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.

Professional Communication Technology Task 1b

Reader 1

First thoughts about Web 2.0

Does Web 2.0 have a place in my world today? . In deed it is good funnel for research, storage, collaborating, networking, interacting, entertain, be entertained, elaborate, exaggerate, lies, corruption, scheming etc.. One big fusion, one big melting pot..  I will extract what I need when I need it.  We are fortunate to be living in the developing world, we are educated, we socialise, we have freedom of thought or have we after being bombarded with new technology in ways that we can improve our lives, information that we all must have!. We should therefore, be able to evaluate, make good judgements and educated risks within seconds of pressing that ‘send/display/share’ button. Hard to live with it and hard to live without it..

I was reading some of the other student’s blogs and comments and had the same thoughts as Liam about society becoming lazy and becoming less physical.  I see this regularly when taking children’s dance classes how unfit and little stamina they have.  Jessica Hay mentions the difference between seeing a ballet production on TV or video compared to experiencing the real thing and exciting all of our senses. Will we loose some of the use of our senses? Emily Brenchley hit the nail on the head; it is our choice in the end.  Do we sit for hours on end in front of a screen for hours on end, adults at work as well as children at play? Should we? Do we have to?

Since starting BAPP and setting up a Blog, I have never come across the whole concept of Web 2.0.  It is very very clever… A real maze for me though!

New to me is Google Docs or similar and without is it would be difficult to share or publish you work in progress.  Do I want everyone to steal some of my ideas if I’m researching?  Is what I’m researching correct?  Should I trust what I read? Wikipedia is a site I will initiate my research, but I need further proof and justification for cross referencing.

Blogging is new to me too.  I will probably use this more often now.

Flickr or similar sites are great for photo storage and of course ways to make some revenue as a professional.  I enjoyed the outcome of this task but not the process.

Youtube can be fun, entertaining and informative, excellent to broadcast news events but a reminder that horrific scenes can be shared too.

I have looked at other gadget and widgets that can be added to your blogs and web sites and may use them further down the line. For now I still prefer to interact much more with humans face to face, to feel them and so witness their real emotions.  I like the feeling of being alive.