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. :)