Facebook is an incredibly popular piece of social networking software, which is used all over the world. However, it has come under criticism for many controversial aspects of its layout and usage. For example, extracting your profile from the social network is something which is actually surprisingly difficult; this is because when you choose to delete your account, the default option is to actually "deactivate" it; if you don't untick this box, then your profile is not completely taken offline and deleted, but it is only your public profile taken down; this is supposed to make it easy for you to return, as you don't have to put up your information all over again. Also, the relative openness of Facebook means that employers can trawl for "digital dirt" on sites such as Facebook.

The web is an incredibly powerful and versatile tool; however, it is also extremely open. This is, however, something that people often forget - that whatever you publish on the internet, be that blogs, or anything, has an invisible audience: one which you do not, and cannot know about. But as people often forget about his, and publish aspects of their lives which they might not want potentially anyone to read. This makes the web something which can also be relatively dangerous; chatrooms, for example, can be accessed by anyone, and was how many paedophiles groomed their victims. Although this is a very extreme and rare case, there are other more common examples of the lack of web privacy; on Facebook, for example, if you are part of the London network, your profile can be viewed by anyone on that network, which currently has over 5 MILLION profiles.

Standard blogging is extremely popular, and is growing at an incredible rate. However, microblogging is a form of blogging which is becoming increasingly popular across the world. The concept of microblogging is that where you write short sentences which describe what you are doing at any given point in time. The problem with "proper" blogging sites such as blogger is that they are designed to hold longer posts (such as what I am writing now), which is inconvenient if you want to write something short and snappy. Probably the most used microblogging site is Twitter, although Facebook and other similar applications have microblogging elements in them. Microblogs can be easily updated, and now sites like Twitter are available on your phone, they can be looked at and updated almost anywhere in the world. Celebrities like Stephen Fry are increasingly using Twitter, as it is an extremely convenient form of blogging.

This blog covers wikis other than Wikipedia; this is by far the most used of wikis, and most people don't even know that other wikis exist. The three that I am going to talk about are as follows; the Science Museum wiki is a wiki created by the Science Museum. The website contains information about objects held in the museum’s public collections, but is extremely limited in it's content; clicking the random page link for a short amount of time will bring you back to pages you have already visited. However, the information is editable and expandable; expansion is encouraged, with links to edit pages easily available. The second wiki is called ThinkWiki, a wiki dedicated to a series of notebooks called Lenovo Thinkpads. It contains useful information on drivers and patches, HOWTO's (installation, information recovery etc.), hardware and other information. There is, however, not a great deal of textual information on this wiki; instead, there are more programs, applications and add-ons. The third and final wiki I am looking at was created by The Auburn School University of Architecture. This Wiki serves to protect the delicate Collaborative environment of Design studio culture, and to serve as a protocol and reference guide to keep these balances in check.

Google Earth is a virtual globe, map and geographic information program that was originally called Earth Viewer, and was created by Keyhole Inc, a company acquired by Google in 2004. It is available in three main formats, Google Earth, a free version, Google Plus and Google Earth Pro which costs around £250 a year, and is intended for commercial use. Another of the main features which have been recently added is Flight Simulator, whereby the user is in a simulated plane, which he or she can fly over any part of the Google Earth map. The Flight Simulator has two planes which you have the option of flying; SR-22 - Although relatively slow and with a low maximum altitude, the SR-22 is much easier to handle and much more preferred for beginners compared to the F-16 Fighting Falcon, which has a much higher speed and maximum altitude than the Cirrus SR-22, it has the ability to fly at speeds of almost 1,100 miles per hour,

The Flight Simulator has been criticised, however, as critics have pointed out that it could be used as training for terrorists. However, these critics are in the minority, and it is generally seen as a useful and interesting part of the software. There are also many options, layers and features that can be used or turned on and off, which greatly increase the power of the software; for example, the ability to see the sun, and tell what time it is in a certain part of the world is extremely useful.

A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The first ever wiki was the software WikiWikiWeb, which was developed in 1994 by the American computer programmer Ward Cunningham. He has said that he originally intended to call it QuickWeb, but instead used the Hawaiian word ‘wiki’ which means fast, after hearing of a shuttle bus in Honolulu called the ‘Wiki Wiki Shuttle’. Cunningham had developed on the ideas of Vannivar Bush in allowing people to "comment and change other people's text". A wiki invites all users to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki Web site, and the most famous wiki around on the web today is of course Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia which can be edited by anyone, which most people use on a day to day basis. However, it is the fact that it is open to be edited by anyone that provides one of its biggest risks - the danger of vandalism and of people putting up false and incorrect information is a huge one, and this is the reason why a lot of these sites are not trusted as source of information, labelled as unreliable. This is unfortunate, as the entire concept of the wikis is for people to share and edit information on the web, and irresponsible usage of wikis is bad.

A blog is when someone posts a comment or comments online to a public audience. This can be done in the form of text, audio or video. This can be done on social software such as Facebook or Myspace, or on dedicated blogging sites like this one. Blogs are extremely useful as means of communication and expression, and sites such as Facebook have gained huge popularity.I have been asked to start and keep an online blog to make me more aware of my online identity; it is very easy to forget that things published on the web can't be private, but can in fact be open to anybody; you are opening yourself to an unknown audience. Blogs, or in fact anything else that is put on the web, can be stay on the web for indefinite amounts of time, and can also be searched for, and so viewed by people you might not want to have your stuff viewed by.

The term "weblog", or "blog", was created by John Barger, and on December 17 1997, he started writing posts on his Robot Wisdom site. Blogs quickly gained huge popularity, and Facebook, for example, has over 100 million users.

When you write a blog on your profile, or write blogs on other profiles or anywhere on the web, you are creating an online identity for yourself. This identity's reputation must be maintained, and you should keep to the same degree of restraint as you would in the real world.