I saw this Talk by Eli Pariser about how Facebook and Google manipulate without consent the information you are exposed to on the internet.
It’s great if you are interested in the politics of the web and the amount of control that companies like Facebook and Google have over information that we as users freely give them, although they would palm it off by saying ‘it’s relevant information targeted at you.’ what they are in fact doing is editing the information we are offered. The user builds the mould with their likes, dislikes, hobbies and interests and are then restricted within it.
So the W3C has given HTML5 its own identity. The HTML5 logo was designed by Ocupop design agency — It looks good; I like it. But what is it for? Well it helps to spread the word about this soon to be (2022) standard of web design, It works though a lot of the elements of HTML5 are stable and it’s good to use it for projects because it’s better to be ahead of the crowd, you don’t want to be learning it later on when everyone else knows all the ins and outs.
If you go to the W3c HTML5 logo page you will find the ‘Badge Builder 5000′ allowing you to create your own badge with clip-on technology class icons to show site visitors what technologies your shiny website utilises — like ‘web scouts’ except your mother doesn’t sew the badges on the ‘Badge Builder 5000′ does.
Do we need a HTML5 logo? Yes. Yes we do, because this is the age of the social web and HTML5 is suppose to be the cornerstone of this web. So print it off, photograph it and don’t forget to use the hash tag #html5logo because it’s meant to be a social thing, and even if all that comes from it is a better web design community I’m all for it.
While looking at the vehicle of information i came across this article, at first the well designed data visualisation caught my eye but the article itself is an interesting read.
The article is from Baekdal.com and is titled Where is everyone? it gives data about the way people interact with information.
Because i have been researching this area to see such an easy to interpret graph is great but the information in the article is also to a high standard.
It is interesting to see how the access to information has evolved over the years and how it is possibly going to develop in the next few years.
As part of artefact 6 I looked into the Twitter application programming interface (API) and i began by looking into how it works and then looked at a few tutorials. The best tutorial on this subject is “Add Twitter to your blog (step-by-step)” writen by Remy Sharp. I folloed the tutorial and modified minor ellements and then styled it so it would fit in with my site. Saying “look to the right” will be made redundant after the next post but my twitter feed is located in the right sidebar. I also created a simple “follow me on Twitter” button which is used as text replacement using CSS.
While looking into web 2.0 to refresh some of the research i had done earlier i came across this in the wikipedia document for web 2.0.
This documents mentions about websites having certain asspects of technology in them. Andrew McAfee gave these technologies the acronym “SLATES”.
Search
the ease of finding information through keyword search which makes the platform valuable.
Links
guide to important pieces of information. The best pages are the most frequently linked to.
Authoring
the ability to create constantly updating content over a platform that is shifted from being the creation of a few to being the constantly updated, interlinked work. In wikis, the content is iterative in the sense that the people undo and redo each other’s work. In blogs, content is cumulative in that posts and comments of individuals are accumulated over time.
Tags
categorization of content by creating tags that are simple, one-word descriptions to facilitate searching and avoid rigid, pre-made categories.
Extensions
automation of some of the work and pattern matching by using algorithms e.g. amazon.com recommendations.
Signals
the use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology to notify users with any changes of the content by sending e-mails to them.”
Profile tagging. Tagging people with words that are useful for your self and others to see helps with the flow of information. It is in my opinion that through the use of tag clouds information on profiles can be illustrated highlighting words that best represent the information being conveyed.
Being able to browse through users that have the same or similar tags. This is something I wanted to add into my eTags system but was unable to instead I added a search function that brought up a list of users who shared those tags.
I found that the profile tagging exercise was very successful and when I asked individuals in the group of people that I used they said that they enjoyed it and that if it were to be created as a Facebook application that it would be one that they would be very interested in using on a regular basis.
I found that people are more likely to get involved with something that is a part of something that they already use. With eTags because it requires an account and a profile people a less likely to spend the time to create one when there are not as many features as real social networking websites. It is for this reason that I decide to look into tagging profiles that had already been set up and that the individuals I asked use on a reasonably regular basis.
This idea I feel was well received and the majority were enthusiastic about the exercise. I asked each member to tag each others profile with a couple of words and said that one word would be enough if it was difficult to add more. I found that the average was three and I created ta table showing what each member tagged each other with including age and sex.
eTags is online. etags is a system where users can create an account and tag other users with words that best represent them. I have added a search facility for users to search for people who are tagged with a specific word.
For artefact one i plan to create a questionnaire and ask people questions about different aspects of web 2.0. i will be asking if people they use social networking websites and what they like using them for, if they use social bookmarking websites and what they like to use on them and if the read blogs and if so what type of blog do they read.
