Web 2.0 (whatever that is)

Hi Readers,
This week I am going to discuss Web 2.0, which is basically the name of the new school way that users, can use the internet. Which includes most of the stuff I have written about on this blog like blogs themselves, APIs, social networking sites, etc. And also all the different ways these are put together with each other. This is because they use either 'collective intelligence', 'AJAX' (Asynchronous Javascript And Xml) or a combination of both. A good example of a site that uses both collective intelligence, to pull tweets off twitter and AJAX, to be constantly putting up new tweets, is twistori. Which we saw in the lecture and I just had another look at it, and I have to say it has strangely hypnotic and highly distracting quality to it.

There is one more 'aspect' of Web 2.0 that I haven't mentioned yet which is actually what most people, if mistakenly, think of as Web 2.0, and that is the "cute shiny slidey stuff" as Michael put it. Which is actually just as it sounds a style of web design and is just there to make sites look easy to use and approachable. Though you could actually make a site that looks plain and deceptively like a Web 1.0 site but actually uses collective intelligence and AJAX. I don't know why you would do this unless you wanted to show people what Web 2.0 actually is and means.

Anyway, goodbye until next week readers!

The Jumper of Candle Sticks

Taxonomy and Folksonomy

Hi Readers,
In this week's post I'm going to try to explain taxonomy, the old fashioned way of categorising information and folksonomy, the new school way of categorising information. Folksonomy seems to be so new school my spell checker doesn't even recognise it as a word! So the difference between the two forms of categorisation is that taxonomy is do by putting things in metaphorical boxes. Say for example putting 'riding a bike' in a box labelled 'exercising'. Now the problem with this is that 'riding a bike' could also go in a box labelled 'transport'. This is where folksonomy makes itself very useful because folksonomy isn't about putting things in boxes, instead it 'tags' things so they will come up under as many categories as the thing has tags. So 'riding a bike' could be tagged with both 'exercising' and 'transport'. This is very useful on the internet, for example on flickr users can tag their photos with many tags like 'friends' 'football grand final' 'party' etc... and someone could search any of these tags and find this image instead of only being able to find it in one place. Another example is Blogger.
I will leave you now to think about the irony of my tagging taxonomy,
The Jumper of Candle Sticks

Internet ISP filtering

Hi All,
Okay so it was an easy week this week because we didn't have a lecture, so for me this meant the added benefit of a four day weekend! Lucky me!

So anyway, this week in my tutorial it was suggested that I do this week's post about the new internet ISP filter that Kevin Rudd says we need to protect children from pornography and paedophiles. Whether that is what it will actually do is something else altogether. The biggest problem with the way the filter is that it wont stop people accessing content from the websites the government does not want us to be able to access. This is because most of the people who access it, do so through peer to peer networks and sharing encrypted websites neither of which will be stopped by the ISP filter. And when paedophiles groom children for sex they do it social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace.

The second biggest problem with the filter is that the banned sites have been put together on a blacklist, which is not accessible to the public and because we don't know what's on it we wont know when completely innocent sites have been blacklisted by mistake. For example a Queensland dog kennel was found on a leaked copy of the blacklist.

Given that the internet filter fails to do what they say it is meant to do could it have another purpose, like say if the government didn't want us to see something because it would hurt them politically? Like in George Orwell novel?

Thanks that's all for now,

The Candle Stick Jumper

css; I'm getting better at it!

Good news readers! I'm getting the hang of css, the reason for this is we went over a bit more css and html this week in the lecture and even more in the tutorial. I'm figuring out the rules in css, it's like when you come to a new job and you have an idea about how it works there but you aren't 100% sure of what you can and cant do, you are a like over careful not to upset the balance by following a rule only you are following and missing the rules everyone else is. So, I have realised the order of css does matter as long as it is properly bracketed. It was also quite encouraging seeing the css that my tutor was writing all seemed very logical and made sense. It has been interesting and quite satisfying learning how to read the language. Going from someone who would do his best to steer clear of this sort of stuff on the net to someone who can see and understand what is going on while surfing. And my internet horizons only got broader when I was lectured and tutored about API's (Application Programming Interface) they open up the opportunity to do great stuff on the net using the API's of social networking sites, government statistics (if they have an API, which they don't here unfortunately) and other research statistics, especially social commentary.
Thanks for reading,
The Candle Stick Jumper

The Wonders of html & css

Since my post last week, a whole other side to the Internet has been opened up to me. This other side is the world of how websites are constructed. This is done using different markup languages, normally there is a combination of the most common language html, which stands for 'Hyper-Text Markup Language', and another language like css, which stands for 'Cascading Style Sheets'.

I found it surprising when my lecturer told me (and the rest of the lecture theatre) that websites are built using simple text editing programs. This is because the 'tag' is the foundation of all markup languages. I cannot directly show what tags look like because they are read as actual html and not examples of it. Because of this I have decided to post this link to a website I was shown by my tutor, I found it very useful when making my first attempt at a website.

That is all for now,
The Jumper of Candle Sticks

Blog, yeah I have one (this is it, funnily enough)

Hi any readers out there in internet land,
I am writing this blog for a university assignment, so I will be blogging about some of the things I have learned in the class Networked Media, conveniently enough the class this blog is being written for.
So, I think it would be a good idea to start off by explaining why I chose this blogging platform; Blogger. And the fact of the matter is that because Typepad requires payment, which I can not provide at the moment and Wordpress was down all over the world when I was in my tutorial choosing my blog platform, Blogger was the most 'flexible' one easily available to me. This is a bit disappointing as Wordpress would enable me to be more profound than Blogger, which for the use I am making of this blog would have been good because without trying to suck up to and flatter my lecturer and tutor too much, my lectures and tutorial have been more on the profound side of things than the trivial. Despite this Blogger should not constrain me to much as in my lecture on blogs we were shown the effective use of Blogger by Geoff Manaugh. His Blog is BldBlog, and it is now how he earns a living not by advertising like a lot of other professional bloggers but just by people finding his blogging of such great quality that they want him to come and speak at their conferences, and will pay him to do it.
So all is not lost for me yet, I'll just need to use my imagination to get around the constraints of Blogger.
That is all for now as it is time for me to go to sleep so I can keep jumping over candle sticks with my normal nimble and quickness.
From The Jumper of Candle Sticks