Digital Shadow

Google has become the default search engine for the vast majority of web users.  Google searches place particular emphasis on the value of incoming links in ordering search results.  For example, in the case of a blog, the more people that link to your blog, the higher it will rank in Google searches.  Google ranks the importance of particular websites and assigns a value to them – the more important Google considers a site that links to yours, the higher your ranking in the search results.

Activity 1 – ‘Ego-Surfing’

We typed our name to the Google search bar and saw what came up along with a few other search engines.

I was surprised with this name search by the amount of personal details that are produced.  I found on google that my facebook was there but not the first one and I am concerned with how much twitter reveales, they gave my full name and my user name together so any one would be able to find me, that defeats the purpose of having a user name, plus they also gave my location Penrith Australia, what an invasion of privacy to give out these details. I found a friends photography site that I commented on last year was there and a petition site that i voted on about an NRL issue also.

On blind search I found the first column to have the most detail which was Yahoo, it showed my Facebook and the petition again. In the blind search under google it had 2 tutors names with my name underneath.
I found nothing that was me on Spezify until I used my username and blog posts, twitter and tweets popped up. It was all me.

I concluded that Spezify must focus more on blogs and twitter like sites showing more of what I had written and google focuses more on the details like showing not only that I am on twitter but what my real name,user name and location are. Does anyone else agree??

I would be comfortable with an employer doing a search on me as I have nothing embarrassing to find (at this stage,hehe).  I am however concerned with an employer mistaking me for someone else with the same name, I do not see how this can be changed but I think it should be. Maybe these search engines should allow you to approve something to make sure it is you before allowing it to be public or maybe we should all have a google search page that we are allowed to create ourselves with a certain access code and you give this to an employer so they get the right info, I dont suppose that will happen,hehe. Then at least nothing embarrassing or nothing that isnt you is not found…

I would be comfortable with family searching for me like I said nothing shameful there at this stage.

Advantages of having little or no digital shadow would be that you do not have to worry about your privacy being invaded or anyone finding out something about you that you did not want them to know, or someone finding where you are who you did not want to find you. Overall I am happy with my digital shadow except for the amount of information the google search gave out on my twitter account,my tweets are marked as private on my account but obviously nothing else is private on twitter or google,boooo…..

Reading – “Facebooks Privacy Trainwreck”

This reading was very interesting although I feel I knew most of it.  On the dicussion board I wrote : I was an avid Facebook user for some time and I hate the news feed, I do not care who is playing what or who has joined what group or became a fan of something or is now friends with etc, I only like the status updates, now they have changed it again to the news feed I find I am not even bothering to access Facebook and havnt done so for a week, which is a big deal to me as I was having a quick look on Facebook daily (at least).

I feel a little invaded when everything I do is there for all to see such as the “is now single” bit, but at the same time it IS always there to see but only to those with enough time on their hands to go into your personal profile and look around, now with the news feed no one has to go to your profile and hunt it is broadcast on their main page. I do not like it at all.

Yes I think twice about what I do on Facebook now with the news feed, im sure everyone would, any click of the mouse anywhere and all can see.

I think the constant updates from and to Facebook friends does give you a false sense of closeness, I have had an experience with a girl who was at my high school 20 odd years ago that I had not seen or spoken to in that time and who we were not even really friends then, she was just in my year at school, who when I posted on Facebook that I was in my hometown visiting family, she wanted to meet, i could not as I was busy and did not even really know her and she started sending nasty messages to my inbox and to my profile so I had to block her. This had a chain reaction like flow as it led to me feeling uncomfortable talking to any mutual friends we had so I had to cull my friends list down quite a bit. I also culled the people who were not “real friends” too so this does not happen again.

I think it is different to following a celebrity on twitter as someone in your friends list will probably read what you wrote to them whereas a celebrity would not so it is a one sided relationship to follow someone whereas Facebook is a two way relationship, you can converse and share with each other.

I think “infinite social information” can be destructive especially to the younger generation who would not think before posting something online whether it will affect them in other aspects of their life either now or later but as for me I am careful with what I share and do not say anything I would not say out loud anyway.   Also with the new Facebook change, every time I see some one has been playing something or is using some application I click on “hide” and it comes up that you can hide that application so this eventually makes your news feed a little more readable and personal. ‘Culling the rubbish’

Another reading for this week was “We Googled You: Should Fred hire Mimi despite her online history”

I think Fred should discuss with Mimi what he has discovered if it is a concern instead of jumping to judgement. Maybe employers should make it known before hand that they may do a search of one’s presence, maybe it could be something they have to state they will do to save people being embarrassed or loose jobs, just because we put something online and it is always ‘potentially public’ I do not think it should mean that we should have to risk employment or potential employment because we choose to access the Internet either socially or otherwise. I think if I was an employer I would do a search on a future employee but I think it would be common courtesy to ask or at least mention it before hand..

Your Internet footprint

The impact you make on the Internet is commonly referred to as your Internet footprint.  It is the accumulated result of all your contributions to the Internet and is found in (but not limited to):

* Blogs

* Forum posts

* Website contributions

* Social networking profiles

* Email

Internet communication basics – Netiquette

Netiquette refers to the basic social conventions that are applicable to any use of the Internet.  It is the ‘unspoken rules’ that informally govern the wide variety of expressive form that the Internet has given rise to.  The most important point to remember is that you can not assume that anything you ‘send via’ or ‘post to’ the Internet will remain private.  What a scary thought, it certainly makes you think twice before sending or posting anywhere on the Internet.

You should consider all communication over the Internet as ‘potentially’ public

Activity – Readings

We got to choose from three readings this week, i chose to read  ‘Anonymity and self-disclosure on weblogs’ as I am really enjoying blogging.  We were then asked to discuss the reading on the discussion board.  I wrote:  In my personal experience with blogs I tend to only read or take interest in blogs that have a certain degree of self disclosure, i much prefer to see someones face or some details of oneself on the blog I am looking at as it gives me a sense of the author, that they are real and if I should take interest in what they are writing and also if they are interested in what they are writing. I also believe that if you are willing to create and write on a blog then you should be enough in what you say or believe in it strongly enough that you are willing to give at least some kind of self to your work. Why hide? I may be the only one that thinks like this but if you have to hide what you are interested in or write about than you probably should not be blogging about it or writing about it to begin with. In summary I would not read or be interested in a blog if the author has total anonymity as I would assume they are hiding and if they do not want to be acknowledged for what they say then dont say it.  My point being that if I am not the only one that thinks like that then surely blogs with some disclosure of self would get way more attention and notice and be more popular than ones with total anonymity!!! My two cents worth!!

Content sharing

Folksonomies  – Collaboration and Emergence

Remembering our earlier experiments with delicious you will recall that what makes the sharing of content so much more than the sum of individual contributions is the attachment of metadata (data about data) to the original data.  As with delicious, on content sharing websites this process is known as tagging.  When submitting content to a site, the user also contributes extra information through the application of a descriptive ‘tag’ that identifies the nature of the content.  As these tags accumulate, they evolve into a folksonomie that allows anyone to search for the content through the use of keywords.  Tagging is not limited to content sharing sites – it can be anywhere metadata about specific content might be useful.

Reading this week – Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication through Shared Metadata. Mathes, A. (2004)

Internet memes

Youtube is one of a number of sites that has provided an ideal spreading ground for Internet memes.  A meme in the sense of the Internet is a slice of cultural information that spreads and becomes popular largely through the net.

Mashups

Not surprisingly Youtube has been the focus of several copyright claims as many members upload content to which they do not hold appropriate rights.  However the site has become an even more interesting center of  copyright disputes as users have produced combinations of copyrighted works to produce original content.  This type of content, which mixes elements from a number of different digital sources, is known as a mashup.

Discussion board

We discussed what we thought about the mashups and if they were breaking copyright laws in our opinion.  I wrote : Although i find the mashups funny,some hilarious, i still can not work out how they are not breaking copyright laws,they are clearly taking direct images and/or footage from other sources that are copyrighted. Maybe i dont understand this weeks material as well as i thought,i will go over it again but i think the mashups are definitely breaking the copyright laws and dont see how anyone could think otherwise. (once again i do like them though,quite funny and i did spend some time browsing for more,hehe)..Heres one i liked:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T5_0AGdFic&feature=related

Activity – Playing around

We went to the website bighugelabs and created a poster.  I decided to create a motivational poster,  I thought this task was fun and  can see myself playing around with this site some more.

Social Networking

From the moment the first email was sent, users were quick to adopt the Internet as a platform for communication.  The most recent development is the explosive growth of dedicated social networking platforms that provide a centralized way of communicating and sharing information with friends and colleagues.  In the past five years sites such as Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Bebo and Linkedin have become the default communication hub for many users.

Reading this week – Social network sites: definition, history and scholarship (Boyd and Ellison)

I found this reading to be crucial to my understanding of social networking.  In this reading they describe the rapid growth of social networking sites and their popularity.

Boyd and Ellison define social networking platforms in terms of what they allow users to do.  To reiterate, users can:

* construct a public profile or semi public profile within a bounded system

* articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection

* view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system

Activity – Introducing twitter

We were asked to join Twitter and add  a #net11 tag to anything that may be of interest to others in the course.  We then visited http://beta.twittervision.com/ which is a website that shows you real time tweets from all over the world.

I was fortunate in this activity as I joined Twitter earlier in the year but never really used it.  Now that i have other students and the tutors to follow I find it is a significant tool for communication and collaboration by asking and answering questions and chatting with one another.  I find myself using this tool everyday.  I have learned a great deal from accessing this site and it has made my study a little easier.  I have even encouraged some of my family members to join the site as well and we communicate with each other daily on this website.  I really found the Twittervision site to be addictive and interesting to see that a new tweet comes up constantly and from all over the world, I sat and watched it for quite some time.

Wikis

The wiki – collaborative content

The term wiki is derived from the Hawaiian word meaning ‘fast’ although it has subsequently aquired the backronym of What I Know Is to capture the collaborative nature of the software.  A Wiki provides a space where multiple people can create and make changes to a hypertext document.  It is a series of database driven pages that can be added to and edited by anyone with the appropriate permission.

Activity 1 Mucking around with wiki text

We went to Wikipedia tutorial and read the editing page, formatting and linking page. Used the sandbox link to edit and create a link to an article that exists on Wikipedia.

Activity 2 Knowledge sharing

Attempt to edit or contribute to Wikipedia

* go to Wikipedia and find a topic that you know something about

* find something you believe is missing or you think should be changed

* make a small change or addition

* check later in the week to see how the community responded

* what changes were evident upon your return

With this activity I had much pleasure as I never knew Wikipedia allowed anyone to edit.  I did not know what it was until this subject began.  I joined the site right away, then looked up ‘respite care’, something I know a lot about having a disabled son myself and receiving respite.  I found the article’s introduction to be somewhat lacking in detail so I added a few lines that I saw on a Dadac website earlier (where I receive my respite from) that summed up respite quite well.  Once I had added the content I was unsure where exactly to put the link, I created a link at the end of my addition and in the edit box I stated that I was not sure where the link or reference went and asked would someone correct this for me, I went back and checked the article the next day and it had been linked appropriately and my addition was still there.  I was so excited and I felt so important that I had added a small piece of information for the world to see and that it had been recognized and kept.  I still kept checking to see if it was there for the next week or so and to my amazement  it was.  I can see myself in the future looking for things to add to Wikipedia, what a great website.

Here is what i wrote on the discussion boards this week..

Im very excited with my first attempt to add to wikipedia,i looked up something i know alot about which was Respite care, i added a sentence, (the second sentence if anyone wants to have a look) i found this sentence to sum it up great from the Dadhc website which is who i receive my respite from and i asked for assistance on how to reference it properly and the sentence was kept and someone referenced it properly for me,this was done within 24 hours of me editing. I feel very excited that my info has been kept so far and that someone took the time to fix it for me rather than deleting it. I can see myself in the future becoming a small time good samaritan on wikipedia and i also joined up…

Blogging

Unfortunately. I must admit that before I began studying I had no idea what a blog was, I even had to Google the word ‘blog’ when I first got into the discussion board and saw people talking about them.  I had heard the word ‘blog’ but I did not know what one was.  Now that I have learned about them and as you can see, I now have my own blog that I created and I feel like I am getting to know my way around pretty quickly.

Some important blogging  features and terminology

* Blog post – each entry

* Comments

* Blog roll – or link roll

* Permalink

* Trackback – tells another blog if you have referred to that blog

* Theme – or ‘skin’ is the look of your blog

* Feed (RSS)

* Podcasts, videoblogs ( Vlogs)

* Blogosphere (collected blogs)

Types of blogs

* Personal blogs – the original form of blog that acts as an online diary.   They often focus on a specific subject that interests the author

* Micro blogs – blogs that contain very short posts, twitter can be considered a form of microblog

* Corporate blogs – many companies now use blogs to keep their customers up to date with their companies developments

* Photo blogs – blogs that are dedicated to publishing pictures

* Podcasts – can be considered a form of blog even if the distribution method can differ.  Podcasts are audio files that can be downloaded and listened to either on your computer or mp3 player of your choice

Activity 1 Discussion via blackboard discussion board

The discussion board was filled with intellectual discussions on our weeks readings, by the time i joined in there wasnt much left to say but i added :  Well all i can add after reading all your perspectives on the blog topic is that i would say that the blogger is more likely to write from his own point of view on the subject at hand and the journalist would have a broader, more open point of view as he isnt specifically concerned with what he is writing about, its his job not his choice of subject…Does anyone else agree? Hope that makes sense…:)

In relation to ‘publicly articulated relationships’ i wrote : What do you think about ‘publicly articulated relationships’ online? How do they challenge/influence our ways of interacting ‘offline’?
Well i certainly have more friends on facebook (for example) than friends i see regularly and i think if i had the facebook amount of friends to see regularly i would have no time for anything else, so having them as ‘publicly articulated relationships’ is fine by me as it frees up so much time,hehe. Who has time to talk to their amount of online friends face to face and why would you when you can talk to them all at once online. Having said that if i was to go out and i happened to run into facebook friends (that are not my everyday friends) i would feel obliged to stop and chat where as if i wasnt on facebook i wouldnt have heard from or seen these people for years and years (like classmates from 1989) and may be able to get by unnoticed.

Activity 2 Intro to blogs and RSS feeds

For this activity i chose Google Reader and we were asked to look up six blogs to follow on our topic of interest and then subscribe to that blog.  Finally subscribe to the RSS feed from our delicious account.  I chose the topic ‘frontal lobe damage’ due to son having this brain damage, i found some great blogs, very informative and also found some not so good ones.

Introduction – What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is a term that seeks to encompass the changes in Internet technologies, approaches to web development and peoples use of the web that have occurred since around 2003.  The term describes an approach to the web that emphasizes communication, collaboration and information sharing.It can be considered to be the move towards perceiving  the web as a platform on which other software can run.

Web 1.0 – the version of the web we have considered up to this point.

The defining elements of this era

* content designed for low bandwidth

* static pages

A few stylistic elements were

* animated GIFS

* the blink tag

* guestbooks

* frames

Characteristics of Web 2.0

*A rich user experience – instead of reading through a web page then clicking to get to the next page, web 2.0 sites offer the user an interactive experience.  Pages are dynamically generated and respond to changes the user makes, content can be added seemlessly.  This shift to seeing the web itself as a platform has been referred to as cloud computing.

* User participation – users are in the process of creating the pages.  Sites like Wikipedia, Youtube, Flickr and Facebook are some of the most popular site in the world, their content provided and appreciated by the same group of people.

* Metadata – metadata is data about data.  An example is delicious.com a social bookmarking site, delicious members can bookmark sites of interest and tag them with your own choice of keywords.

* Dynamic content – the generation of dynamic pages through the separation of form and content.  The way the page looks (the form) is separated from the information on it (the content).

* Content sharing – all kinds of media, videos, audio etc can be accessed and/or added easily via the web.

Activity 1 – Newsflash

Rss (Really Simple Syndication).  We went to news.com.au, made a note of current stories under ‘breaking news’ then looked at news feed just under it.  RSS feeds are not limited to news sites, they can be from any web page where content is updated regularly (eg blogs).

Activity 2 – creating a delicious acount

We created a delicious account and tagged sites that may be useful in our studies and added a bookmark button to our browser. We tagged specific sites with Net11_test.  We aimed to gather at least five useful sites.

Four technologies that have emerged from web 2.0.

* Blogs – an online journal, sharing text,images and other media.

* Wikis – is a network of web pages that can be worked on collaboratively by a group of users.

*Social networking – based on connecting people with one another.

and what is the World Wide Web?

The World Wide Web is a wide area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.  Tools required for a working World Wide Web consist of :

*  a transfer protocol  (HTTP  -Hypertext transfer protocol)

*  A web server

*  a language to display the information  (HTML – Hypertext Markup Language)

*  a web browser

August 1991 saw the debut of the Web as a publicly available service.  From 1993 onwards saw the public awareness of the Internet and the web skyrocket.  The World Wide Web was the public face of the Internet and within a few years, URLS  (Uniform Resource Locators) were a common sight as business moved on to the web.  The web was the first many to many communications medium.

*  Understanding HTML and the Web

A web browser is a piece of client software with which we can access the World Wide Web.  By access we mean retrieve and display hypertext documents that are stored on web servers all over the world. The browser requests the page, the server delivers it and the results display in the browser window.

*  HTML and Hypertext

The documents we view in our browsers are predominantly written in Hypertext Markup Language. (HTML)

As well as formatting text, images can be added and most importantly, hyperlinks can be created to other pages.  This is Hypertext.

Activity 1 –  Show me the HTML

This week we went to the discussion board and typed a comment and looked at the HTML code and then also checked out the change when added bold and italics.  I am amazed to see this, this week  has taught me so much,  I did not even know anything about HTML until this week.  I had never even heard of it or seen it before.  I assumed what we saw in our browser was just how it was written.  The HTML looks like a bunch of words with brackets everywhere at first.  It looks very complex on my first look but after some analyzing of the HTML code I noticed that it can be readable with further study.  HTML is the code that the web browser is written in.

Hypertext – why the fuss?

The early web was built on the idea of these static pages, all interlinked to form an enormous repository of information.  Hypertext enables us to turn our attention to whatever takes our fancy at any given moment.  Since the early days, the technologies behind the web have changed dramatically and web pages are no longer limited to static form – they can also be generated dynamically.

Activity 2  – Going way back

We took a look at the way back machine.  Going to Internet archives at http://www.archive.org/…Here we looked at curtins homepage to see how the page had evolved over the years.  We looked at several other websites as well through the way back machine.  It was interesting to see how much they had changed over the years.

How big is the World Wide Web?

In July 2008, google reported that it had indexed 1 trillion individual URLS.  1,000,000,000,00

Where did the Internet come from?

Net 11 week 2

“What is the Internet?”

The internet is  a big computer network.   Networks connecting and intertwining with other networks, giving us the internet.  I have always assumed that the World Wide Web was just another name for the Internet but I have learned this week that this is not true.The world wide web and emails are in fact applications that run and rely on the underlying network of the internet.

Computers themselves date back as far as the 1950s, but it was not until  the 1990s that the internet was up and running.

Pt 1 – Networking basics

Various networks

*  Server/client networks = for example when you access a web page , your web browser ( a client ) makes a request to that server which sends page back to you, enabling you to view its content. Other examples are mail servers, database servers, game servers and file servers.

* Peer to peer networks = examples are file sharing services like limewire, Gnutella also internet telephone services like skype and freenet project.

Packet switching and TCP/IP

TCP  (Transmission control protocol) disassembles the data into packets and reassembles it at the other end.

IP  (Internet Protocol) governs movement of information making sure it gets to the right place.

Domain names

TLDs (top level domains) like countries for example .au for Australia and .com, .org, .edu and .gov.

Second level domain names likeYahoo and curtin.

Bandwidth = is the amount of communication resources.  The more data that can pass through the faster the connection.  Measured in bits per second.

56 kbit/s	Modem/Dialup
1.5 Mbit/s	ADSL Lite
1.544 Mbit/s	T1
10 Mbit/s	Ethernet
11 Mbit/s	Wireless 802.11b
44.736 Mbit/s	T3
54 Mbit/s	Wireless-G 802.11g
100 Mbit/s	Fast Ethernet
1000 Mbit/s	Gigabit Ethernet
10 Gbit/s	10 Gigabit Ethernet

My laptop is download – 212kbps and upload – 54kbps

8 bits = 1 byte

1000 bits = 1 kilobit

1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte

Kb = bit  and  KB = byte

Bytes we use KB/s and Bits we use Kbps  (how confusing)

Broadband = high speed connection without using phone lines.  I personally have found this type of connection not as reliable or quick as the wireless modem i use now.

Part 2 – Activities

Activity 1

Proxy trace – we were asked to go to yougetsignal.com and do a proxy trace on several different sites, all of which ended up in the USA.  I learned that a request from your browser travels to different places all over the world before landing at its destination.   Also I found this task interesting as I was unaware that most sites would be hosted from there, I always assumed that if something in France for example has a website then the website would be hosted from that country.  Then we were asked to find a host that wasnt in the US or Oz, I tried quite a few but could not find one, I even tried sites like ones on the Eiffel Tower thinking that if they are not about things in the US or Oz then maybe the site would be hosted from another country but still no luck.  I wont give up though, I will keep hunting for a site.

1 week later –  Just typed in bbctv.com and it ended up in UK, 24,113 miles traveled.   Finally success on finding a site that is not hosted by the US or Oz.

Activity 2

Who owns what?  – we went to hexillion.com and looked up the owners of sites like flickr.com and youtube.com and several others and found that google.com and Yahoo.com own the sites.

Part 3  – Examples of networking software

*  Simple Mail Transfer Protocol  (SMTP) allows the sending and receiving of emails.First widely used in the 1980s.

*  File Transfer Protocol  (FTP) allows files to be transfered like when you download a file off the web to examine later.

*  News Network Transfer Protocol  (NNTP) is the protocol behind one of the oldest forms of communication on the Internet, Usenet newsgroups.

*  Internet Relay Chat  (IRC) is an open protocol that allows a number of users to simultaneously connect to a channel and chat in real time using text over the Internet.

# #  Finally i have finished my first assignment question this week after much brainstorming and procrastination, one down four to go…

##  Question 2 completed for assignment and have begun question 3, finally feel like im getting somewhere!!