This lead to a great amount of wasted time staring at the screen waiting for a great topic to blog about popped into my head. Then I began to only write blog posts when I had an idea of what I was going to write about already in mind. When I did this, I started to have ideas for blog posts pop into my head at random times when I noticed a connection between something we had done in class and something I was experiencing just then. I would write down these ideas and then turn them into posts later. For me at least, this was a much more productive system of blogging than trying to think of a topic on the spot. Overall, it took me about three quarters, but I really began to warm up to the idea of blogging when I started using this new system of having a predetermined idea for a blog. Thank you Mr. Bolos and Mr. O'Connor for a great year of American Studies, and a year's worth of blogs to remember it by.

The post I would like you to look at is The Caste System of Flatland