Hyunsung Yang's New Media Blog

There is one glaring difference between blogs and wikis that make each a unique tool for new media communication - Wikis are innately designed for collaborative work and blogs are designed to be a space where an individual is able to post his/her thoughts. According to Stacy Hawkins of the U.S. Embassy, Wikis are "open to the contributions of all who work [together]." Through a wiki, many different people come together to create one project. Unlike wikis, where opinions are collected before the publication, blogs welcome individual opinions and thoughts before leading to a group or corporate feedback. There are distinct benefits to both wikis and blogs - wikis offer a productive means to complete collaborative projects, and blogs offer individual freedom and personal cyberspace which seem like a rarity in today's corporate society. Sourc es:  Barbaro, Michael. “Wal-Mart Tastemakers Write Unfiltered Blog.”  The New York Times , The New York Times, 3 Mar. 2008, www.nyti...

Social Media and the NBA: Surprising Correlation Between NBA Salaries and Social Media Usage As communication technologies evolve, players no longer need to rely solely on classic media outlets (TV, newspapers) to communicate with their fans. The NBA player base, as a whole, began to take their thoughts and feelings to new media outlets, especially Twitter and Instagram, and unlike TVs and newspapers, these players can quantitatively see how many people their messages have reached online. Such statistics soon became the metrics that informally measure players' popularity. In this paper, I aim to explore whether there is a distinguishable positive correlation between social media outreach and NBA salaries. If not, I plan to turn my attention to individual player's advertising revenue.