Professional Communication Technologies Further thoughts

 I am familiar with some web 2.0 tools but since starting on the BAPP course I have learnt about Google Mail, Google Docs and Blogging. I was about to research ‘Delicious’ further as it’s a good social book marking site and I will eventually book mark the links below into it, but I became side tracked.. Google Docs – Cloud computing/concept. I understand this concept. I worked for Virgin Media and our division (Business) conceived and designed some of the routing for the hardware to be connected within large corporations nationally and internationally to one another for information to be collected/collated/pass through the ‘cloud’ concept. I was on the team of the BT N3 NHS project in the UK, connecting ALL government NHS establishments, hospitals, health care centres, GP centres, Dentists etc., to this cloud that stores all our health notes. Information passed through Ethernet products from speeds around 10Mb to 100Mb
http://www.n3.nhs.uk/HowdoI/N3LondonEthernetNextGenerationServices.cfm
In my current Professional capacity, I first thought ‘who would want to collaborate or edit anything that I've written and that I would want to store this information in Google Docs?’ This line of questioning tells me that I have been teaching ‘autonomously’ far too long and that the technology today has made/forced me to become transparent in all we do. I intend to add my research notes at some point. When I was reading about Ulrich et all (2008) who suggests that ‘these services are constantly evolving and that each platform is progressively developed and replaced (what they refer to as the ‘perpetual beta’), I’d not long read about Quora that was launched out of a ‘private beta’ by two former Face Book employees in 2009 What is Quora? “The website Quora is likely to have answers for you, thanks to submissions from its vast community of users, which the service calls “some of the smartest people in the world.” That's another website for us to ‘manage’! Further proof, in the link below, that Gruber (2007) suggests that there are three components of an on line system that support collective intelligence and the benefits that might be gained from the idea that in a web 2.0 platform like Face Book, the fact that there is over 500 million members makes it the valuable and useful tool for social interaction. The owners of Quora are certainly on their way to benefiting financially.

http://www.maclife.com/article/features/what_quora_and_why_should_you_use_it

Harnessing collective intelligence. How can we trust that the facts are correct? We need to be reminded that photographic and video evidence can be interfered/tampered with. Re mixable data & transformations. Valtyssen 2010 ‘suggests that the blurring of the distinctions between the people who make media and the people who consume it encourages people to engage and participate in the media’ Proof of this is that we have become journalists, reporters and media makers, making our own videos reporting the truth or horrors. One such example of reporting are from young people in war torn countries. This ‘platform’ has given us all a ‘voice’ we are now becoming equal and as important as anyone else with intelligence gathering and reporting it..
I intend to use this media to market my business and add a business page.  I have my own web site but need more hits.. I hope to learn about higher web site profile during this course. I currently us Face Book for socialising and was reading the statistics. A question sprung to mind ‘What would FB be like in five years time’ I was inquisitive so I Google’d the question and found a video interview in 2009 with Eric Scmidt, CEO of Google.  His highlighted comments are shown below;
• Five years from now the Internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
• Today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
• Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
• Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
• "We're starting to make significant money off of YouTube", content will move towards more video
• "Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results."
• There are many companies beyond Twitter and Face book doing real time.
• "We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?"
• It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.
• A very compelling interview and worth listening to.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_web_in_five_years.php
I am curious by nature and found the following link about FB. This site mentions Quora and how it would be a good competition for FB. Here is evidence of evolving ideas for improvement. How FB can become bigger in 5yrs than Google is today..
 http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/02/facebook-bigger-google/

In my conclusion I think these new ideas will come to fruition. Having  worked in the Telecoms Industry I was in the midst of the new concepts and designs for evolving and new technologies which are being implemented today.  Live, real time video conferencing for many and varied industries has been in use for quite some time. For example, in education, medical profession, live TV interaction and is happening now in our everyday lives.  Companies will have their day and then go out of existence within a few years. Companies investing in new Technology will be in ‘fashion’ and we all want to at least try out the new technology.  It’s up to us to make an informed choice about the Technologies in our lives. Is it a necessity? We should be responsible enough to allow our young children to dabble with the Internet safely. There is so much going on, I fear we are becoming desensotised.