Wednesday, November 08, 2006

For a better english class


  • Organize debates, talk-shows about different topics… Compare our points of view in English is a way to let everyone speak. Are Sego e-communication and best e-wishes more efficient than Sarko e-strategy?
  • Interview each other about our career, will, ambition... We are starting an internship soon, we should interview each other about it from the research to the end.
  • Invite Net entrepreneurs, actors of emerging and creative digital trends : some people from Second Life, famous bloggers... Maybe film them to put a video podcast of this meeting.
  • Change the accent... Give me a five !

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

SHTPP

SHTTP : Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol was developed by Enterprise Integration Technologies in 1995 to guaranty security for personnal information. It concerns mostly commercial transactions on the Web. This protocol is essential in order to develop business over the Web. Buyers need to trust the media to use it without fear. Ordering a book on Amazon at home still seems dangerous to many people such as my mum.

RSS


RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a way to easily distribute a list of headlines, update notices, and sometimes content to a wide number of people. RSS is an XML file updated instantly. It easily distributes a list of headlines, updates notices, and gather a wide number of people. RSS feeds are displayed on a web page as a link. It's very useful on the web because we haven't the time to search contents from every source.

Moreover, contents always change. It permits to gather recent information on the same place. Less time to research and more time to read. Easy reading for many communities organized on the Web.
My RSS is active which means I can share my updated data with the people who choose to receive my RSS feed on their blog. RSS are now being displayed by search engines such as Yahoo! and Google which propose aggregators of RSS feeds on their home page.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Cyberkill, cyberrob, cybercopy...

Cybercrime includes every type of criminal activity in which computers or networks are used as a tool, a target, or a place of criminal activity. The most important example concerns intellectual property and copyrights. Peer-to-peer networks permit people to download movies, songs illegally. Spamming, virus are other crimes spread on the Web which are very annoying. It also includes defeating access controls (unauthorized access). Some crimes are facilitated by the use of computers such as child pornography and online gambling.

Victim?
I’m not a victim of cybercrime, I hope not anyway… Ah, yes, actually, I am when I receive a lot of junk mail even if I only should receive mails when I tick “Opt-in”.
To protect myself, I have anti-spyware and I avoid giving any personal data on the Net. And I always use my own computer to consult my bank statements and not another computer even if I have code access.

YouTube

History

YouTube was founded in february 2005 by three old employees of Pay-Pal, (an e-business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet) : Chad Hurley (chief executive officer, Steve Chen (chief technical officer), and Jawed Karim (Advisor).
The company began in a garage
in Menlo Park, California. The initial version launched in 2005 primarily featured videos of Chen’s cat. Online word-of-mouth has first permitted YouTube's growth. The founders had enough creativity to make their project successful. To get their website some buzz, the partners organised a contest that awarded an iPod Nano. This contest generated the traffic YouTube needed and made it one of the fastest-growing sites around.
In October 2006, Google bought YouTube fo 1,65 billions dollars. YouTube kept his name and his 67 employees.


Success recipe?
The key to the success of the platform YouTube is linked with the potential notoriety this site provides to its users. Moreover, this platform is easy to use and quite fast. It also offers a wide choice of video contents.
It’s a lot more simple to put a video on the Web with YouTube than with Google Video where you have to download a transfer software, then upload the clip and fill out data about the video, including its title, description and genre. Eventually Google approves or not the clip, which can take a few hours, or a couple of days. On YouTube, users sign in, type in a video's title and description, and upload. The clip goes up instantly. The other difference lays on the community aspect.

Me and YouTube
At the moment, not having Internet at home prevents me from going from sites to sites seeking information and finding funny videos … I’d rather spending hours on Internet instead of watching a crappy movie of TV. YouTube is one of the sites I go to once in a while.

YouTube in the future

We could imagine that YouTube might develop again in the future, making money throw Advertising and then a new small community will emerge criticizing the change of YouTube. For instance, they might add an ad after five minutes of a movie…



Monday, October 23, 2006

Identity theft ? Don't let someone steal your identity, your wife, your kids...


Identity theft happens when someone uses your personal information without your permission to commit fraud or other crimes.

Minimizing Your Risk

First of all, when you open new accounts, create “uneasy” passwords. Avoid using your mother's name, your birth date, your phone number, or a series of consecutive numbers. If you are a bit paranoid, check the precautions recommended by the US Federal Trade Commission such as shred documents and paperwork which contain personal information before you discard them, don't give your personal information unless you know who you are dealing with. That's really helping us. They know about identity theft, don’t they!





Do you speak web English ? Yes, I do.

Evolving on the Internet requires some English knowledge because most of the vocabulary is in English. For any type of activity on the Net, this language is necessary. You want to play poker, you need to know what a club is if you don’t want to loose all your savings.
Learn English is quite easy on the Net because it’s a lot more fun than an English class in high school. For instance, you can make progress in English chatting up a nice australian surfer on an online dating website.

The six keys of Internet practises

Generosity : You need to share your links, data, informations, good music and fun videos... with your contacts. Help each other to make each other better informed, entertained...
Discipline : To be sure to keep your blog looked at by your public, it is necessary to blog new messages regularly. You alsoo need to separate your professionnal links to your friends. Sending a dirty joke to you future employer reduces your credibility in work.
Patience : You need to be patient to reach a certain knowledge of the tools. For instance, it took me ages to download pictures on this blog!

Perseverance : If you use Internet as a lobbying tool, you have to be perseverant which includes sending a lot of mail to every one you know. Mail to spread your propaganda takes maybe a few years to reach their target.
Insight : The good Internet contents are not easy to be found. Plus you need to criticize everything you read if you don't want to follow every weak or dumb ideology spread by dozens of charismatics dummys ont the Net. Be open-minded but aware and ironic.
Comprehension : Please read the sentence above.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Social networks


Social network is a virtual community which became particularly popular in 2002. There are over 200 social networking sites now. In these communities, some people first send invitations to other members of their own personal networks to join the site. Those sites offer different features such as profiles, links, video…

Virtual communities often create real communities. As an example, MySpace which appeared in 1995, combines offline and online relationships. Some people even find a job on this site.












A key trend: Businesses are increasingly opening up stores on MySpace. Why? It's easy to do and a great to target young people.

DRM

Digital Right Management is one of the technology used to control access to and usage of digital data (software, music, movies). In the musical field, this system which protects author rights includes special size to encode titles and also rules for software and hardware.

To promote innovation, it’s important to protect author rights. However, abuses of this control exist and are getting more and more important. In the worst future, we could imagine that your music record is only readable 15 times on your cell phone of brand X, without any possibility to download on your pc or you mp3. That’s why a lot of people criticize DRM. Those opponents defend the conception of free software and praise a real share of knowledge. Moreover, it affects more legitimate purchasers of media than pirate media who hack the technology.

Fight for Web neutrality...



The concept of network neutrality means that everyone has the same level of access to the web and also that all data on the web is treated equally. This point of view is defended by companies like Microsoft and Google. However, recently, many attempts in the US to try to charge for different levels of online access were very criticized in the name of Internet ideals such as freedom. Telecoms companies want to implement a system, where data from companies or institutions able to pay, have more priority than others who are not able to pay. According to Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist who developed the World Wide Web, if United States agrees for a “two-tier system”, Internet will enter in a “dark period”. Web neutrality is also being defended by many associations, organisations which gather bloggers, businesses and internet users in general. “The SavetheInternet.com Coalition” is an example of association which tries to protect Internet freedom. This coalition uses lobbying among the political powers in United States.


According to me, some companies have forgotten the ideologies which lead the creation of the web. Furthermore, they are always interested in the creation of an economic model which makes more money. It’s necessary to have internet users who denounce these abuses.


Thursday, October 12, 2006

The Web in the last six months

The web's evolution is first lead by the creativity and ideals of internet users. We can say that the technological progress combined with the maturity of internet users is structuring the web. Web2.0 is caracterized by this implication of internet users who do not want to be spectators anymore but actors.
More concretly, the development of collaborative platform such as Youtube is getting more and more important, creating a major change on the web. Myspace.com is a an example of a successful "socialisation" website linking people to each other whereas You tube is the most used website for video with a monthly audience of 30.5 millions visitors.


Last but not least, Google, the online search behemoth, agreed Monday to pay $1.65 billion for YouTube. Google is expected to try to make money from YouTube by integrating the site with its search technology and search-based advertising program.

Podcast

A podcast is a term to describe the technology used to push audio content on websites so people can listen to it on their iPod or on other audio player. The author of a podcast is called a podcaster. The term podcast comes from iPod and broadcasting.
This technology can also be used to push any kind of file, including pictures and videos.

Not surprisingly, musicians and bloggers are prevalent among the early adopters, but mainstream media organizations, including ZDNet are beginning into podcasting as well.

Wikinews is an example of podcast which allows people to report news on different subjects. Its goal according to wikipedia is to "create a diverse environment where citizen journalists can independently report the news on a wide variety of current events". This is linked with the new ideal that non professional can produce their own content and create a community on the web.

Welcome to an experimental e-culture lesson



Welcome to my blog.

In my English e-culture class in the Celsa, we are discussing emerging issues about the uses and developement of the Internet. You can read my opinion, learn stuff in a fun and easy way on this blog. Being totally ignorant about those issues, i jumped into a big bath of weird and complicated word. Follow the bigouden's learning step after step...