Week 14 - The future of the internet

It is undeniable that the internet has brought about great conveniences to many. In fact so much convenience that it is almost possible for one to stay at home to do many of their chores from home.

In the previous posts, I mentioned that students are able to still catch up with their school work when their had to miss weeks of school due to the sars outbreak with the help and invention of blackboard. Then we have e-commerce, people are able to make purchases online without needing to go out of their houses and have the purchases delivered to their door steps. We had social networking to keep us "close" and connected to our friends and kins. Being connected to the internet also allows us to work from home via emails, video live conferencing and such. You see, internet has really brought us so much ease and convenience that we can almost go about doing everything from the comfort of our homes.

Perhaps in the future, we will really be able to do EVERYTHING from home, without having to physically move about. I remember reading a story "the machine stops" by E.M Forster for my literature in secondary school. Although it was written in the 1909, long before the invention of computers, internet, it has almost very accurately predicted what the future would be like when humans grow overly reliant on technology and on the computer. It depicted how humans would stop leaving their homes, how humans will start growing and becoming cold to one another due to the lack of human interactions and humans may not be able to make it or survive without technology. Because, the short story is about the detrimental and devastating effect of what technology can do.

Hence in my opinion, although technology like the internet has made lives much more comfortable and convenient for us, we must always bear in mind that these are bonuses in lives. They are invented and here to help AID us, but we should not grow overly reliant on it as the story has depicted. For example, although social networking has aided us and helped us to stay connected to our love ones whom we are not able to see everyday, we should not solely depend on it. We should still put in efforts to visit and interact face to face with out people, not just via the screen because such interaction is cold and not genuine.

Internet is still advancing, and i'm sure that in future, it will definitely bring about greater conveniences. Like i said, when that is the case, maybe there will be no need to leave our homes and perhaps we do not even need to move about as the connectivity and technologies improve. We can order our meals online, pay our bills online and etc. When this happens, human's health will also be affect due to the lack of physical movements.

Hence we must almost make an effort to remember that humans are the creator of machines and technologies, and not the other way round. We must not let the machines and technology control and ruin our lives.

Free Topic: Why I love Stumble upon. - Week 13

Have you ever felt so bored at home that you feel like your life is really rotting away? Well, I have, and i really hate that kind of feeling.

Being a student kind of means that you are financially crippled 1/2 of the time. So when that happens, I will try to stay at home so that i can avoid spending, or rather OVER-spending. One fine day while being broke and staying home, i stumbled across this social bookmarking website called "Stumbleupon", and that is one of the best discovery i've made online. Stumble upon allows you to list out your interests, and then base on your interests, brings you stumbling around websites that are of your interests. That means, almost every site that you stumble across are very possibly those that you will spend time reading, going through, and enjoy it. To date, i have discovered hundred over other websites that i found useful and interesting and they have since really killed and fight my boredom for me, which i am very much thankful for. So i am gonna repay stumble upon and help them do a "publicity" by sharing its awesomeness. I will share 5 interesting sites that stumbleupon has led me to, which may help kill some of your boredom if you think you could use so

me of it.

1. Need some softwares/applications to edit or do your work but don't feel like spending the thousand of dollars ? Fret not. Allmyapps.com have compiled a list of

freeware or free application that may come in useful and handy if you need them. They have also categorized them neatly, so you can easily find what you need based on the categories!

2. Are you interested in photography or graphic designs? Does photography inspire you? If your answers to those questions were yes, you should probably visit photographyserved, where fresh work from leading creative professionals are showcased.

3. Still feeling bored? Then you should probably try downloading one of these free MMORPG from here. Awesome gameplay and graphics, best of all, it's even free!

4. Have you always been fascinated and intrigue by some really wonderful advertisments and how they convey their messages across? If you had, then you'll probably be very interested in this site, whereby it showcases some of the really amazing ads that have been done. Click here or here or here.

5. Looking for inspirations or need something to spur you on in life? Sayingimages, the new in thing on the blogsphere, can or may make a difference in your life.

Free Topic: The Transition of Internet in my life? - Week 12

To me... internet is simply the remedy to ABSOLUTE BOREDOM.

I started using the internet when i was about 9 years old. I remembered that before internet invaded my life, i was pretty much into watching tv or spending time outdoors. But everything changed when i started getting hooked on the internet or perhaps the computer.

Back then, i was really into gaming. But at that time, to play DECENT or FUN games, you had to purchase them, at during that time, games were really expensive. So i remember buying them and playing them for a very long time even if i got sick of it. But den, internet was evolving at such a rapid speed that soon, many things were available on the internet(games, music), FOR FREE, but that is of course only if you know your ways round the internet.

At 11, i got hooked to chatting in chat rooms. The most popular chat program then was mIRC (Internet Relay Chat) or ICQ (Internet Chat Query). I wasn't much of an ICQ user, but i was an avid IRC user. I would log into it on a daily basis and stay hooked onto it for hours each day. At that time, there was no broadband bundle or unlimited access and whatsoever. If i didn't remember wrongly, my internet package only had 16 hours of free usage,

after exceeding that amount of time, you will have to start paying for your usage. And i would choke up to $200+ over worth of bills. At mIRC, it's not only about making friends, there were also channels there whereby you could download music. You could choose to be a leecher and just download from people or you could opt to be a server and let people download music from you(music sharing). When you qualify to be a full board server by clocking a certain amount of hours within one week, they will let you gain access to their music storage database. It was pretty much back in those days, and i continued to be hooked on mIRC until i was in secondary school.

When i was in secondary school, i was introduced to 2 phenomenal web; Neopets and Friendster.

Friendster came much later in teenage ye

ars. So neopets! It is a virtual pet website where users can own/adopt pets. Users can train their pets and level them up for battles, do trading of items, set up businesses, doll up their pets and even play simple flash games. At that time, this was pretty entertaining and addictive. It was also pretty phenomenon because everyone knew what neopet was. Users could also exchange/trade items with other users or send gifts to them. Perhaps this is already one of the

predecessor of social networking sites. After school everyday, people would rush to the free access computer lab in school to "chope" a computer so that they could play neopets.

And then... when i was in upper secondary, friendster took over the world, or my world,

by storm. Everybody grew obsessed with uploading pictures of themselves

, adding/finding friends, looking at other people's pictures and then most importantly,

writing testimonials for friends. Testimonials were also always

the longer the better, because it would

probably mean that the person is "very good". And the more testimonials you have, it means the more popular you are. But soon, the purpose was defeated because friends were just posting funny comments and such, not the exact kind of proper testimonia

ls. As Friendster's primary function was to upload pictures and write testimonials, the craze soon fazed out after 2 years, and that is when facebook took over the world.

And after all these, we now have facebook, twitter,

tumblr, blogging, live journal and etc. I have all of these right now, and i log into them daily too. This is the way to stay connected to your friends, to the world. Not only will you know what's happening to your friends, but through some of your friend's updates, you can also get to find out what's happening around the world. I would feel pretty lost these days without using them, it's like there's something missing.

It's undeniable that social networking site has made an immense impact in our lives and brought about great changes. I don't think i can survive more than a week without all these social networking stuff. I may be exaggerating, but truth is, i really do not want to go back to days without the existence of such great inventions.

Internet Journalism - Week 11

These days, journalism have caught the wild fire and have spread to the internet as well. One may not really know what internet journalism is, but if i mention a few names, you will bound to have some idea. So... i'm sure you've heard of "Razor TV", "Stomp" or perhaps "Xinmsn" from Singapore ?

As Wikipedia defines, Internet Journalism is "the reporting o

f facts produced a

nd distributed via the Internet". These facts or news could be from real profession reporters or they could also be from nosy netizens who have experienced and sighted some "interesting" happenings.

Razor TV's platform have professional reporters, but i feel that they tend to focus or pick on an event's absurdity or bizarre-ness, and not so much on it's importance, although they to make an effort to. In othe

r words, i feel that there's some kind of entertainment value in Razor TV's content. Take this video for example

The focus seemed to be more so on her ridiculous answer of how she has regretted not bringing her parents to Universal Studio. Not that these internet journalism doesn't report facts, i'm sure it does, but somehow, to me, it seemed that they are always another side to it which pulls you off the main track or focus.

Then we have sto

mp.

Stomp's news are kind of less political and heavy. As suggested by its slogan on the left, "you generate the content, you write the reports, you take the photos, you shoot the videos". Hence it is like more of a platform for netizens or budding reporter to report on societal issues or sightings, such as displ

aying public affections too openly in public or other p

oor behaviors in public. Usually

such reports are sent in by its readers who have sighted such events and when they post it on Stomp, it provides a platform for readers to generate discussions and be raises readers' awaresness of such happenings and phenomenon at the same time. So sometimes, readers should be prepared to read of see some biased or exaggerated comments in it, and should not expect all reportings to be 100% accurate or true. In fact, some of the reportings could even be hoax at times, so it would really be bette

r and wises if readers hold some reservations to what they have read.

Of course, there are other very credible internet journalism such as NYTimes.com and BBC.co.uk. However, both of such sources have already been around for very long and are also the state's newpapers for both New York and The United Kingdom. Their reportings are usually very serious and reflects worldwide or major issues. There are minimal tabloids in the reportings from these.

So after watching the video from razor tv on one of our latest PAP candidate Ms Tin Pei Lin, what is your impression of her? 2 days ago, i saw a friend of my on facebook posted this picture up:

Did u feel the same as him? I, on one hand, have my reservations on that. :)

Politicians taking the virtual world by storm - week 10

I am quite sure that internet has change politics in many ways. And i would believe that it will change the way politics is done in Singapore more than ever. In Singapore, before the internet and social media, opposition team had little ways to reach out and communicate with the citizens, thus making it hard to convey their ideas or policies across. If they are caught rallying or out publicizing openly for the party without a license or permit, they will be caught and dealt with.

As a result, many has condemned the current ruling party and saying that this is not fair play. Contesting parties are extremely upset and fought for the rights to be able to reach out to their supporters and also to gain better recognition. Today, our government has somewhat relented or loosen the law (or were there simply no laws governing this) and has allowed opposition political teams to "connect" with their supporters via the internet, meaning that they are allowed to set up their own website or use various forms of social media to create awareness of their existences.

With only one means of legal medium to reach out to the public, i do believe this will still need some time to take off, but i believe, with so many young people being connected to the internet these days, this will bound to make changes to our political system, sooner or later. Concerned youths who serve the internet on local politics will get to know them, what they represent and their policies. And with the internet's popularity on the rise, it won't be surprising that internet MAY very well be our main source of information in the future, especially for the future generation. Having said so, this is the place to start "propagandalis-ing" the youths of tomorrow, and with its reach growing broader (and soon over taking the television), I really believe that if anywhere, internet is definitely a good place for politician to reach out to their supporters and potential supporters. The power of internet must not be undermined.

Those who undermined it, may very likely not emerge as victor, like hw McCain of the US had totally neglected it.

Internet Security - Week 9

If you are a frequent web surfer or browser, internet security is definitely something that a user should neglect. Negligence on internet security can cause a user a lot of problems and if serious can even end up as police cases.When we talk about internet security, we are talking about firewalls, virus protections, internet scams such as phishing, spams and many many more.

Without the help of virus protection softwares such as Norton Anti-Virus, AVG anti-virus, users

are much more prone and susceptible to viruses. It was said that the are millions of viruses online, if we go online without the use of firewall and anti-virus softwares, we will be said to be playing with fire, exposing ourselves to the million of viruses out there and before we know it, we may be hit with one which can cause your computer to malfunction, depending on the severity of the virus.

However, viruses do not necessary have immediate impact on the computer, some can take a few days, or ever a few years to act up. Speaking of which, some viruses are also less prominent or visible than the other. Take phishing and spyware for instances, which works hand in hand. Phishing is defined as "a form of internet fraud that aims to steal valuable information such as credit cards, social security numbers, user IDs and passwords.." Malicious websites that you stumble upon will secretly 'plant' and spyware into your computer, so when you enter personal information into forms, these spywares will be able to obtain this information. When fallen onto the hands of evil, these personal and private information can be used against um such as credit card theft and etc. Hence, when we install firewalls, anti-viruses softwares, we will be better protected against such harms like these. However these softwares are also not 100% foolproof.

The advice to safe online practices when disclosing personal information is for you to clear your cache and delete browsing history. Also, we should keep our virus softwares up to date and do a full system scan at least once ever fortnight . It would be good to install a software such as Ad-Aware because this is a software which helps you to clear all those spywares planted in your computer.

Multimedia - Week 8

For a person like me, it'll be hard for me to live in a world without multimedia. Multimedia, as the name suggest, is a broad and wide aspects of various media, such as videos, music, animaltion, graphic and etc.

I graduated from Singapore Poly with a diploma in multimedia, therefore one can understand why i said it'd be hard for me to live in a world without multimedia. Multimedia is my passion, and we live in a world that relies on multimedia these days. Everyday, we will have some form of experience with multimedia, such as watching or streaming a video clip or a trailer online, listening to music, creating animation and so on. Back in my poly days, my world really did revolve around multimedia, i am always editing or designing animations, videos and graphics. Although i wouldn't say i am a professional, i dare say that i am pretty competent with softwares such as final cut pro on mac for video editing, audacity and pro tools on windows for music editing, adobe master suite (flash, photoshop, dreamweaver, image ready, illustrator and premiere pro).

Being competent in these softwares have brought about much advantages and conveniences. I am able to create entertainment for myself or others, and i am able to digitally beautify or enhance many things. Attached in these posts are 2 videos and 1 image of how i am able to beautify things. Knowing how to use these multimedia tools or softwares have also in a way equipped me with a skill which has enabled me to feed myself or earn some extra cash. I do some freelancing for people to design collaterals for their events or even design and edit the webpages and video. Best of all, freelancing can pay pretty well too, so one can really consider picking up such skills. However, i feel that this could only be temporary because these days, people are becoming really tech savvy, meaning that many people can edit and enhance things themselves and no longer require engaging a professional to help them do

things like these. So maybe the moral of the story could be that, pick up the multimedia skills while there is still market for it, because when everyone becomes tech-savvy and can do the job themselves, you may already have earned enough to conquer some other markets!

Some of my works below:

Video done for Com 101 in UB, May 2009. Using Adobe Premiere Pro.

Animation Video done for Year Two Modelling and Animation Project in Singapore Poly, using Autodesk 3d Max and Adobe Premiere Pro.

Digital Imaging + Enhancing for freelance job using Photoshop.

Internet Tools - week 7

Sooo.... Internet Tools, what are they ? Some examples of internet tools would be search engines like Google and Yahoo, and those tools you can find in google.

I used to be a Yahoo! User... until Google came along. Of cos i didn't switch over immediately, when Google first came out, i didn't like it, because i thought that there

wasn't much functions as the

User Interface was too plain, but boy can i be so wrong. Anyway, it always take me quite a while to like and get accustomed to new interfaces, so like i said, i think i didn't switch over to Google until it was perhaps at least 2 or 3 years old. And when i did, i realised how much i've missed out.

Today, like many people would have said, google is my new found best friend. Almost literally. One of the first Google tool i've used was it's email. If i didn't remember wrongly or at least to my knowledge, Google's Gmail was the first email services to offer 1 GB of mail storage space. At tha

t time, that kind of storage was enormous! Hotmail, the hottest online emailing tool then offered much lesser, probably about 500mb or less. People who send out and receive attachments welcomed and were very thankful to Google, because this means they could h

ave stored more stuff than ever before. And so once again, i bade farewell to hotmail. Hello Gmail! But of course, in the competitive world of the internet, the others followed suit. And so now we all have large storage for our emails.

It was not until i've tried their email tool did i switch over to its search engine. Nowadays, anything that i don't know, or need assistance in, i simply over the browser and google it. Oh by the way, google's set as my homepage. That probably already says a lot. As Yahoo! main cust

omers or consumers are its advertisers, the first few results that it returns when you search for something are usually those paid by their advertisers, meaning you may not find what you are looking for exactly or in other words, it may take you longer time to get to what you are really looking for.As for Google, their focus and consumers are on its users, so the results that they try to return can be generally more related to a user's searches and thus, save more time. That is one of the very important reasons why i decided to switch over from Yahoo! Google is my best friend because anything that i need to know or things that i need to find, it has them ready for me, almost everytime. It never fails me.

And then it jus got bigger. There were google Maps. Goo

gle Translate. Google Scholar. Google News. Google Docs. To

day, I NEED to live with all these tools. Without them, believe it or not, i feel so lost. Today, Google Maps have been incorporated into mobiles/cell phones, i cannot say how brilliant this can be, especially for a direction idiot like me. Everytime i need to go to somewhere new, i just need to turn on the Google Map app found in the iPhone and it leads me to it. I no longer know what getting lost or walking round in circles means anymore! This is really a savior for mankind, i may exaggerate, but i'm not kidding. Even before the app was on iPhone, we could still log onto Google map and type in the directions and it would still give us step by step directions to get to our intended destinations! And the last i heard, there are now even webcams on GoogleMap to assist you in monitoring situations such as traffic and perhaps even the weather. How sweet.

And if you're w

orried that you stumbled upon some website in foreign languages, fear not. Google is again, here to the rescue. With that tool, it will give one a basic or general translation of a word you've entered. It may not always be accurate though, as we know that there are some puns in our languages, but it works pretty well for me. Sometimes, i have friends who want to act mysterious on facebook, and they will type in other languages like french, japanese or korean in their status updates. With Google Translate, it's SO easy to "decipher" what they are saying. HAHA. Gotcha! Oh, and if you are using Google's Chrome, Google's web browser, if you stumble upon a website that is of foreign language, it even offers or prompt you to let them translate the entire website for you!

The last thing that is really worth mentioning will definitely be Google Scholar. I never knew of such tool until i went into college. With research paper due every month or so, this tool is ESSENTIAL to all college students. It helps you to collate and find reliable sources or scholarly journals which you can use to reference for your research papers. And if you have access to your college's e-library, that's even better because Google Scholar can also link it to that and generate even more results for you.
Really! Talk about convenience, Google has it all. Thank you Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page! What would we have done without you!

e-learning - week 6

I vaguely remembered i was introduced to e-learning in 2003, that was when i was in secondary 3. The decision for the use of an e-learning platform was merely because school has been closed for a period of 2 weeks? And that was all because of the SARS epidemic that took place then.

I guess during that time then, e-learning hasn't been very well conceptualised yet, or at least for me, it was the first time i have heard of something like that. And upon my first interaction with it, i really didn't like it, and i felt it was NOT user friendly. And if i didn't assume wrongly, even the teachers who were using it must not have liked it, as i remembered only one of our teacher assigned and uploaded work onto the platform. The rest probably didn't managed to figure out in time how to use it or found it too troublesome.

It was about another 2 years later that i gotta use it, intensively this time. And i did learn how to use it then, because it was a compulsory thing to in polytechnic. All our lecture and tutorial notes were uploaded there.So meaning if you didn't know how to access it, you can forget about passing your course. The other things we used it for were for online topic discussions which our lecturer gave us as assignments or extra work which could give us bonus points, or for some weekly quizzes. Although i feel that the platform and interface for elearning tools or blackboard(the elearning application's name) has become more user-friendly and easier to use, i don't really see much use for it, maybe perhaps it did contributed to the environment by being more environmental friendly because we no longer have to print out notes on papers. But other than that, so far, even as i use it in university today, the use of these tools were mainly for uploading of lecture notes.

Maybe it facilitates and aids in learning, in case we missed out some points that were being mentioned in class. Or maybe i did not see the big picture of it, or simply did not have the chance to experience it. Perhaps in the future if classes were conducted virtually, or if we could ask a virtual lecturer questions anonymously which feeling embarrased, it could really be more of a use. I've seen videos of lectures being conducted via online, but maybe it just isn't something that has taken off over here yet, probably because we lack the discipline needed for such convenience to take off.

Success E-commerce Web - Week 5

These days, many businesses have ventured into the online market in order to remain competitive and to stay ahead of time. Venturing online has extended many businesses market and has also helped bring in more revenue. However, whether one is successful in the e-commerce industry will also be dependent on the e-commerce web each business has set up.

Firstly, i feel that it is very important to have an accessible site. Simply because if the web is not accessible, it will cause users to be very irritated. Sites with many broken links or incorrect link will cause its potential buyers to hunt for the many other alternative available on the world wide web today, and thus losing businesses. It has been researched that many users these days do not have patience to browse through inaccessible sites.

Secondly, I feel that the interface or design of the website has to be of quality, simple and straight forward. Because if a site is too complicated, it will cause users to lose their attention span. People will not want to waste time navigating through complicated sites to find what they want. One of the purposes of turning to buy things from online is to save time, hence if the e-commerce website does not help a user to save their time, users will not ever want to consider visiting it again.

Thirdly, the credibility and security of an e-commerce web is very important, because users will be revealing their personal information here, and they will not be pleased to know when their credit card numbers or personal information have been hacked or retrieved by unauthorized third parties. An e-commerce site with "Verisign" or "Safe Secure" guarantees will help to put customers' minds at ease and therefore, commit a transaction with you.

Next, positive testimonials of previous buyers will also help to prompt and encourage prospective clients to make purchases with you, as these testimonials will help to cast your business in a favorable limelight. Prospective buyers who see that your business is well respected and received by others will be more keen to buy from you, as it gives them a sense of predictability and security.

Social Networking Sites - Week 4

More and more social networking sites are emerging every day, and so said that their primary purpose is to connect the world together despite of the geographical distances. But underlying that primary purpose, critics have revealed that social networking sites are not only benefiting users but creators, businesses and etc as well.

The most popular and well known social networking site as of today is probably Facebook, with millions of users logging onto it every single day and the number is still growing at a tremendous speed. After the success of facebook and its predecessors, more of such sites are being created everyday. Each of these sites hope to gain as many members as they can, in doing so, they are also establishing and archiving valuable database and information of these members. These databases are often said to be private, but it has been revealed that some of these databases are also being sold to 3rd parties which uses these database to their advantages such as being able to send their advertisements to users who have interests related to their products.

Then come my question, is it really a must for one to be one a social networking site? In my opinion, i am on a social networking site mainly because i am just following the trend, i don't want to be seemed as some outdated or old fashion person who is lost in transition. But if u were to really ask if it has benefited me, i would be less sure. True it has helped killed time when i'm bored, and helped kept me updated about my friends' statuses but i'm just not too sure whether it has helped bring me closer to my friends.

And recently, I've came to know of this app called FourSquare on iphone. It's a location-based social networking website that allow your friends to know and track your whereabouts.Users check-in at venues using a mobile website, text messaging or a device-specific application by running the application and selecting from a list of venues that the application locates nearby.Each check-in awards the user points and sometimes "badges". As of December 2010, the company reported it had 6 million registered users. The difference between this and facebook is that facebook currently do not have the ability to track users' whereabout unless manually updated by the users themselves. At the same time, facebook also do not have "objectives" for the user to fulfill, thus making FourSquare seemed like a objective/role playing game at the same time, generating the interests of users.

To me, i do agree that social networking sites are powerful and can be powerful for businesses, as it can help to create awareness, free publicity to a large group of people over a short span of time. However, it must have many features and abilities, and must be constantly improved so that users will not grow sick of it and to keep track of changing demands. A social networking site can be powerful by itself, but if it is incorporated together with other forms of media such as phones, the impact of it can be even more powerful, which is why many social networking sites are developing apps to be compatible on different phones and platforms. But sometimes, the impact can be so powerful it may even be undesirable. Pros and cons, as always.

Social Media - Week 2

2011.... we are now living in a world fuelled by all the social media.

maybe we have already long forgotten, that a long long time ago (or maybe not that long), that we used to be solely dependent on the traditional media, eg newspaper, radio, television. Those were the days then... and thinking back, news took a little longer to reach us as compared to today, especially news that seemed a little further from us geographically.

Today, i dare say that we can learn of any event that happened around the world within 10 mins, and that's is all thanks to the thing called social media, like youtube, blogs, podcasts, facebook and twitter. And with the help of mobile phones like iPhones and HTC which allows u to access the internet to update anything you want, maybe it doesn't even have to take 10 minutes anymore. And if the content uploaded is anything phenomenon, it can generate millions of hits within a short frame of time too, meaning millions of people from all over the world have seen what you have just uploaded onto the world wide web, and so yes, that's how power the social media is now.

Social media is an efficient way to learn about the world's happenings and also help create and foster a new generation of liberal and independent people, who do not have to depend on the traditional means of media to get their news or insights. There are able to exercise their own critical thinking ability and can also express their opinions more interactively. Traditional forms of media usually go through some forms of censorship by the government or authority and many of the things or information people learned from it may be "fine tuned", hiding some kinds of truth from them. But social media is a little different, it is a participatory online media where news, photos, videos and podcast are made public via social media websites through voluntary submissions by people in the community and around the world. Unless it is anything overly serious, they will not face censorship or be taken off the web, and even by the time they are taken off the web, many people are online long and often enough to have already seen it.

In the past, people used to turn to tv or radio immediately whenever they hear of some major news. But these days, people are offered this other alternatives, which provides a broader option for them to learn about things. Social media offers a wider range of insights into things, and most importantly have more and faster updates on the various trending issues. These days, the consumers grow irritably impatient when traditional media do not provide us enough information at a fast enough speed, and increasingly there are more people just resorting to social media to feed their hunger. It is undeniable that many of us today are overly reliant on the social media today.

Internet - Week 1

The birth of the internet was related and linked to the US and USSR 's space race. While the USSR was focussed and succeeded in developing and launching technologies into space, the US not wanting to lose out and feel inferior focussed on computer science and eventually developed the internet.

Developed by the Advance Research Project Agency (ARPA), they focussed mainly on computer science and information processing. It was their goal in the 1960s to connect mainframe computers at different universities around the country so they would be able to communicate using a common language and a common protocol. In 1969, the world's first multiple-site computer network was finally launched, and that eventually developed into the internet that we use today.

Together with the internet, a browser used to surf the net was also developed. In the earlier days, we had netscape, and then slowly, we had internet explorer and suddenly, we had a "population boom" on the internet. Within a short time frame, user suddenly had many choices to choose from, such a Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera and what have you.

The internet together with browsers and perhaps also search engine formed a formidable combo. Young people these days probably no longer know what is encyclopedia, and if they are clueless about anything in the world, they no longer worry. All they have to do is simply have an internet connection, then double click on the mouse, log onto www.google.com or www.yahoo.com (in fact any search engines that exists today), type in their questions, and wala! Your answers are out there. Who cares about those bulky and space consuming encyclopedia books these days when you have google scholar and wikipedias.

But the internet hadn't always been that accessible and so interactive. When it first began, it worked on an interface/platform known as the web 1.0. Web 1.0 only allowed "read-only" websites or web documents, meaning only the creator/authors could edit or post things online. No picture postings were allowed too. Later, when web 2.0 was developed in the millennium (fall of 2001 to be exact), users saw the great change of the web. Web 2.0 had allowed more interactivity and flexibility among web surfers, as it allowed almost all surfers to "read-write" or create and generate their own contents and publish it online. In layman terms, everyone could have and create their "own space" in the cyber world. Later into the years, this sparked off an "upload/download" phenomenon and outraged various copyright infringements.

True enough, the internet has sparked off much controversies, in fact there's so much that it seems almost uncountable. Some people had called the internet the devil of millennium, but there are others, like me who beg to differ. Without internet, i doubt finding informations or doing researches would be such a breeze. Staying in touch with close ones who are miles away is gonna be such a pain and would perhaps also burn holes in pockets. And most importantly, where are we gonna get all the entertainment that we are getting these days? ;)