Mashups - From week 10 Scarpbook

Firstly, let’s take a look at what “Mashups” means from Wikipidia:

“In web development, a mashup is a web page or application that uses or combines data or functionality from two or many more external sources to create a new service. It implies easy, fast integration, frequently using open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and data sources to produce enriching results that were not necessarily the original reason for producing the raw source data. … In the past years, more and more web applications provide APIs that enable software developers to easily integrate data and functions instead of building it themselves. Mashups can be considered to have an active role in the evolution of social software and Web 2.0.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28web_application_hybrid%29 >

Some examples of a mashup would be Google Map and Youtube as well as Tweeter, where everyone around the world could update their status every second.

Mashups could serve very well in international governance because mashups can help the governments and other firms to display information effectively to the internet users. Mashups display mass of information such as videos, maps, webs, news, images, Wikipedia, blogs, jobs, shopping, government and etc. since we are more becoming digital native, Mashups can be very useful tool for informing us (as users) information about different subjects. And it can gather information globally then deliver to us. Mashups not only provide a way for governments and firms to spread information effectively but as a user of the information, we feel that Mashups are very easy to access and we also enjoy exploring the internet through mashup since they do providing information all around the world. From business point of view, mashups help to expand the sector of the business, since Mashups help to organize all the data and useful information around the world, a business can make a better decision such as where should the firm located? What is the target market? Or even what kind of products would be popular in a particular country? Etc. decisions like these are not easy to make, but because the emerged of mashups, this process become not as difficult as previous.

Few interesting mashup examples:

http://clusty.com/

https://mozillalabs.com/ubiquity/

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

http://maps.google.ca/

Communication - From week 9 Scarpbook

What does global civil society look like? Where are the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forces located, and how do they achieve their ends?

Create a map to complement your blog entry and integrate it into your blog.

Global Business (Privacy) - From week 8 Scarpbook

Does Internet Democratize the Consumer? Is privacy a concern?

Yes, internet does democratize the consumer from time to time. The emerged of Internet, not only improved the way people communicating, but also changed the tradition of the society that we used to have. Online-shopping is one forms of new tradition we are experiencing right now. An example that can best describe internet democratization would be the Ebay site. A consumer who is physically living in Ontario can buy a product from Hong Kong by just a “click”, the power of this “click” means, this consumer is finally ended up with the most satisfied product that she/he has been looking for while. (Information sharing over the internet) Secondly, buying products over the internet resulted saving in transportation from Ontario to Hong Kong. (Lead to more efficient) Consumers have comparative advantage when buying products over the internet, such as compare the qualities from product made in US and the product made in Hong Kong, and he/she can compare the prices as well, (This can reduce unnecessary waste, efficiently) or sometime comparing the seller’s credibility on selling products, consumers may take a look at, rather the seller provides insurance, free shipping, return policy and etc. (processing global communication). As a consumer, Internet gives such conveniences to us. It provides us with freedom to choose, to compare, and to buy. But problems still rose, even though everything seems going toward a best direction. People are now having problems in choosing between goods and services. Since there are so many firms are in the market, they created huge competitions between goods and services. Firms are trying to give out the “best” to their customers, in order to generate huge amount of profit. The processes of improving the goods and services, is also the processes of improving consumers’ tastes and expectations on goods and services. This democratic improvement may results in consumer disappointment. Go back to my ebay example, in order to do the online shopping, we all need to provide our personal information to the business holder first. Privacy protection therefore plays an important concern to all of us. News such as “personal information selling to others”, “credit card being used by a stranger oversea” and “credit card information being hacked by hackers”, news like these are not strange to all of us. Therefore we all need internet governance to protect all of us.

Apple I-Phone Activity - From week 8 Scarpbook

Visit the Apple website and explore the I-Phone applications

Web Link:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/apps-for-iphone/

[image source: http://images.apple.com/iphone/apps-for-iphone/images/overview-hero-20090608.jpg]

Translation

Original English Sentence:
"Translate a phrase from English to another language and then back again"

Translated into Chinese Sentence:
"翻譯一個短語從英語到另一種語言，然後再回來"

From Chinese back to English:
"Translate a phrase from English to another language, and then come back"

Result:
Google Translator is professional, the result is almost identical compare to the original sentence.

Source: http://translate.google.com/#

Translation Tools - week 6 Scrapbook

Translate a phrase from English to another language and then back again. Post the result to your blog.

Post a blog entry: What are the main arguments in the two readings for this week? What version of historical change do you believe in and why?

Podcasts - From week 5 Scarpbook

What are the main arguments in the two readings for this week? Which one do you prefer and why?

The main idea in Charles’s article “Cosmopolitan Ideal or Cybercentrism?” is democracy and cosmopolitanism; both terms have significant relationship in the communications field nowadays. Democracy can be defined various due to the values of different nations. The emergence of the internet created a brand new way for communication, which created no borders and all people around the world can together as a whole, they can sharing the same visions and values, and create cosmopolitanism together. The mini version of this cosmopolitanism would be the western society we are living right now, we are now having the freedom of speech, we can get to choose the leader of the country, to have relationship with worldwide people and etc. we did everything not only for our culture, ourselves, but as the whole country. This new form of communication will definitely improve our daily life from both economically and politically. But still, for some countries in the world, their governments are still trying to keep their citizens away from the internet information and the western media. The more recent example would be the conflict between the search engine Google and the Chinese government.

The second article “The Enclosure of Cyberspace” written by Ronald V. Betting talks about internet from more social perspective, more related to our daily life. The author is turning information as a commodity goods which all dealing with advertising and selling. We should all agree that money is becoming powerful in out life, internet not only provides an opportunity to sharing and creating information to the world but also creating mass of business opportunity around the world to let many of people make money.

For me, I totally agree with both articles but for the second one, it seems more convince me, since we obviously cannot avoid the power of money now a day, I always do trading on the internet, and I study information (knowledge) from the internet to fulfill my needs, and hope that I can use these knowledge again in my future career to generate money. Even schools are going to use internet as a way to presenting themselves, while more students applying for the school, more funding their will get. Therefore, what Ronald V is saying is more convince me.

Folksonomy - From week 4 Scarpbook

What determines the structure of a folksonomy and why? The code, the content or the "physical technology"? What does your answer to this question suggest about how we can "think about" globalization?

To me, the word "Folksonomy" is new. After I had read some websites, I started to have some idea about what folksonomy actually is. According to the Wikipedia, the definition of Folksonomy is

"A system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content."

Tagging is the characteristic of web 2.0, it makes users more easily organize information by the "keyword", and it is conveniences for users get information from the web page. The code, the content and the "physical technology" must work together to make this happen. According to the experiment I did in the tutorial, I have to put the java-script into my HTML code first, then I have to determine the weight of each word within the content, in order to tag it as the "keyword", and of course we need our "physical technology" such as desktop for us to actually access to this folksonomy, so they are essential and dependent on each other. But in comparison, I think the content will do more for folksonomy since the process of getting the keywords are based on the content, or folksonomy will not exits. During the experiment, I found out that folksonomy does provide benefits. First, we can get to choose which word should be tagged, more personalization information. Secondly, all tagged words are sharing over the web, so everyone only needs to type in the keyword at the search engine, all the information that have been tagged with the same keyword will appear to users, and the keywords will actually direct users to the right place. Lastly, by the time you look at the tagged word in a web page, the bigger the size of the word means it is more often being used, it could be an important word within the content. Globalization is a big word for us, we are in the process to globalization, folksonomy defiantly plays a role in this transitional process, and we can think of folksonomy as a basic idea that we can make further development to make our communication wisely and effectively.

Wikis - From week 3 Scarpbook

Are wikis an effective means of communication? Why or why not? Why does it matter?

By looking at this question, the first thing I did is to identify the term “Effective”. According to the Longman-Dictionary of Contemporary English (http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/effective ), the word “effective” generally means “successful, and working in the way that was intended”. It is hard for me to answer this question, because I am in a pros-and-cons situation. It depends on the role we are playing while using this service, from academic point of view, or non-academically. The term “effective” act differently.

As a non-academic user of wikis, fast and easy may consider as effective. Wikis is fast because whenever you type in question, the first site that comes up with the most solutions will always from wikis. Its wording is simple, information are well-defined according by the use of different subjects. Just like the word “effectiveness”, in wikis you get different meanings such as from mathematics perspective, as well as from medicine, management’s perspective and etc. but back to the Longman-Dictionary of Contemporary English, it just simply tells you that, the word “effectiveness” is a noun, which is not enough information for us to know. Secondly, Wikis is now a universal service, because it offers in different languages. While there is no language restriction, more and more people are benefited from Wikis. The use of Wikis will also save lots of time, which we will consider as effective. People may even make friends by contributing the site together. This is good because we can expand the social network while working on wikis.

But on the other hand, from a student perspective, wikis are not the kind of academic resources we can use as references. Since people around the world have equal opportunity to contribute or edit the articles. They may edit based on personal opinion, or from what they have heard from others, therefore no sources can be found. Some people may not edit the material seriously and provide the fake information on it and audiences will never get a chance to notice about if the information is real or not.

In conclusion, I think there will not be an exact answer for this question.

The digital divide - From week 2 Scarpbook

I think we should worry about the digital divide. Firstly, we all know that now a day the improvement of technology is no way to stop. Marvin says in his article “New electric media were sources of endless fascination and fear, and provided constant fodder for social experimentation.” By the time you read the newspaper, new technologies are coming out every years, every months or even every weeks, they are very frequently. Access to digital and information technology are the assets to catch up with the society. As a student in Canada, I become more relying on my laptop for daily social, online shopping and more convenient services. In school, professors are using PowerPoint, just like this course (ISTB01), we are told to complete weekly assignments on the internet service called Blog. It would be a nightmare if I do not have such a basic knowledge. Secondary, according to the ITU Digital Access Index (2003) from the lecture slide, one can see that particular countries have a very low internet usage rate, for example the bottom 5 are Guinea Bissau, Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger with the lowest access rate over 178 countries around the world. It is not difficult to find some of the commons in these countries. Lowest GDP per capita and lowest literacy rates are the two commons from there. With technology, people can easily access to websites globally, fills their brain with useful information and open one’s eyes. All they need to learn before hand are internet safety, how to access and basic literacy. The main idea is to get improvement using the internet advantages. Internet may also provide the opportunity to trade with countries around the world as well. Why we should worry about the digital divide? It is because it seems countries are going towards the extreme ends.

Communication - From week 1 Scarpbook

How did my grandparents communicate?

Back to the old day, China was a pretty undeveloped country. No internet, no telephone and no any other convenience communication tools that we are having today. They had telegrams at that period of time, but only used for military purpose only. My grandpa told me that, during the war period, the only way for him to communicate outside of the force, was by writing letters. But letters were not easy to send out; they must first read by superior before sending out. And when my grandma wrote back, the same process was applied. Communication at that time was no privacy. The other problem for writing letter was that it took too long to travel from my grandpa’s place to grandma’s place and the proofread by superior slowdown the process even more. So keeping a good relationship during that time was not that easy.

How could Web 3.0 change my life?

I think web 3.0 would make my life even more dependent to the word “digital”. Web 3.0 will act like my personal assistant. It knows all of my interests and needs, and provide me with the best solutions. But web 3.0 will not only works when I am sitting in front of the computer, as professor mentioned in the lecture, it will be part of my daily life assistant as well, for example it can detect what kind of food is missing in my refrigerator, and order it for me from supermarket. That is so convenience, since I have less housework that need to care about, so I can fully enjoy my free time. And because web 3.0 can take care most of my personal stuffs, it gives me more time and chances to get involves with the society, like meeting friends and relatives. But things will never be so perfect. What about if this web 3.0 is “sick”? In other word, since it is a digital product, it should be by chance has some kinds of crash or disable during the time, and since I am so depend on it, I may just be crazy at that time. Therefore, Yes Web 3.0 does provide lots of benefits in daily life, but no matter what, please do not be a slave for it. =]

How would being a "digital native" affect my answer to this question?

Compare to the past, technology is now slowly becoming one of the basic needs for our daily life. and since we have so much experiences working with technology, we can now easily choose the best and the right technology product for ourselves. Web 3.0 will not only be a new tool for us to use for daily life, but also part of our life.

My First Post!

Hi everyone, This is Ellen from IST class.

Setting up a blog is FUN!

And I hope all of you will enjoy your IST class!

Good Luck! =]