ESPN.com: Is it Worth Reading?

So you're looking for a website that covers sports, and covers it well. For television sports news most people tune into ESPN. So that begs the question is ESPN's website, ESPN.com, worth reading? At first glance, ESPN.com has good imagery - a running slide show of the day's top sports headlines, and a continuous ticker of the days scores above it. Scroll down, and you'll see more in depth articles, opinions, commentaries, videos, polls and links. The site highlights the must see events in sports news, and advertises for the most exciting upcoming games. Another great feature of the site is the different pages for each sport. Are you a big MLB fan? Well ESPN.com has a special page for that with all the latest baseball news along with all other major sports including the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, NCAA Basketball and Football, NASCAR, Soccer, as well as many others. No one can accuse ESPN of not being thorough with its coverage of every sport imaginable. The site even has special in depth coverage of sports in major cities such as Boston, New York, L.A., Dallas and Chicago. If you're from one of those cities, there is really no need to pick up the sports section of the paper anymore - it's all there for you.

There are negative aspects of the site as well, however they are far fewer than the positive. For example, anyone who wants to participate in some of the polls or personalize the site, he or she must sign up for a membership. This is not a paid membership, however if you do not want to put your information out there, you are at a disadvantage if you want to use these features.

ESPN.com is a sports website with thorough coverage of every game imaginable. The site is very user-friendly: it is easy to look at, easy to use, and its advantages far outweigh its disadvantages. The choice is yours. Check out ESPN.com and decide whether it's worth reading.

Swoboda: High Expectations Reaps Benefits

No Survivors in Florida Shipwreck

This ship washed up on a Florida beach. None of the passengers on board survived.

The students of Wyoming Seminary know the school as one that requires them to do many research papers. Usually students are given these assignments by their history and English classes, and many dread working on them.

However painful these papers may be to complete, the library staff helps ease the pain a little bit by providing students with easy to use databases for finding sources for their papers. The Library subscribes to these databases for a fee. Librarian Ivy Ballard Miller says that the library staff “researches these databases and picks and chooses the ones that we view will be most helpful and effective for the students.” The library offers a list with all of the databases it subscribes to as well as the usernames and passwords that are required to use the sites. Some of these databases include “Annals of American History,” “Gale Science Resource Center,” “Historical Newspapers,” as well as many others.

Cicely Hazell ’11, finds the databases to be very helpful overall. “I find some databases are hard to use, but the History Study Center is really helpful when I’m writing a historical research paper.” Hazell says that it is the first resource she turns to when she is starting a paper. “I can usually find things on the database easier than I can find them on Google. I am glad these resources are available because without them I don’t know what I would do.”

Patrick McMullan ’11 shares the same sentiments as Hazell. “I found the databases especially helpful when I was writing many of my papers for Mr. Lewis’s various classes. He always demanded very detailed papers, and it was very easy to find information on the various sources available through Wyoming Seminary.” McMullan hopes that these resources will be available to him in the future when he attends college because “once you use these databases it is hard to go back to just searching through random books. I like how you can find everything in one place, which allows my research to go much more smoothly.”

As evidenced many Sem students find these databases to be very helpful and use them frequently.

KINGSTON, Penn. - It's that button you see in the address bar of your browser that says RSS, XML, or RDF. You probably see it, and if you don't know what it indicates, you probably ignore it. An RSS indicates an RSS Feed which is a "format for a regularly changing web contact" according to www.WhatisRSS.com.

RSS Feeds were introduced in March 1999 by Netscape. Anyone can sign up for to follow and RSS feed, and by following a feed it allows you to stay informed about sites that you are interested in. Most sites have the option to follow their RSS feeds, and to follow one its as easy as a click of a button. To view the RSS notifications from subscribed links one would need to use a feed reader such as Google Reader. In the notification, there simply is a few sentences describing the latest post with a link to the post. Before, users would have to surf the web to look for the latest updates on their favorite webpages, now they are offered a brief summary of all new posts in one central location.

Matthew Cartwright, President of the Class of 2014 at Wyoming Seminary, 15, says that he uses RSS feeds "they are useful when I want to be kept up to date on my favorite websites." Cartwright believes everyone should subscribe to RSS feeds so that they can be "as current as possible. "I started using RSS feeds on Nov. 27, 2008, and I will never look back."

For students at Wyoming Seminary looking for the latest news posts on The Opinator, they can simply click the RSS button in the far right corner of the address bar, and they will receive notifications in their RSS feed readers every time one of The Opinator editors posts something.

For anyone looking to be more up to date, RSS feeds are a simple, practical solution.

Twitter: Useful or a Waste of Time?

It seems like everybody is talking about it. Twitter: a site that can be about everything, or a site that can be about nothing. Before I started using Twitter, I thought of it much like blogging. I thought of it as a site full of mindless chatter, and consisting of nothing of substantive matter. I pictured the average 'tweeter' as (not to be sexist) a typical teenage girl who craves attention. However when I signed up for my Twitter account, I never thought I would use it as much as I do.

I first used Twitter the way I thought it was supposed to be used; I posted statuses about my life that probably no one cared about. I tweeted a few more times, and then I forgot about Twitter for a few months. Then I logged back on to give it another chance, and I have been hooked ever since. Users of the website need to find their own purpose for using the website, following people, and tweeting. My purpose for using Twitter is for politics, and particularly political gossip and news. I follow many elected officials, and political journalists and news agencies including several U.S. Senators, and U.S. Representatives, Chuck Todd of NBC news and the Huffington Post along with many others. Some of their Tweets are very interesting and are published faster than on mainstream media sites.

Twitter is also useful to see what people are talking about; and people love to talk about politics. It's especially useful to see what people are talking about when something is happening rapidly. The first time I started searching what people were talking about was during the recent midterm election. I am a Democrat and passionately supported Democratic candidates, and I wanted to see if the Pennsylvania statewide Democratic candidates were going to win. I knew that the voter turnout was key in Philadelphia. If the turnout was very high it was more than likely that the Democrats were going to win statewide. So while I was in line at the local Subway wanting to know how the turnout was, I took out my smart phone, went to Twitter.com and searched "Voter turnout in Philly." What I found were tweets from voters at the polling stations talking about the long lines in Philly. It turns out that the turnout in Philly was very high, however it was not enough to carry the Democrats in the polls.

According to a Pew Research Study, about 8% of Americans who use the internet also use Twitter and of that 8%, 55% of Twitter users post links to news stories and 10% of that 55% do this more than once a day. Twitter is a very news conscious website, and I would say that many of the posts I read about political gossip are accurate even though they are not checked. I have not run into a problem with them in the past. Check out the rest of this survey.

Twitter is useful if you know what to look for.

Check out my Twitter!

Blogging: A Necessary Evil

Newspapers no longer are the news, they're the old. Nobody's asking "What are they saying in the papers?," instead it's "What are they saying on the blogs?"

For me, blogging is pointless. Posting about my life, and my interests do not intrigue me, and may not appeal to whoever may be reading this. I find the idea of the "blogger" as someone who sits on the computer and never gets out to see the world, and therefore I am not as inclined to believe their writing as truth. No matter how much a person may detest blogging, or the bloggers themselves, it is necessary to keep up with what is being said on the blogs. For example, my main passion is for political news and gossip. When I want to find out about the latest political stories, I don't want to check the news because it has become too slow. Bloggers can post anything, including the true stories that established news sources are unwilling to publish, because the difference between bloggers and reporters is that they don't have to verify sources. And it's not just me who checks the blogs for this reason, because political campaigns are always checking what the bloggers are saying about their candidates. If I simply chose to ignore blogs just because I don't like them, I would not be up to date in the political world. If I want to be someone who is recognized among the everyday politicos I need to read the blogs.

Saying that, blogging is pointless for things other than news, and gossip. Posting about your life does not contribute to society, whereas posting about news and other important gossip can contribute to greater knowledge and discussions. Sometimes blogs tend to be 'mindless chatter,' and I think that is what has given me a negative connotation about them.

Blogging is something that I may find annoying, and 'mindless,' however it does have some aspects that do contribute to society. Therefore blogging is a necessary evil.