WAIS =
The abbreviation for Wide Area Information
Service, WAIS is a Net-wide system for looking
up specific information in Internet databases.
WAIS Gateway =
This term refers to a computer that is used to translate
WAIS data so it can be made available to an otherwise
incompatible network or application. Mosaic must
use a WAIS gateway.
WAN
= Wide Area Network of computers
spanning hundreds or thousands of miles. Unlike
intranets and virtual private networks, WANs do
not use public Internet
arteries and are totally isolated from the public
domain. (See also LAN, Intranet,
Extranet,
and Virtual
Private Networks (VPN))
WAP
= (Wireless
Glossary of Terms)
WARP
= (See OS/2)
Waterloo MAPLE = (See MAPLE)
Watermark = a background image in HTML documents that does not
scroll like larger images that are not watermarks.
For example, in the Microsoft FrontPage Editor,
if you click on Page Properties and Background,
one of the options is to import a watermark image
for your web page.
Wav
= (See AIF,
AU,
Sound board,
and Wave
file)
Wave File = A wav file format used by Microsoft Windows
for storing digitized audio. All information necessary
to generate voice and music is stored in the file.
(See also AIF, AU, Sound board,
and MIDI)
The Web is Alive With the Sound of MP3," Newsweek, February 22, 1999, Page 16.
http://www.MP3.com (hours of free downloads, including the New York Times MP3s.)
http://www.audiogalaxy.com (lots of samples and free downloads.)
Go to the Frequently Asked Questions at http://www.MP3.com
. MP3 is a file format which stores audio
files on a computer in such a way that the file
size is relatively small, but the song sounds near
perfect. You can identify MP3 files because they
will end in MP3. Typically 1 MB is equal to one
minute of music or several minutes for spoken work/audiobooks.
This is about a 90% reduction in hard drive space
and bandwidth
vis-a-vis uncompressed high quality
wav files, but the actual savings depends upon the
recording quality of your wav files. If you
think about a CD-ROM holding 650 Mb, this translates
to over 11 hours of high quality audio in MP3 format.
More importantly, MP3 audio does not require as
much Internet bandwidth as previous audio alternatives
WebBob
= (See Bot.)
Web browsers = Interfaces to the World Wide Web that simplify
locating web pages, downloading files, playing of
audio, playing of video, etc. Gopher was
the first to become a great hit, but it was limited
mainly to text. Mosaic followed, but it was
Netscape that hit the market with enormous success.
Netscape Navigator can be downloaded from
<http://www.netscape.com/. This success jolted
Microsoft into expanding its network browser development
from six employees to more than 600 developers.
The Microsoft browser is known as Explorer
(see <http://www.microsoft.com/>). Various
other competitors are emerging, but it is a market
share browser race between Netscape Navigator and
Explorer. Features to both are added almost monthly,
so it is very difficult to stay up to date on the
latest happenings without going directly to the
vendor web pages. An earlier comparison is given
in PC Computing, April 1996, pp. 79-80, but this
comparison was obsolete amost as soon as it hit
the presses. Most browser vendors also sell software
for creating and maintaining web (home) pages. Students
can set up free homepages at <http://www.tripod.com/>.
Virtual Servers Inc., for a monthly fee, will provide
web server space to business firms and other parties
wanting to set up network application servers. The
Virtual Server home page is http://vservers.com/
. In the past, browsing was free of virus risks.
With the advent of Windows Scripting Host utilities,
this is no longer the case. Precautionary
advice is given under ActiveX.
(See also Cookies,
Image
map, GINA,
Gopher,
Mosaic,
Internet,
SLIP
and Web
streaming.)
Windows
users mostly prefer Internet Explorer that comes
bundled in Microsoft Office. A key advantage
of Internet Explorer is that it supports DHTML dynamic
Webpages. Another advantage is that it now
supports XML and XBRL --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/XBRLandOLAP.htm
Apple's
entry into the browser market is both sleek and
unique. But is Safari the Mac user's best bet on
the Web?
"Surfin' Safari," by Michael Calore, Webmonkey,
January 8, 2003 --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/03/02/index3a.html
Those kooky minds over at Apple, I tell ya.
Apparently, they are not content with producing the industry's most celebrated
hardware, the sleekest operating system, and the
sexiest portable audio device since the boombox. Now, Apple Computer is setting its sights on the crowded browser
market.
At the Macworld
2003 conference (which took place the week of
January 6th, 2003), Apple head honcho Steve Jobs
announced the development of a lightweight Web browser
that's especially tailored for Apple's Jaguar operating
system.
The new browser, named Safari, is available for download as a public beta
from Apple's website. Our expectations are especially
high on this one, partly because we've been handed
a brand new standards-compliant browser based on
an open-source engine. But we're really wringing
our hands in anticipation because it's Apple, and
Apple has consistently produced some fantastic software
— iTunes, iMovie, and the whole OS X family of server
and desktop work environments rank among the best
— so its take on the seemingly perfected arena of
the Web browser is a welcome and exciting event.
At the heart of Safari is the KHTML engine. Originally developed for the KDE Konqueror
browser, Apple selected the open-source rendering
engine for its speed, its compliance with current
standards, and its relatively small code base. Also
Safari's JavaScript handler, called JavaScriptCore,
is based on Konqueror's KJS engine. Apple isn't
just scamming open-source technology by building
it into Safari, it's continuing to contribute to
the community by tracking the development of the
browser engine alongside the KDE development team.
Apple's commitment to the open-source movement is praised by many, decried
by some. But if it means more engineers working
on the improvement of Web browsers, making them
better and more consistent, then why knock it? It
should also be noted that many of the members of
Apple's Safari development team have past experience
with open-source browser technology: Don Melton,
the Safari Engineering Manager, was one of the key
people on the first Mozilla team, and David Hyatt,
also on the Safari development team and from the
Mozilla crew, was one of the originators of Chimera,
an open-source browser for OS X.
Eager to try out the first public beta, I downloaded Safari, installed
it on my 600MHz iBook (OS X 10.2 or later is required),
and used it to complete a series of tasks. I wanted
to see if Safari could handle the usual day-to-day
stuff: browse my favorite news sites, pay my credit
card bill, and update my weblog. I also played with
all of the fancy features and gave the controls
a few tweaks to see what the range of capabilities
were.
So let's take Safari on a ride, shall we?
Continued
at http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/03/02/index3a.html
Mike's
bottom line conclusion:
The general assumption of those in the pundit business is that Safari is intended as a replacement
for the sluggish and standards-defiant Internet
Explorer for the Macintosh. And it does serve
as an excellent alternative. But is it the best
candidate for the job? No.
In my opinion, the best browser for Mac OS X, or at least the most promising
one, is Chimera. Also in the beta stage (release 0.6 as of this writing),
Chimera is part of the Mozilla open-source browser
project, so it runs on the Gecko engine. It's a
lovely piece of software for many of the same reasons
as Safari: it's fast and lightweight, it loads pages
properly, and the major plugins work correctly.
Webcasting = use of World
Wide Web to broadcast information. Unlike typical
surfing, which relies on a pull method of transferring
web pages, webcasting uses a "push" combination
of technologies to send information to users' computers.
This is also referred to as "broadcasting,
channel
surfing, or "netcasting."
Users get steady updates of streams of information
in requested categories. Users can subscribe to
a "channel," download software to a local
computer, and then streams of automatic updates
follow. The most popular webcasting service to date
is PointCast, but several major
companies, including Microsoft and Netscape, have
announced their own webcasting products and services.
For example Netscape announced it "Netscape Netcaster" as follows:
Netscape
Netcaster, the newest component of Netscape Communicator,
enables push delivery of information and offline
browsing. Netcaster seamlessly integrates with Channel
Finder, the source for the best channels on the
Internet. Users can subscribe to the information
they want and have it delivered automatically. Offline
browsing allows users to take the valuable resources
of the Web offline with them - wherever they go.
Developed entirely using the open Internet standards
of HTML, Java, and JavaScript, Netscape Netcaster
is an example of the powerful applications that
can be built on the Netscape ONE platform.
For
Podcasting go See also Listserv
and Chat
Lines.
One
of the latest webcasting options is the Java-based
Castanet that can
be downloaded from http://www.marimba.com.
When users subscribe to a channel with Castanet
Tuner, it requests the download of the corresponding
application from an Internet-based Castanet Transmitter
server. Castanet Tuner then saves the Java application
onto your hard disk. When launched, channels can
either operate locally without a live Internet connection
or (where appropriate for the channel's type of
content) communicate across the Internet. In the
past, web casting was free of virus risks.
With the advent of Windows Scripting Host utilities,
this is no longer the case. Precautionary
advice is given under ActiveX.
See also Intercast.
The
next generation of metadata
webcasting will probably be in Resource
Description Format (RDF). There were various
metadata processes before RDF was on the drawing
boards. Microsoft's Channel Definition Format
(CDF) used in "Web Push Channels" and
Netscape's Meta Content Framework (MCF) preceeded
RDF. These technologies describe information
resources in a manner somewhat similar to RDF and
can be used to filter web sites and web documents
such as filtering pornography and violence.
They can be used to channel inflows of desired or
undesired web information. CDF, for example,
carries information not read on computer screens
that perform metadata tasks. See Resource
Description Format (RDF) and Search engine.
Web document =
An HTML
document, Gopher
document, a PDF
document, or some other document that is browsable
on the Internet.
WebLedger = An online accounting system in which a vendor
of accounting services (e.g., bookkeeping, receivables
management, bill paying, inventory management, financial
statement preparation, and tax services) are provided
to multiple firms by a WebLedger vendor. The
CEO of Oracle was a pioneer in this area when he
formed NetLedger that has since changed its name
to NetSuite. You can read more about WebLedgers
and alternative vendors at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/webledger.htm
Weblog (Blog)
Also see RDF
and RSS
Weblog
= Blog = What?
Also
see Podcasting at http://www.trinity.edu/
Answer
from Whatis.com ---
A Weblog (which is sometimes written as "web log" or "weblog")
is a Web site of personal or non-commercial origin
that uses a dated log format that is updated on
a daily or very frequent basis with new information
about a particular subject or range of subjects.
The information can be written by the site owner,
gleaned from other Web sites or other sources, or
contributed by users. A
Web log often has the quality of being a kind of "log of our times"
from a particular point-of-view. Generally, Weblogs
are devoted to one or several subjects or themes,
usually of topical interest, and, in general, can
be thought of as developing commentaries, individual
or collective on their particular themes. A Weblog
may consist of the recorded ideas of an individual
(a sort of diary) or be a complex collaboration
open to anyone. Most of the latter are moderated
discussions.
Listing
of Accounting Blogs
Among the millions
of Web logs permeating the Internet, there are some
by and for accountants worth checking out. This
article includes an Accounting Blog List that you
can download, bookmark or print.
Eva M. Lang, "Accountants Who Blog,"
SmartPros, July 2005 --- http://accounting.smartpros.com/x49035.xml
Bloggers
will love TagCloud
Now, many bloggers are turning to a new service
called TagCloud
that lets them cherry-pick articles in RSS feeds
by key words -- or tags -- that appear in those
feeds. The blogger selects the RSS feeds he or she
wants to use, and also selects tags. When a reader
clicks on a tag, a list of links to articles from
the feeds containing the chosen keyword appears.
The larger the tag appears onscreen, the more articles
are listed.
Daniel Terdiman, "RSS Service Eases Bloggers'
Pain," Wired News, June 27, 2005 --- http://www.wired.com/
Weblog
software use grows daily -- but bloggers abandon
sites and launch new ones as frequently as J.Lo
goes through boyfriends. Which makes taking an accurate
blog count tricky --- http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,54740,00.html
Some eight million Americans now publish blogs and 32 million people read
them, according to the Pew Internet & American
Life Project. What began as a form of public diary-keeping
has become an important supplement to a business's
online strategy: Blogs can connect with consumers
on a personal level -- and keep them visiting a
company's Web site regularly.
Riva Richmond, "Blogs Keep Internet Customers
Coming Back," The Wall Street Journal,
March 1, 2005; Page B8 --- http://online.wsj.com/
Want
to start your own blog?
BlogBridge --- http://www.blogbridge.com/
What
Blogs Cost American Business, Ad Age
What Blogs Cost
American Business In 2005, Employees Will Waste
551,000 Work Years Reading ThemBy Bradley Johnson
LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) -- Blog this: U.S. workers
in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years
reading blogs. About 35 million workers -- one in
four people in the labor force -- visit blogs and
on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week
engaged with them, according to Advertising Age's
analysis. Time spent in the office on non-work blogs
this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million
jobs. Forget lunch breaks -- bloggers essentially
take a daily...
Bradley Johnson, "What Blogs Cost American
Business, Ad Age, October 25, 2005 ---
http://adage.com/news.cms?newsId
=46494#
Time
Magazine's choice of the 50 Coolest Websites for
2005 --- http://www.time.com/time/2005/websites/
How do we come up with our 50 best? Short
answer: we take your suggestions, probe friends
and colleagues about their favorite online haunts
and then surf like mad. This year's finalists are
a mix of newcomers, new discoveries and veterans
that have learned some new tricks.
The
List: Arts & Entertainment
The
List: Blogs
The
List: Lifestyle, Health
& Hobbies
The
List: News & Information
The
List: Shopping
Question
Does blogging hurt my chances for advancement?
See "Serious Bloggers," by Jeff Rice,
Inside Higher Ed, February 20, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/02/20/rice
Blog
Navigation Software
Blog Navigator
is a new program that makes it easy to read blogs
on the Internet. It integrates into various blog
search engines and can automatically determine RSS
feeds from within properly coded websites.
Blog Navigator 1.2 http://www.stardock.com/products/blognavigator/
It's
easy to start your own blog. Jim Mahar's great
blog was set up at http://www.blogger.com/start
You too can set one up for free like Jim had done.
There are many other alternatives other than
blogger.com for setting up a free blog. See
below.
BlogBridge
--- http://www.blogbridge.com/
Microsoft
will open a free consumer blogging service, its
latest attempt to attract more users to its MSN
online service and away from rivals such as Google.
Question
A four-letter term that came to symbolize the difference
between old and new media during this year's presidential
campaign tops U.S. dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster's
list of the 10 words of the year.
What is that word?
Answer
BLOG
The other nine top words are discussed at CNN, November
30, 2004 --- http://edition.cnn.com/.../words.of.the.year.reut/
April 22, 2005 letter from Amy Dunbar [Amy.Dunbar@BUSINESS.UCONN.EDU]
I would like some advice on what news
aggregator to use for RSS feeds. I read the
BusinessWeek Online article on blogs this morning,
and it piqued my interest
http://www.businessweek.com/
The BusinessWeek
Online blog, http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/
gave a link to various
blog RSS feed in a side menu:
http://directory.google.com/.../News_Readers/
Is anyone using blogs in classes?
Any advice on how to set up links to RSS feeds?
Thanks,
Amy Dunbar
UConn
Reply
from Bob Jensen
Hi Amy,
I don’t use blogs in class and only
find time to visit a few each week
For RSS feeds, look at the left hand
column at http://www.rss-specifications.com/blog.htm
Bob Jensen
"MBA
Blogs," Business Week, September 12,
2005 --- http://snipurl.com/MBAblog
You're invited you to join BW Online's new MBA Blog feature as a guest
blogger
STORY TOOLS Printer-Friendly Version E-Mail This Story
Our upcoming MBA Blog feature is an online community where you can interact
and share your pursuits of an MBA, job search, life
as a grad student, and much more. Whether you want
to create your own web log online, exchange advice,
or launch a professional network - come join our
MBA Blog ---
http://mbablogs.businessweek.com/
The innovation that sends blogs zinging into the mainstream is RSS, or Really Simple Syndication.
Five years ago, a blogger named Dave Winer, working
with software originally developed by Netscape,
created an easy-to-use system to turn blogs, or
even specific postings, into Web feeds. With this
system, a user could subscribe to certain blogs,
or to key words, and then have all the relevant
items land at a single destination. These personalized
Web pages bring together the music and video the
user signs up for, in addition to news. They're
called "aggregators." For now, only about
5% of Internet users have set them up. But that
number's sure to rise as Yahoo and Microsoft plug
them.
Business Week, April 22, 2005 --- ,
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/
"Controversy
at Warp Speed," by Jeffrey Selingo, The
Chronicle of Higher Education, April 29, 2005,
Page A27
The deluge of messages left Mr. Corrigan wondering how so many people had
found out about such a small skirmish on his campus.
So his assistant poked around on the Web and discovered
that six days after the protest, a liberal blog
(http://sf.indymedia.org) run by the San
Francisco Independent
Media Center
had posted an article headlined "Defend Free
Speech Rights at San Francisco State University"
that included Mr. Corrigan's e-mail address.
It was not the first time that Mr. Corrigan has been electronically inundated
after a campus incident. Three years ago he
received 3,000 e-mail messages after a pro-Israel
rally was held at the university.
EVERYONE HAS A BEEF
Conflicts on campus are nothing new, of course. But colleges today
are no longer viewed as ivory towers. Institutions
of all sizes and types are under greater scrutiny
than ever before from lawmakers, parents, taxpayers,
students, alumni, and especially political partisans.
Empowered by their position or by the fact that
they sign the tuition checks, they do not hesitate
to use any available forum to complain about what
is happening at a particular institution.
In this Internet age, information travels quickly and easily, and colleges
have become more transparent, says Collin G. Brooke,
an assistant professor of writing at Syracuse University,
who studies the intersection between rhetoric and
technology. Many universities' Web sites list
the e-mail addresses of every employee, from the
president on down, enabling unencumbered access
to all of them.
"That was not possible 10 years ago," Mr. Brooke says.
"Maybe I'd go to a library, find a college
catalog, and get an address. Then I'd have
to write a letter. Now it's easy to whip off
a couple of sentences in an e-mail when it takes
only a few seconds to find that person's address."
Continued in article
Student Blogs
"What
Your College Kid Is Really Up To," by Steven
Levy, Time Magazine, December 13, 2004, Page
12
Aaron Swartz was nervous when I went to interview him. I know this
is not because he told me, but because he said so
on his student blog a few days afterward.
Swartz is one of millions of people who mainstream
an Internet-based Weblog that allows one to punch
in daily experiences as easily as banging out diary
entries with a word processor. Swartz says
the blog is meant to help him remember his experiences
during an important time for him --- freshman year
at Stanford. But this opens up a window to
the rest of us.
Continued
in the article.
See
http://www.aaronsw.com/
"Microsoft
Begins Free 'Blogging'," by Robert A. Guth,
The Wall Street Journal, December 2, 2004, Page
D7 --- http://online.wsj.com/
Microsoft Corp. today will open a free consumer "blogging" service,
its latest attempt to attract more users to its
MSN online service and away from rivals such as
Google Inc.
Called MSN Spaces, the service will allow consumers to create Web logs,
or blogs, that include pictures, music and text.
Blogs are personal Web sites and opinion journals
that have gained popularity in recent years. Early
blogs focused largely on technology and politics,
but millions of computer users have now at least
experimented with the form.
It's
been said that newspapers write the first draft
of history, but now there are blogs. These days,
online scribes often get the news before it's fit
to print --- http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,56978,00.html
Blogs
Help You Cope With Data Overload -- If You Manage
Them," by Thomas E. Weber, The Wall Street
Journal, July 8, 2004, Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,personal_technology,00.html
If you're an information junkie, you've probably discovered the appeal
of reading weblogs, those online journals that mix
commentary with links to related sites. Obsessive
blog creators scour the Internet for interesting
tidbits in news stories, announcements and even
other blogs, culling the best and posting links.
A good blog is like the friend who always points
out the best stories in the newspaper.
More and more, though, the growth of blogs is increasing rather than reducing
information overload. By some estimates, the number
of blogs out there is nearing three million. It
isn't just amateurs either: Start-up media companies
are creating blogs, too. Gawker, for example, publishes
the gadgets journal Gizmodo ( www.gizmodo.com
) and Wonkette ( www.wonkette.com
), devoted to inside-the-Beltway gossip.
To help juggle all those blogs, I've started playing around with a relatively
new phenomenon called a newsreader. Rather than
forcing you to jump from one blog to another to
keep up with new entries, newsreaders bring together
the latest postings from your favorite blogs in
a single place.
That's possible because many blogs now publish their entries as news "feeds."
These are Web formats that make it easy for a newsreader
program (or another Web site) to grab and manipulate
individual postings. For a blog publisher, it's
like sending out entries on a news wire service.
To tell whether a site offers a news feed, look
for a small icon labeled "RSS" or "Atom."
I've tested a number of popular newsreaders. At their best, they give you
a customized online newspaper that tracks the blogs
you're interested in. But using them is only worthwhile
if you're willing to invest some time upfront getting
organized.
Newsreaders come in several varieties. One is a stand-alone software program
you install on your PC. In that category, FeedDemon
($29.95 from Bradbury Software) is especially powerful,
with extensive options for customizing the way news
feeds appear on your screen.
Other newsreaders integrate news feeds into your e-mail on the theory that
mail has become the catchall information center
for many users. NewsGator ($29 from NewsGator Technologies)
pulls feeds into Microsoft Outlook, while Oddpost
(www.oddpost.com)
combines blog feeds with an excellent Web-based
e-mail service for $30 a year. For Mac users, Apple
just announced it will include newsreader functions
in the next version of its Safari Web browser --
a sign of how important the news-feed approach is
becoming.
Overall, I had the best experience with a service called Bloglines, and
I recommend it, especially for beginners. Bloglines
(www.bloglines.com) works as
a Web service, which means there's no software to
install and you can catch up with your blogs from
any Web browser. You're no longer tied to the bookmarks
on a particular PC, so you can check postings from
home, work or on the road. The service is also free.
Mark Fletcher, CEO of Trustic Inc., which operates
Bloglines, tells me the site will use unobtrusive
Google-style ads to bring in revenue.
After starting an account, you enter the blogs you want to track. When
you visit Bloglines, your blog list will appear
on the left side of the screen, along with a notation
telling the number of new postings since your last
visit; clicking on a blog pulls the new postings
into a right-side window. The beauty of this is
that you don't waste time visiting blogs that haven't
posted new entries.
Of course, it's all pointless without interesting blogs to read. The best
way to find great blogs is to follow your curiosity,
tracking back links on blogs you visit. Here are
a few to get you started:
GENERAL INTEREST: Boing Boing (www.boingboing.net) is one
of the Web's most established blogs, and one of
its most popular, too. By "general interest,"
I mean of general interest to your average Internet-obsessed
technophile. The focus isn't explicitly on technology,
but expect it to skew in that direction -- over
a recent week, posting topics included robots, comic
books and a cool-looking electric plug.
ECONOMICS: EconLog (econlog.econlib.org) offers
a thoughtful and eclectic diary of economics, tackling
both newsy developments (the real-estate market,
taxes) and theory. It also includes a list of other
good economics blogs -- there are more than you
might think.
GADGETS: Engadget (www.engadget.com) can be counted
on for a good half-dozen or more news morsels each
day on digital cameras, MP3 players, cellphones
and more. When it isn't the first to stumble across
something good, it isn't shy about linking to another
blog with an interesting post, so it's usually pretty
up to date.
POLITICS: WatchBlog (www.watchblog.com) has stuck
with an interesting concept for more than a year
now. It's actually three blogs in one: separate
side-by-side journals tracking news on the 2004
elections from the perspective of Democrats, Republicans
and independents.
TECHNOLOGY: Lessig Blog (www.lessig.org/blog). OK,
this one's about politics too. More specifically,
it covers the intersection between regulation and
technology. Its author, Stanford law professor and
author Lawrence Lessig, weighs in on copyright,
privacy and other challenging topics in high-tech
society.
"Choosing
Who Can See What on Your Blog: Web Service
Offers Features For Privacy, Adding Media; Registration
Is a Turn-Off ," by Walter S. Mossberg and
Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal,
November 22, 2006; Page D7 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/the_mossberg_solution.html
A big problem with blogs is privacy. While some people -- especially MySpace
fans -- don't mind posting personal news, photos
and videos for anyone to read, many of us hesitate
to leave details about our personal lives online.
This week, we tested a new, free blogging service called Vox, www.vox.com,
from Six Apart Ltd., a blogging software company.
One of Vox's best attributes is its ability to label
each individual post, or entry, with a different
privacy filter, so that instead of setting your
blog to be entirely private or entirely public,
you can pick and choose what you want to share.
Vox also excels at making it easy to add photos, audio, videos and book
links to your blog without any prior expertise.
It lets you incorporate content from Web sites like
YouTube, Amazon and photo-sharing site Flickr in
only a couple of steps. Viewing of each multimedia
element can also be restricted to people you choose.
Vox is supported by ads that aren't intrusive or
distracting.
We each made a blog in Vox, and updated them several times. We found the
process to be quick and simple, and the results
to be attractive. We liked the privacy features.
But while its intentions are good, Vox has a few
downsides. Its idea of making each blog post visible
to different groups is useful. But everyone who
views your privacy-protected entries must also be
registered with Vox, a quick process, but one that
will discourage many potential users.
Also puzzling are Vox's categories for labeling those who view your blog.
Everyone must be labeled as friends, family or neighbors,
but the filters that determine who can view your
posts don't include neighbors at all.
Vox also doesn't do a great job of implementing many features that are
standard in blog services. These features include
interactive elements on a page such as drag-and-drop
organizing.
We got started by signing up for Vox -- a process that involved entering
our email address, creating a password and URL,
and entering personal information. A Design section
walked us through choosing a layout and theme from
numerous choices. Katie chose the Cityscape Washington,
D.C., theme, which includes the Capitol and Washington
Monument.
Walt chose Firefly Night, which includes the moon
and stars and a silhouette of a tree.
To prompt you to blog, the Vox homepage always offers a Question of the
Day, or QOTD. With one click, you can optionally
answer the QOTD in your own blog. When you post
your answer, or enter any post, a drop-down menu
lets you choose who can view it: The World (Public),
Your Friends and Family, Your Friends, Your Family
or Just You. If, for example, you choose to allow
only your friends to see a post, other groups won't
know that they're not seeing the friends-only post.
If you see another person's Vox blog and would like to bookmark it so that
his or her latest entries are constantly updated
on a special page just for you, you can add that
blogger to your neighborhood. Friends and family
are automatically part of your neighborhood, but
when choosing who can see your content, neighborhood
isn't an option. Vox plans to make the neighborhood
concept more understandable in an updated version
due out by December.
Continued
in article
Blogging
we will, blogging we will go! In Iran?
So what would a really interesting and exciting
piece of qualitative research on blogging look like?
And how would it get around the problems of overfamiliarity
with the phenomenon (on the one hand) and blogospheric
navel-gazing (on the other)? To get an answer, it
isn’t necessary to speculate. Just read “The Vulgar
Spirit of Blogging: On Language, Culture, and Power
in Persian Weblogestan,” by Alireza Doostdar, which
appears in the current issue of American Anthropologist.
A scanned copy is available here. The author is
now working at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies
at Harvard
University,
where he will start work on his Ph.D. in social
anthropology and Middle Eastern studies. “Weblogestan”
is an Iranian online slang term for the realm of
Persian-language blogs. (The time has definitely
come for it to be adapted, and adopted, into Anglophone
usage.) Over the last two years, Western journalists
have looked at blogging as part of the political
and cultural ferment in Iran — treating it, predictably
enough, as a simple manifestation of the yearning
for a more open society. Doostdar complicates this
picture by looking at what we might call the borders
of Veblogestan (to employ a closer transliteration
of the term, as used specifically to name Iranian
blogging). In an unpublished manuscript he sent
me last week, Doostdar provides a quick overview
of the region’s population: “There are roughly 65,000
active blogs in Veblogestan,” he writes, “making
Persian the fourth language for blogs after English,
Portugese, and French. The topics for blog entries
include everything from personal diaries, expressions
of spirituality, and works of experimental poetry
and fiction to film criticism, sports commentary,
social critique, and of course political analysis.
Some bloggers focus on only one of these topics
throughout the life of their blogs, while others
write about a different topic in every new entry,
or even deal with multiple topics within a single
entry.”
Scott McLemee , "Travels in Weblogestan,"
Inside Higher Ed, March 29, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/03/29/mclemee
Top Executives Are Finding Great Advantages to Using and Running Blogs
"It's
Hard to Manage if You Don't Blog Business embraces
the new medium as executives read—and write—blogs,"
by David Kirkpatrick, Fortune Magazine, October
4, 2004 --- http://www.fortune.com/
Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of Sun Microsystems, has recently criticized statements by Intel
executives, mused that IBM might buy Novell, and
complained about a CNET.com article—all by writing
a blog on a Sun website.
Yep, blogs—which are a way to post text to a website—have found their way
into business. Schwartz is the highest-ranking executive
yet to embrace the new medium, which is burgeoning
globally. About 35,000 people read his blog (http://blogs.sun.com) in a typical
month, including customers, employees, and
competitors. Schwartz encourages all Sun's 32,000 employees to blog, though
only about 100 are doing it so far. But they include
at least three senior managers other than Schwartz
as well as development engineers and marketers.
The company's most popular blogger is a marketer known as MaryMaryQuiteContrary.
Her blog ranges from rhapsodies about "proxy-based
aspect-oriented programming" to musings about
her desire to become a first-grade class mother.
Says Schwartz: "I don't have the advertising
budget to get our message to, for instance, Java
developers working on handset applications for the
medical industry. But one of our developers, just
by taking time to write a blog, can do a great job
getting our message out to a fanatic readership."
He adds, "Blogs are no more mandated at Sun
than e-mail. But I have a hard time seeing how a
manager can be effective without both."
Over at Microsoft,
some 1,000 employees blog, says a spokesman, though
no top executives do. Robert Scoble, Microsoft's
most prominent blogger, says via e-mail that "I
often link to bloggers who are not friendly to Microsoft.
They know I'm listening, and that alone improves
relationships." Other tech companies with company
blogs include Yahoo, Google, Intuit, and Monster.com.
Even Maytag has a blog.
But businesses are learning—sometimes the hard way—that this new medium
has pitfalls. David Farrell, Sun's chief compliance
officer, notes that the company will soon require
employees to agree to specific guidelines before
starting blogs. Companies are also worried about
unflattering portrayals and leaks. Last year a Microsoft
contract employee posted a photo of the company
receiving a dockful of Apple computers; he was promptly
fired. A Harvard administrator and a software developer
at Friendster were also recently fired after personal
blog postings. (Microsoft, Harvard, and Friendster
declined to comment.)
But some managers find that even more important than writing blogs is reading
them. During a recent conference for Microsoft software
developers, top company executives huddled backstage
reading up-to-the-minute blogs written by the audience
to get a sense of how their messages were being
received.
While most people agree on Web logs' value for promoting student expression
and critical thinking in schools, there's no consensus
on the amount of control over access and content
that educators should exercise. Blogs may
become more of an issue in college courses when
and if students begin to keep Weblogs of day to
day classes, teacher evaluations, and course content.
"Classroom
Blogs Raise Issues of Access and Privacy,"
by Kevin J. Delaney, The Wall Street Journal,
October 27, 2004 --- http://online.wsj.com/
First graders at Magnolia
Elementary School
used a Web log earlier this year to describe their
dream playgrounds. Monkey bars were heartily endorsed,
and live animals and bumper cars also made the cut.
Students in a handful of other classes at the Joppa, Md., school also used
blogs, some trading riddles about book characters
with peers at a school in Michigan.
Now, county administrators have frozen the use of blogs in the classroom
amid concerns about oversight of what students might
post online. Michael Lackner, a teacher who jump-started
blog use at Magnolia last year, is optimistic that
a technological fix will be found.
But the school's experience highlights some of the issues that educators
and parents face as blogs -- simple Web sites that
follow a diary-like format -- gain entry into the
nation's classrooms. While most agree on blogs'
value for promoting student expression, critical
thinking and exchange, there's no consensus on the
amount of control over access and content that educators
should exercise. As blogging spreads, it could revive
debates over student expression similar to those
that have cropped up around school newspapers.
The issues surrounding blogging and related technology in the classroom
are "pretty much uncharted," says Will
Richardson, an educational-blogging advocate and
supervisor of instructional technology and communications
at Hunterdon
Central Regional
High School
in Flemington, N.J.
The use of blogs in schools remains limited but is growing, as scattered
programs piloted by tech-savvy educators generate
buzz and followers. Teachers are attracted to blogging
for some of the same reasons blog use has exploded
among techies, political commentators and would-be
pundits. Blogs are cheap, thanks to free or inexpensive
software packages and services -- Hunterdon, for
example, pays just $499 a year for software to run
hundreds of student blogs. And their simple format
makes them easy to set up. Using tools from Six
Apart Ltd., Google Inc. and others, consumers can create a blog in less
than 10 minutes and post messages to it over the
Web or by e-mail. By some estimates, five million
or more Americans already have created their own
blogs, with some prominent bloggers even influencing
the news and political agendas.
Students in Mr. Richardson's high-school journalism classes, for example,
never turn in hard copies of their homework. They
post all assignments to individual blogs. Their
blogs also notify them when other students complete
writing assignments, so they can read and comment
on them.
Meredith Fear, 17 years old, has created two blogs for classes taught by
Mr. Richardson. The 12th grader says posting her
work online for others to see motivated her to do
better and increased her parents' involvement in
her education. "I don't often get a chance
to talk with her about school, so having the opportunity
to check her blog and see what she was up to was
a great way for me to keep up on things," says
Jonathan Fear, Meredith's father. He adds that was
one factor in overcoming his wife's original concerns
that ill-intentioned outsiders could see Meredith's
writings through the blog.
Recognizing such worries, some teachers at Hunterdon protect blogs with
passwords so only they and their students can see
them, particularly for creative-writing classes
for which the subject matter is more likely to be
personal. There are other blogging precautions:
Parents have to sign releases giving permission,
and only students' first names are used online.
Mr. Richardson says the school has hosted more than
500 student blogs in the past three years without
incident.
Mr. Richardson is planning a session with parents later this fall to teach
them about the technology and set up blogs and Web-text
feeds so they can gain access to a broader range
of information from teachers and see what their
children are up to. "Kids like it. And I can
see more enhanced learning on their part,"
Mr. Richardson says.
At Magnolia, teachers were happy with their classroom blogging and had
plans to expand it this school year. But Harford County
public school officials notified them this summer
that such projects appeared to fall afoul of policies
regulating student communication. In particular,
they were concerned that students and others could
post comments to the blogs before they were reviewed
by a teacher.
"What we want to see is a Web log where a teacher has final control,
acts as a filter for any postings or comments,"
says Janey Mayo, technology coordinator for Harford
County Public Schools. "We're trying to be
very cautious with this because we're working with
kids." School administrators also want to see
further research on whether blogging has educational
value at the elementary-school level, but so far
haven't found any.
Mr. Lackner believes there is potentially a quick technical fix to the
problem: A blogging service could add a function
that would forward any online comments to a teacher
for review before posting them.
Continued
in the article
July
1, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]
THE
EDUCATED BLOGGER
According
to David Huffaker (in "The Educated Blogger:
Using Weblogs to Promote Literacy in the Classroom,"
FIRST MONDAY, vol. 9, no. 6, June 2004), "blogs
can be an important addition to educational technology
initiatives because they promote literacy through
storytelling, allow collaborative learning, provide
anytime–anywhere access, and remain fungible across
academic disciplines." In support of his position,
Huffaker provides several examples of blogs being
used in classroom settings. The paper is available
online at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_6/huffaker/index.html.
First
Monday [ISSN 1396-0466] is an online, peer-reviewed
journal whose aim is to publish original articles
about the Internet and the global information infrastructure.
It is published in cooperation with the University
Library, University of Illinois
at Chicago.
For more information, contact: First Monday, c/o
Edward Valauskas, Chief Editor, PO Box 87636, Chicago
IL 60680-0636
USA;
email: ejv@uic.edu; Web: http://firstmonday.dk/.
-----
Suzanne
Cadwell and Chuck Gray of the University
of North Carolina
- Chapel Hill's
Center for Instructional Technology have compiled
two feature comparison tables that describe three
blogging services and four blogging applications.
Blogging
Services Feature Comparison
Using
a blogging service generally doesn't require any
software other than a web browser. Users have no
administrative control over the software itself,
but have some control over a blog's organization
and appearance. Depending on the particular service,
blogs can be hosted either on the service’s servers
or on the server of one’s choice (e.g., www.unc.edu). Users purchasing a paid account with a service
typically will have no banner ads on their blogs,
more features at their disposal, and better customer
support from the service. The Blogging Services
Feature Comparison chart is available http://www.unc.edu/cit/blogs/blogcomparison/services/.
Blogging
Applications Comparison
Downloadable
blogging applications require the user to have access
to server space (e.g., www.unc.edu). Most of these applications are comprised of
CGI scripts that must be installed and configured
in a user’s cgi-bin folder. Although they are packaged
with detailed instructions, applications can be
difficult to install, prohibitively so for the novice.
Blogging applications afford users fine-grained
control over their blogs, and most applications
are open-source or freeware. The Blogging Applications
Comparison chart is available at http://www.unc.edu/cit/blogs/blogcomparison/applications/.
Question
What services are available to help you create a
blog?
Answer
from Kevin Delaney
"Blogs
Can Tie Families, And These Services Will Get You
Started," by Kevin J. Delaney, The Wall
Street Journal, June 10, 2004, Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,personal_technology,00.html
Online Web logs, or blogs, have long been a bastion of techy types, those
prone to political rants, and assorted gossips.
But now they're making inroads among families who
want to keep up on each other's doings.
Blogs are personal Web sites where you can post things, including photos,
stories and links to other cool stuff online. They
resemble a journal, with information arranged chronologically
based on when you post it. The simple form is a
major virtue -- you don't have to think too hard
about how to organize your blog.
I've used a variety of Web sites in recent years to share photos of my
children with their grandparents and other family
far way. Lately, I've wondered if it wouldn't be
better to put photos, digital videos and other links
I want to share with my family on one Web site,
making it easier to manage and access them from
afar.
With this in mind, I've been testing three of the most popular blogging
services, which are available free or for a small
monthly fee.
Blogger, a free service from Google at www.blogger.com, promises you can
create a blog in "three easy steps." After
selecting a user name and password, I chose a name
and a custom Web address. Then I selected a graphic
look -- "Dots," a simple design with a
touch of fun that seemed right for a family site
-- from 12 attractive templates. After that, Blogger
created my blog. Within a few minutes, I was able
to put a short text message on the site and have
Blogger send e-mails to alert my wife and father
of the blog's existence.
Blogger, like the other services, lets you further customize the organization
and look of your site and put several types of information
on it. Sending text to the blog is as easy as sending
an e-mail. (In fact, Blogger and the other services
I tested even let me post text to my blog using
standard e-mail.) A Blogger button on Google's toolbar
software, which must be downloaded and activated
separately, offers the useful option of posting
links to other Web sites on your blog as you surf
the Web. Another nice feature lets you designate
friends or family members who can post to the main
blog.
To put photos on any blog hosted by Blogger, you have to download another
free software package from Picasa called Hello.
Hello blocks connections to computers operating
behind what's known as a proxy server, which is
a pretty typical corporate configuration. As a result,
I couldn't upload photos from my work PC, though
I was able to do so from home.
Blogger lacks some advanced features other services offer. But its main
shortcoming is that it doesn't let you protect your
site by requiring visitors to use a password to
enter. I don't want strangers to look at photos
of my kids or search notes I'm writing for family
members. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment
on any plans for such a feature, citing restrictions
related to the company's planned initial public
offering.
TypePad from Six Apart, at www.typepad.com, provides a higher-powered service
for creating blogs that does let you password protect
your site. You can also upload a broader range of
files, including video clips. But the tradeoff is
a level of complexity that is unnecessarily frustrating.
The company offers three monthly subscription rates starting at $4.95.
It costs $8.95 a month for the version that allows
you to create photo albums, a feature that I consider
essential for a family blog. Albums allow you to
avoid filling up the main blog site with strings
of photos. If you choose to password protect your
blog, though, TypePad won't let you link your blog
directly to photo albums. It's a surprising shortcoming,
and Six Apart doesn't disclose it on its site. Its
support staff gave me complicated instructions for
another way to make such a link, but they never
worked for me.
Six Apart Chief Executive Mena Trott says the photo-album-linking problem
is a bug the company is working to fix. She acknowledges
that parts of the service could be easier to use,
and says improvements will be made. She also says
that in practice Six Apart lets most users exceed
the company's miserly limits on blog storage space,
which are 100 megabytes for the $8.95-a-month plan.
AOL's Journals service, which requires an AOL subscription, is about as
simple to use as Blogger. It allows you to restrict
public access to your blog and provides nice albums
for grouping photos. If you do decide to restrict
access, your visitors will have to register with
AOL. That registration is free, though, and many
people already have an AOL "screen name"
because they use the company's instant messaging
service.
But other advanced features, such as the button in Blogger for easy linking
to Web sites, are missing. In addition, the layout
templates aren't nearly as attractive graphically
as Blogger's and TypePad's. AOL says it's working
on all of these issues, and expects to add a Web
linking button and phase out the registration requirement
later this year.
I'm not completely satisfied with Journals, and I would be happy to use
Blogger or TypePad if they manage to work out their
issues with photo albums and passwords. In the meantime,
though, I've chosen AOL's Journals to create my
family blog.
"WEBLOGS
COME TO THE CLASSROOM," by Scott Carlson, The
Chronicle of Higher Education, November 28,
2003, Page 33
They get used to supplement courses in writing, marketing, economics, and
other subjects
Increasingly, private life is a public matter. That seems especially
true in the phenomenon known as blogging.
Weblogs, or blogs, are used by scores of online
memoirists, editorialists, exhibitionists, and navel
gazers, who post their daily thoughts on Web sites
for all to read.
Now professors are starting to incorporate blogs into courses. The
potential for reaching an audience, they say, reshapes
the way students approach writing assignments, journal
entries, and online discussions.
Valerie M. Smith, an assistant professor of English at Quinnipiac University,
is among the first faculty members there to use
blogs. She sets one up for each of her creative-writing
students at the beginning of the semester.
The students are to add a new entry every Sunday
at noon. Then they read their peers' blogs
and comment on them. Parents or friends also
occasionally read the blogs.
Blogging "raises issues with audience," Ms. Smith says, adding
that the innovation has raised the quality of students'
writing;
"They aren't just writing for me, which makes them think in terms
of crafting their work for a bigger audience.
It gives them a bigger stake in what they are writing."
A Weblog can be public or available only to people selected by the blogger.
Many blogs serve as virtual loudspeakers or soapboxes.
Howard Dean, a Democratic presidential contender,
has used a blog to debate and discuss issues with
voters. Some blogs have even earned their
authors minor fame. An Iraqi man--known only
by a pseudonym, Salaam Pax--captured attention around
the world when he used his blog to document daily
life in Baghdad as American troops
advanced on the city.
Continued
in the article.
"Weblogs:
a history and perspective," Rebecca Blood,
Rebecca's Pocket, September 7, 2000 --- http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
In 1998 there were just a handful of sites of the type that are now identified
as weblogs (so named by Jorn
Barger in December 1997). Jesse James Garrett,
editor of Infosift, began compiling a list of "other
sites like his" as he found them in his travels
around the web. In November of that year, he sent
that list to Cameron Barrett. Cameron published
the list on Camworld,
and others maintaining similar sites began sending
their URLs to him for inclusion on the list. Jesse's
'page
of only weblogs' lists the 23 known to be in
existence at the beginning of 1999.
Suddenly a community sprang up. It was easy to read all of the weblogs
on Cameron's list, and most interested people did.
Peter Merholz announced in early 1999 that
he was going to pronounce it 'wee-blog' and inevitably
this was shortened to 'blog' with the weblog editor
referred to as a 'blogger.'
At this point, the bandwagon jumping began. More and more people began
publishing their own weblogs. I began mine in April
of 1999. Suddenly it became difficult to read every
weblog every day, or even to keep track of all the
new ones that were appearing. Cameron's list grew
so large that he began including only weblogs he
actually followed himself. Other webloggers did
the same. In early 1999 Brigitte
Eaton compiled a list of every weblog she knew
about and created the Eatonweb Portal. Brig evaluated all submissions
by a simple criterion: that the site consist of
dated entries. Webloggers debated what was and what
was not a weblog, but since the Eatonweb Portal
was the most complete listing of weblogs available,
Brig's inclusive definition prevailed.
This rapid growth continued steadily until July 1999 when Pitas, the first free build-your-own-weblog tool
launched, and suddenly there were hundreds. In August,
Pyra released Blogger,
and Groksoup
launched, and with the ease that these web-based
tools provided, the bandwagon-jumping turned into
an explosion. Late in 1999 software developer Dave
Winer introduced Edit This Page, and Jeff A. Campbell launched
Velocinews. All of these services are free, and
all of them are designed to enable individuals to
publish their own weblogs quickly and easily.
The original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a mixture in unique
proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts
and essays. Weblogs could only be created by people
who already knew how to make a website. A weblog
editor had either taught herself to code HTML for
fun, or, after working all day creating commercial
websites, spent several off-work hours every day
surfing the web and posting to her site. These were
web enthusiasts.
Many current weblogs follow this original style. Their editors present
links both to little-known corners of the web and
to current news articles they feel are worthy of
note. Such links are nearly always accompanied by
the editor's commentary. An editor with some expertise
in a field might demonstrate the accuracy or inaccuracy
of a highlighted article or certain facts therein;
provide additional facts he feels are pertinent
to the issue at hand; or simply add an opinion or
differing viewpoint from the one in the piece he
has linked. Typically this commentary is characterized
by an irreverent, sometimes sarcastic tone. More
skillful editors manage to convey all of these things
in the sentence or two with which they introduce
the link (making them, as Halcyon pointed out to me, pioneers in
the art and craft of microcontent).
Indeed, the format of the typical weblog, providing
only a very short space in which to write an entry,
encourages pithiness on the part of the writer;
longer commentary is often given its own space as
a separate essay.
These weblogs provide a valuable filtering function for their readers.
The web has been, in effect, pre-surfed for them.
Out of the myriad web pages slung through cyberspace,
weblog editors pick out the most mind-boggling,
the most stupid, the most compelling.
But this type of weblog is important for another reason, I think. In Douglas
Rushkoff's Media
Virus, Greg Ruggerio of the
Immediast
Underground is quoted as saying, "Media
is a corporate possession...You cannot participate
in the media. Bringing that into the foreground
is the first step. The second step is to define
the difference between public and audience. An audience
is passive; a public is participatory. We need a
definition of media that is public in its orientation."
By highlighting articles that may easily be passed over by the typical
web user too busy to do more than scan corporate
news sites, by searching out articles from lesser-known
sources, and by providing additional facts, alternative
views, and thoughtful commentary, weblog editors
participate in the dissemination and interpretation
of the news that is fed to us every day. Their sarcasm
and fearless commentary reminds us to question the
vested interests of our sources of information and
the expertise of individual reporters as they file
news stories about subjects they may not fully understand.
Weblog editors sometimes contextualize an article by juxtaposing it with
an article on a related subject; each article, considered
in the light of the other, may take on additional
meaning, or even draw the reader to conclusions
contrary to the implicit aim of each. It would be
too much to call this type of weblog "independent
media," but clearly their editors, engaged
in seeking out and evaluating the "facts"
that are presented to us each day, resemble the
public that Ruggerio speaks of. By writing a few
lines each day, weblog editors begin to redefine
media as a public, participatory endeavor
Continued
at http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
The
Weblog Tool Roundup, by Joshual Allen, Webmonkey,
May 2, 2002 --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/02/18/index3a.html
But then personal sites went from being static collections of bad poetry
and award banners to constantly updated snippets
of commentary, photography, sounds, bad poetry,
and links. The popularity of this format grew (for
a good primer on where weblogs came from and how
they evolved, try Rebecca Blood's Weblogs:
A History and Perspective), and people started
building applications to simplify the process of
maintaining a content-heavy personal site.
These applications have grown in number and sophistication over the years,
and with some major upgrades appearing over the
past few months (Blogger Pro, Movable Type 2.0,
Radio UserLand 8.0), I thought the time was nigh
to talk about what they do, why you might care,
which one would best suit your needs, and how they
can keep you company on those long, lonely nights,
so empty since you were abandoned for someone who
could write Perl scripts.
Continued
at http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/02/18/index3a.html
"Will
the Blogs Kill Old Media?" by Steven Levy,
Newsweek, May 20, 2002, Page 52
From
Yahoo Picks of the Week on December 3, 2002
blo.gs
http://www.blo.gs/
Weblogs continue to grow in popularity, no doubt in part to their immediacy.
Denizens of the Internet enjoy the opportunity to
drop by and catch an up-to-the-minute account on
their favorite blog. However, nothing is more frustrating
than encountering a cobwebbed blog that hasn't been
updated in weeks. To remedy such situations, this
site offers a minute-by-minute account of over 50,000
weblogs. It doesn't get fresher than this! For utility's
sake, the site offers a tiny java applet that sits
on your desktop and continually refreshes, keeping
the weblogs whirring. You can also stop by the most
popular blogs to see what kind of content is piquing
the interest of others. Whether you're a neophyte
or veteran blogger, you're sure to find an intriguing
site or two to scour.
Some
time ago, Glenn Reynolds hardly qualified as plankton
on the punditry food chain. The 41-year-old
law professor at the University of Tennessee
would pen the occasional op-ed for the L.A. Times,
but his name was unfamiliar to even the most fanatical
news junkie. All that began to change on Aug.
5 of last year, when Reynolds acquired the software
to create a "Weblog," or "blog."
A blog is an easily updated Web site that works
as an online daybook, consisting of links to interesting
items on the Web, spur-of-the-moment observations
and real-time reports on whatever captures the blogger's
attention. Reynold's original goal was to
post witty observations on news events, but after
September 11, he began providing links to fascinating
articles and accounts of the crisis, and soon his
site, called InstaPundit, drew thousands of readers--and
kept growing. He now gets more than 70,000
page views a day (he figures this means 23,000 real
people). Working at his two-year-old $400
computer, he posts dozens of items and links a day,
and answers hundreds of e-mails. PR flacks
call him to cadge coverage. And he's living
a pundit's dream by being frequently cited--not
just by fellow bloggers, but by media bigfeet.
He's blogged his way into the game.
Some
say the game itself has changed. InstaPundit
is a pivotal site in what is known as the Blogosphere,
a burgeoning samizdat of self-starters who
attempt to provide in the aggregate an alternate
media universe. The putative advantage is
that this one is run not by editors paid by corporate
giants, but unbespoken outsiders--impassioned lefties
and righties, fine-print-reading wonks, indignant
cranks and salt-'o-the-earth eyewitnesses to the
"real" life that the self-absorbed media
often miss. Hard-core bloggers, with a giddy
fever not heard of since the Internet bubble popped,
are even predicting that the Blogosphere is on a
trajectory to eclipse the death-star-like dome of
Big Media. One blog avatar, Dave Winer (who
probably would be saying this even if he didn't
run a company that sold blogging software), has
formally wagered that by 2007, more readers will
get news from blogs than from The New York Times.
Taking him up on the bet is Martin Nisenholtz, head
of the Time's digital operations.
My
guess is that Nisenholtz wins. Blogs are a
terrific addition to the media universe. But
they pose no threat to the established order.
Mobile
weblogging, or moblogging, is the latest trend in
the world of blogs. New software allows users to
update their weblogs remotely with cell phones and
other handheld devices --- http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,57431,00.html
The meteoric rise of weblogging is one of the most unexpected technology
stories of the past year, and much like the commentary
that populates these ever-changing digital diaries,
the story of blogging keeps evolving.
One recent trend is "moblogging," or mobile weblogging. New tools
like Manywhere
Moblogger, Wapblog
and FoneBlog
allow bloggers to post information about the minutiae
of their lives from anywhere, not just from a PC.
The newest of these tools, Kablog, lets users update
their weblogs remotely with cell phones and other
handheld devices like wireless PDAs.
Kablog works on any device running Java 2 Platform Micro Edition, or J2ME, a version of Java for mobile devices.
Those devices include cell phones running the Symbian
operating system, many Sprint PCS phones, the Blackberry
from RIM, and many Palm handhelds running OS 3.5,
such as Handspring's Treo.
Todd Courtois, creator of Kablog, offers the program for free as shareware
and says that word-of-mouth has already generated
several thousand downloads in the short time it
has been available.
What distinguishes Kablog from other moblogging software is that it does
not use e-mail or text messaging for updating weblogs.
Other programs such as FoneBlog enable users to
e-mail posts from a cell phone or PDA to a server,
which uploads the entry onto a site. Kablog lets
those who use Movable Type as their weblogging software
log directly onto their sites for updating.
Continued
in the article.
September
2, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]
RHETORIC, COMMUNITY, AND CULTURE OF WEBLOGS
The Department of Rhetoric at the University of Minnesota
has created "Into the Blogsphere," a website
to explore the "discursive, visual, social,
and other communicative features of weblogs."
Educators and faculty can post, comment upon, and
critique essays covering such areas as mass communication,
pedagogy, and virtual community. The website is
located at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/
For
more information on weblogs in academe, see also:
"Educational
Blogging" By Stephen Downes EDUCAUSE REVIEW,
vol. 9, no. 5, September/October 2004, pp. 14-16,
18, 20-22, 24, 26 http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0450.asp
"The
Educated Blogger" CIT INFOBITS, June 2004 http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/bitjun04.html#1
January
2005 Update on Blogs
Eric
Rasmusen (Economics, Indiana
University)
has a homepage at http://www.rasmusen.org/
His business and economics blog is at http://www.rasmusen.org/x/
In particular he focuses on conservative versus
liberal economics and politics
Gerald
(Jerry) Trites (Accounting, AIS) has a homepage
at http://www.zorba.ca/
He runs an e-Business blog at http://www.zorba.ca/blog.html
His site is a great source for updates on research
studies in e-Business
Some
Blog Directories
- Blogarama
categorized
directory of blogs and journals.
Category:
Weblog
Directories
www.blogarama.com
- 17k
- Cached
- More
from this site
- BlogCatalog
a
blog directory where users can submit and
find blogs.
Category:
Weblog
Directories
www.blogcatalog.com
- 23k
- Cached
- More
from this site
- Blogwise
- Blog directory
...
Weird is our choice blog this week, straight
out of ... Blogwise often find a blog that
stands out for its ... be featuring a new blog
every week in this slot ...
Category:
Weblog
Directories
RSS:
View
as XML - Add
to My Yahoo!
www.blogwise.com
- More
from this site
- Blog
Search Engine - MoBlog & Blogs Search
...
Download the Blog Search Engine Toolbar.
The blog Search Engine is a web search resource
for finding ... Free Video Game and Online Game
Directory Web Conferencing Small Business
Forum ...
www.blogsearchengine.com
- 15k
- Cached
- More
from this site
- GetBlogs
blog
search engine and directory.
Category:
Weblog
Directories
www.getblogs.com
- 7k
- Cached
- More
from this site
- Bloghub.com
- Blog Search engine & Blog
Directory
Bloghub.com
- Your local blog directory! ... Bloghub.com
is an international online blog directory
and community where members from around the world
gather here ... site to our directory, search
our blog directory or join us for
...
www.bloghub.com
- 64k
- Cached
- More
from this site
- Political
Blog Directory
features
a directory of political blogs covering
all viewpoints.
Category:
Political
Weblogs
directory.etalkinghead.com
- 9k
- Cached
- More
from this site
- Bloglines
| Blog Directory
...
My Subscriptions Search The Web Subscribe To URL.
Directory. Share. Home > Feed Directory.
See Also: Most Popular Feeds | Most Popular Links
... View: Feed Directory | User Directory
...
www.bloglines.com/dir
- 19k
- Cached
- More
from this site
- Weblogs
Compendium - Directories
...
and trackback services, and a Blog O the
Week feature. Blog Universe. Blog
directory categorized by genre ... like you.
British Blog Directory - BritBlog.
A directory of blogs written ...
www.lights.com/weblogs/
directories.html - 16k - Cached
- More
from this site
- Blog
- definition, information, sites, articles.
The
BLOG page at Marketing Terms.com - Internet
Marketing Reference. ... Blog. weblog. ----------------------------
(Requires JavaScript ... eatonweb.com - blog
directory and portal. ...
www.marketingterms
"The
Bottom Line on Business Blogs: Entrepeneur.com,
August 9, 2004 --- http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/0,4621,316638,00.html
They've moved beyond the realm of diarists and techies
to benefit mainstream businesses.
Anybody
can go slogging, but it is most common among teenagers
Thomas Claburn discusses the new concept
of "slogging,"
or slanderous blogging, about someone you know or
wish you didn't. In my youth, we used to call this
"gossip," and the cardinal rule was never
to put anything in writing for fear our ill-tempered
musings would be forever etched in stone and, worse,
overheard or seen by the person being dissed. But
getting "caught" by the subject is apparently
the entire point of slogging, as I understand it.
I would have thought in our overlitigated society
that the voice of reason (if not politeness and/or
basic human decency) would trump that of nastiness,
but I would have been wrong.
InformationWeek Newsletter, August
31, 2005
Also see RDF and RSS
Webmaster
= This term refers to the person in charge of administrating
a World Wide Web site.
Web node
= This term is synonymous with Web site or Web server.
Web page
= An HTML document that is accessible on the Web.
Webspace
= This term refers to the space created by the World Wide
Web.
Web streaming
= Live playback of media files on the web. The most
common way to execute media files (audio and video)
is to download those files into a local computer
and then launch a plug-in or applications program
to execute the media file in question. Users have
an option of saving the files, although the usual
default condition is only to store the file temporarily.
Web streaming is quite different. In that case,
audio or video files play in real time without having
to wait for full downloads of the files. In general,
web streaming playback is of lower quality than
download playback, but streaming avoids downloading
interruptions and the need for storage space in
a local computer. However, these are not mutually
exclusive options. Streaming can actually be in
real time or in "pseudo" web streams.
Pseudo streaming downloads a portion of a file sufficient
to play it back in somewhat better quality than
real time streaming on the fly. Some pseudo streaming
software require beginning at the start of the file
while others allow starting at various points in
the file. MIDI technology is on the rise for audio web streaming.
For more on MIDI
solutions, see http://www.liveupdate.com from LiveUpdate.
Two video pseudo streaming alternatives are Apple
Corporation's QuickTime and Microsoft's ActiveX,
both of which can be launched as plug-ins to browsers.
ActiveX facilitates pseudo streaming of ActiveMovies
embedded in AVI, QuickTime, or MPEG video
files. Even 3D movies can be streamed back using
OLiVR Corporation's interactive 3D movies from a
QuickTime VR source. Two good software downloading
web sites are http://www.microsoft.com/activex/controls/
and http://www.netscape.com/
from Netscape. High end video streaming
alternatives are reviewed in NewMedia,
September 22, 1997, 47-56. The NewMedia
web site is at http://www.newmedia.com/
The top ranking "Awesome" alternative
in terms of "overall value" was
RealVideo from Progressive Networks at http://www.real.com/ The price is free
at the time of this writing. Others reviewed
include Microsoft's NetShow, Motorola's TrueStream,
VSOnet's VDOLive, Viv's VivoActive, Vosaic's MediaServer,
and VStreme's Web Theatre. Prices range from
free to over $3,000. In the past, media playback
was relatively free of virus risks. With the
advent of Windows Scripting Host utilities, this
is no longer the case. Precautionary advice
is given under ActiveX.
For an example of streaming media, see http://www.streamingmediaworld.com/
The Web is Alive With the Sound of MP3," Newsweek, February 22, 1999, Page 16.
http://www.MP3.com (hours of free downloads, including the New York Times MP3s.)
http://www.audiogalaxy.com (lots of samples and free downloads.)
Go to the Frequently Asked Questions at http://www.MP3.com
. MP3 is a file format which stores audio
files on a computer in such a way that the file
size is relatively small, but the song sounds near
perfect. You can identify MP3 files because they
will end in MP3. Typically 1 MB is equal to one
minute of music or several minutes for spoken work/audiobooks.
This is about a 90% reduction in hard drive space
and bandwidth vis-a-vis uncompressed high quality wav
files, but the actual savings depends upon the recording
quality of your wav files. If you think about
a CD-ROM holding 650 Mb, this translates to over
11 hours of high quality audio in MP3 format.
More importantly, MP3 audio does not require as
much Internet bandwidth as previous audio alternatives.
Web surfing
= Browsing the WWW using a Web browser. Users search
for information, chat lines, business transactions,
and many other purposes. Surfing generally refers
to the "pull" approach where the user
pulls in the fish. Casting (webcasting, netcasting,
Castanet, etc.) generally refers to the "push"
approach where the user selects channels for preferred
types of information and then lets the channel push
updates automatically into the user's computer.
In the past, web surfing was free of virus risks.
With the advent of Windows Scripting Host utilities,
this is no longer the case. Precautionary
advice is given under ActiveX.
(See also Internet,
Search engine, Webcasting
(Netcasting, Castanet), World Wide Web,
and Web
surfing backwards)
Web surfing backwards
= Once you have your web documents up and running,
you may want to learn more about who is using these
documents. A free service is available from http://www.webcrawler.com/WebCrawler/Links.html
from Webcrawler. One of the most popular commercial
software options for building professional databases
regarding facts about who uses corporate web documents
is called Hit List Pro. You can learn more about
it from "PCMagazine," November 19, 1996,
p. NE19 and from http://www.marketwavecom/ (See
also Internet,
Search engine, World Wide Web,
and Web
surfing)
WebTV = a way of accessing Internet and email service
via a set-top box, a television set, a standard
phone line, and a subscription-based online service
called WebTV Network. WebTV
is a failure is the opinion of one professional
who writes in Information Week, July 15,
pg. 12.
Whois Gateway
= A source listing of email addresses around the
world on the Internet. (See also Mosaic)
Wide area network
= A network that encompasses a large geographical area.
Wide-screen TV
= Television sets with a 16:9 movie theater aspect
ratio for home theater systems. Standard broadcast
aspect ratios are 4:3. The W-VHS is a wide-screen
HDTV recorder and tape deck introduced by JVC in
Japan that will record the Japanese
version of HDTV as well as standard TV signals.
Wiki
=
Question
What is a wiki and why is it becoming more important?
Answer
A wiki allows readers on a browser such as Internet
Explorer to interact with and easily make changes
in Websites provided the Webmasters agree to Wiki
revisions. One of the best known sites is
Wikipedia that allows readers to add to, correct,
and insert new entries into the free multilingual
multilingual online Wikipedia encyclopedia --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
For a short while some of my definitions in the
accounting theory were in Wikipedia, but then the
Webmaster decided that I was hogging too much space
with hundreds of pages of detail so he shut
me off. I'm not angry, however, because I
understand that Wikipedia cannot simply provide
free gigabites of storage for each kook like me.
You
can still look up my definition of "accounting
reform" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_reform
I will perhaps update this someday if I can just
find the time. Any of you can update this definition from Internet Explorer
or some other Web browser. Simply click
on the tab "Edit this Page" and type away.
March
3, 2005 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]
MAKING THE CASE FOR A WIKI
The Wiki.org site defines a Wiki as "the simplest online database
that could possibly work." It is a "piece
of server software that allows users to freely create
and edit Web page content using any Web browser.
Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax
for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal
pages on the fly." Some uses of Wikis in education
include collaborative writing projects, discussion
forums, project spaces/libraries, and interdisciplinary
projects.
In "Making the Case for a Wiki" (ARIADNE, issue 42, January 2005)
Emma Tonkin explains what a Wiki is and how to choose
and deploy a Wiki implementation. The article is
available online at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/tonkin/
.
Ariadne is published every three months by the UK Office for Library and
Information Networking (UKOLN). Its purpose is "to
report on information service developments and information
networking issues worldwide, keeping the busy practitioner
abreast of current digital library initiatives."
For more information, contact: Richard Waller, Editor;
email:
ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk
; Web: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/
"'Wiki'
May Alter How Employees Work Together," by
Kara Swisher, The Wall Street Journal, July
29, 2004, Page
B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/
Wiki is a Hawaiian word for "quick," and some say it has the
potential to change how the Web is used.
A wiki is a type of Web site that many people can revise, update and append
with new information. It's sort of like a giant
bulletin board on an office wall to which employees
can pin photos, articles, comments and other things.
A wiki can gather, in one place, the data, knowledge, insight and customer
input that's floating around a company or other
organization. And it's a living document, since
workers who are given access to it can make changes
constantly.
No elaborate programming skills are needed. Users can simply click an "edit"
button to add comments or make changes.
Despite its speedy name, the wiki is not a new idea. It was pioneered in
the mid-1990s by a programmer named Ward Cunningham,
who wanted to create a platform for freewheeling
collaboration in software development. He named
his effort WikiWikiWeb. The idea first caught on
among other techies, who used wikis to collectively
work on engineering projects.
Now, venture capitalists are funding several startups that are attempting
to take the idea to a bigger and more lucrative
general-business audience. Their goal is to try
to solve one of the workplace's most vexing problems:
how to have employees collaborate and communicate
better electronically.
Coming up with a good solution to this problem long has been a quest of
the tech industry. Big tech companies have responded
with heavy-duty collaborative software packages,
such as Lotus Notes and Workplace from International Business Machines Corp. These products usually
are expensive, controlled from the top and difficult
to implement and use. And e-mail -- the most common
way workers share information -- is hard to search,
leaves important data deeply buried within it and
is highly vulnerable to viruses. Some analysts have
dubbed collaboration via e-mail "occupational
spam" -- endless, time-consuming and often
pointless.
Enter the wiki, which has aims to revive the idea of the "writable
Web," which was how the medium itself was originally
conceived by many of its earliest proponents. Using
simple software, it allows anyone with Web access
to post a page of information that is accessible
to anyone else in the same group or organization.
Others in the group can then modify, enhance or
update it. To keep track of changes, old versions
are retained. A wiki has been likened by some to
a giant digital white board in a constant state
of movement and creation.
Until now, most of the development of wiki software has been led by noncommercial,
open-source efforts such as TWiki (www.twiki.org), whose free software
has been downloaded by tens of thousands of people,
who then typically unleash it within companies on
their own. "Of course it comes from the bottom,
since information technology departments in companies
don't naturally embrace things they perceive they
can't control," says Peter Thoeny, Twiki's
founder.
But they should, say entrepreneurs who are now trying to improve and streamline
wiki software so they can sell it to companies as
the collaboration silver bullet.
Continued
in the article
"Not
Your Father's Encyclopedia," by Kendra Mayfield,
Wired News, January 28, 2003 --- http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,57364,00.html
One of the Web's first open-source encyclopedias has reached a milestone,
just two years since its inception.
Last week, the English-language version of Wikipedia, a free multilingual encyclopedia
created entirely by volunteers on the Internet,
published its 100,000th article. More than 37,000
articles populate the non-English editions.
Unlike traditional encyclopedias, which are written and edited by professionals,
Wikipedia is the result of work by thousands of
volunteers. Anyone can contribute an article --
or edit an existing one -- at any time.
The site runs on Wiki
software, a collaborative application that allows
users to collectively author Web documents without
having to register first.
"People from very diverse backgrounds can agree on what can be in
an encyclopedia article, even if they can't agree
on something else," said Wikipedia co-founder
Jimmy Wales.
Wikipedia topics range from Internet terms, such as spamming and trolling, to more mundane
subjects, such as unicycling.
Each page on the site contains an "Edit
this page" link, which users can click
on to edit, reposition and revise passages created
by other writers. Once a user has made an edit,
those changes are posted immediately.
Users can also view older versions of a page, discuss the page, view links
on a page or see related changes. These options
allow contributors to constantly refine and comment
upon entries.
All articles are covered by the Free Software Foundation's GNU Free Documentation
License, which allows anyone to reuse the entries
for any purpose, including commercially, as long
as they preserve that same right to others and provide
proper credit to Wikipedia. This open-content license
ensures that Wikipedia's content will always remain
free.
"It's a guarantee to contributors that their work is non-proprietary,"
Wales
said. "It's not something that any one person
or organization can take and restrict in any way.
It really encourages people to contribute."
The project employs a Neutral
Point of View policy, which encourages contributors
to write articles without bias, represent all views
fairly and to attribute controversial opinions,
rather than stating them as fact.
"This makes it possible for political and philosophical foes to work
together, often with excellent results," agreed
Larry Sanger, co-founder and former chief organizer
of Wikipedia.
But since neutrality is hard to maintain, "it's understandable if
a sizeable number of articles have noticeable biases,"
said Sanger, who is also editor in chief of the
free online, peer-reviewed encyclopedia Nupedia.
Ensuring accuracy is also difficult. A core group of regular contributors
help monitor the site's recent changes
page to quickly correct any errors and ensure that
entries aren't vandalized.
Continued
at http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,57364,00.html
The
Wikipeda homepage is at http://www.wikipedia.org/
Wikipedia
is a multilingual project to create
a complete and accurate open content encyclopedia. We started on January
15, 2001 and are already working on 101702 articles in the English version. Visit
the help page and experiment in the sandbox
to learn how you
can edit any article right now.
Note
that Wikipedia also has news documents and biographies
of people currently in the news.
Quality
Problems in Wikipedia
"Wikipedia
founder admits to serious quality problems,"
by Andrew Orlowski, The Register, October
18, 2005 --- http://www.theregister.co.uk/.../page2.html
Traditionally, Wikipedia supporters have responded to criticism in one
of several ways. The commonest is: If you don't
like an entry, you can fix it yourself. Which is
rather like going to a restaurant for a date, being
served terrible food, and then being told by the
waiter where to find the kitchen. But you didn't
come out to cook a meal - you could have done that
at home! No matter, roll up your sleeves.
As a second line of
defense, Wikipedians point to flaws in the existing
dead tree encyclopedias, as if the handful of errors
in Britannica cancels out the many errors, hopeless
apologies for entries, and tortured prose, of Wikipedia
itself.
Thirdly, and here
you can see that the defense is beginning to run
out of steam, one's attention is drawn to process
issues: such as the speed with which errors are
fixed, or the fact that looking up a Wikipedia is
faster than using an alternative. This line of argument
is even weaker than the first: it's like going to
a restaurant for a date - and being pelted with
rotten food, thrown at you at high velocity by the
waiters.
But the issue of readability
poses even greater challenges. Even when a Wikipedia
entry is 100 per cent factually correct, and those
facts have been carefully chosen, it all too often
reads as if it has been translated from one language
to another then into to a third, passing an illiterate
translator at each stage. (Possibly if one of these
languages was Klingon, the entry might survive the
mauling, but that doesn't appear to be the case
very often).
Here the problems
begin, because readability is a quality that can't
be generated by a machine, or judged by one. It's
the kind of subjective valuation that the Wikipedians
explicitly hate: subjectivity is scorned for failing
the positivist's NPOV test.
As a delicious illustration,
Wikipedia appears to have a quality problem with
the word "quality" itself. While Merriam
Webster online offers us eight major definitions, including "a) degree of excellence : GRADE ... b : superiority
in kind", and the Cambridge Dictionary
three, of which two are "how good or bad something is and of a high standard" Wikipedia's
sister project Wiktionary definition begins this.
"1 - (uncountable) general good value"
Now is that General
Good Value as in something plucked from a Wal-Mart
sale? And "Uncountable"? Yes, indeed.
If this was a Marvel
Comic, our superhero Objectivity would by now be
ensared in the evil coils of Subjectivity. There
appears to be no escape. Or is there?
Not good enough -
so what do we wikkin' do?
Re-working Wikipedia
so it presents the user with something minimally
readable will be a mammoth task. Although the project
has no shortage of volunteers, most add nothing:
busying themselves with edits that simply add or
takeaway a comma. These are housekeeping tasks that
build up credits for the participants, so they can
rise higher in the organization.
And Wikipedia's "cabal"
has become notorious for deterring knowledgable
and literate contributors. One who became weary
of the in-fighting, Orthogonal, calls it Wikipedia's
HUAC - the House of Unamerican Activities prominent
in the McCarthy era for hunting down and imprisoning
the ideologically-incorrect.
So right now, the
project appears ill-equipped to respond to the new
challenge. Its philosophical approach deters subjective
judgements about quality, and its political mindset
deters outside experts from helping.
This isn't promising.
One day Wikipedia
may well be the most amazing reference work the
world has ever seen, lauded for its quality. But
to get from here to there it will need real experts
and top quality writing - it won't get there by
hoping that its whizzy technical processes remedy
such deficiencies. In other words, it will resemble
today's traditional encyclopedias far more than
it does today.
For now we simply
welcome the candour: at least Wikipedia is officially
out of QD, or the "Quality Denial" stage.
Bootnote Of the many, many atrocious entries, we'd like to
bring one more to the HUAC's attention, and it's
our very favorite. As of the time of writing, whoever wrote the entry for
soul legend Baby Washington has no idea who she
is, but makes a wild guess, then gives up completely
with the less-than-helpful advice: "Many have
written inacurate information about Washington.
She IS NOT "BABY WASHINGTON"
from James Brown." (sic).
Indeed. But note that
this entry has been edited no less than seven times
and can be found replicated at Biography.com, Answers.com,
Reference.com, InfoMutt, The Free Dictionary and
hundreds of other sites.
Can
Wikipedia Survive Its Own Success?
It's not easy
being Wikipedia, a free web encyclopedia created
and edited by anonymous contributors. Just ask founder
Jimmy Wales, who has seen his creation come under
fire in just a few short months as the site fends
off vandalism and charges of inaccurate entries.
But Wikipedia, founded in 2001 as a non-profit organization,
has become a big enough presence that it raises
a number of interesting questions, including: Just
how accurate is free content, given recent events
at Wikipedia? Does the aggregate 'wisdom of the
crowd' trump the expertise of knowledgeable individuals?
Does Wikipedia's policing mechanism work? And does
the controversy over Wikipedia merely reflect further
tension between old and new media? Wharton experts,
along with Wales, offer some answers.
"Can Wikipedia Survive Its Own Success?,"
Knowledge@Wharton, University
of Pennsylvania, January 2006 --- http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/
Windows
= A windowing (Mac-like) extended DOS operating system
from Microsoft Corporation that allows users to
have more than one application running at the same
time. Because Windows ran on lower-capacity 386
and 486 chips, it captured huge market shares and
had over 40 million adopters by the end of 1993.
This has severely clouded the future of Apple Corporation
whose graphical operating system lost its uniqueness
and popularity as Windows operating systems spread
across the world. Windows applications can be stacked
in succeeding "windows" that have menu
lines and, unlike Mac processors, have an ability
to "minimize" multiple operating programs.
Users can then dart back and forth between windows
(applications) without having to reload. Popular
windows programs include those on Macintosh computers
and on PCs using Microsoft Windows, Works, and Enable.
Finder is another windows program. It has become
common for the word "Windows" in computer
lore to refer to Microsoft Windows built upon the
DOS foundation. Newer OS/2 and Windows 2000 (New
Technology) shed the DOS foundation but require
considerably greater hardware capacity than the
older Microsoft Windows. (See also Operating
system, OS/2,
Windows
Chicago, and Windows
2000)
Windows 95/98
= (See Windows
Chicago)
Windows Longhorn
=
"First
look at future of Windows," BBC News,
October 28, 2003 --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3220017.stm
Microsoft has given programmers a peek at the next version of Windows.
Codenamed "Longhorn", the software was
shown to developers by Bill Gates, the technology
giant's chairman and chief software architect.
Microsoft said the new version will have better security, make it easier
to organise and find files and need to be restarted
much less often.
Although programmers are getting an early look at Longhorn, it is unlikely
to go on sale before 2006.
Microsoft said the new version will have better security, make it easier
to organise and find files and need to be restarted
much less often.
Although programmers are getting an early look at Longhorn, it is unlikely
to go on sale before 2006.
Programming peep
Longhorn was shown off on Monday at Microsoft's Professional Developers
Conference in Los
Angeles.
The audience for the demonstration was made up of 7,000 programmers many
of whom will be writing applications that take advantage
of the new technologies in Longhorn.
Some of the gloss was taken off the unveiling because early versions of
Longhorn were leaked on to the net the day before
the conference began.
Bill Gates said the release of Longhorn would be Microsoft's largest software
launch this decade and would mean big changes to
the way Windows works.
He said the creation of Longhorn had been conducted around four key areas:
Security and scalability Graphics File storage Web services The security
changes aim to make Windows less vulnerable to malicious
viruses and worms and will give system administrators
features for limiting what machines can do and what
users can do with particular files or documents.
Also included are technologies that speed up the installation of software
and make programs launch quicker.
Longhorn will also have a completely re-written presentation system, called
Avalon, that removes many of the memory and graphics
limitations that remain from earlier, less powerful
generations of machines.
Bill Gates said that Longhorn will have a unified storage system called
WinFS. This will use web-derived technology to make
it possible to search for and categorise any type
of file with just one system instead of separate
ones for every application.
Such a flexible system would be needed, said Mr Gates, because in the future
people are likely to generate 'oceans' of information
that they will need to search through quickly.
Finally, Longhorn will have built in many of the technologies needed to
make it easy to set up sophisticated web services.
As well as outlining the new technologies in Longhorn, Microsoft also demonstrated
how it would look.
One of the key features of the new desktop is a smart panel that sits at
the side of the screen and can be configured to
hold essential information such as instant messenger
buddy lists, time, links to favourite websites as
well as news and stock tickers.
Windows 2000
= the updated
name for the Windows NT operating system from Microsoft
Corporation that looks and feels somewhat like Microsoft
Windows but is far more powerful in multitasking
and computing speed of a 32-bit architecture memory
access. NT has extensive networking capabilities
as well as being a full 32-bit processor. Most present
Windows users, however, will not be able to use
NT without buying more powerful computers and becoming
accustomed to its lack of object-oriented features.
Many experts see Windows 2000 as the operating system
of choice in future networks, although networking
and efforts of Sun, Novell, to stay in the market
have do not make it a sure thing. McGee (1994)
reports that, although Hewlett-Packard would rather
stay entirely in its popular UNIX networking operating
system, the company recognizes Windows 2000 as such
a threat to UNIX that Hewlett-Packard is also expanding
its operating system to include Windows 2000. According
the HP's CEO, "...three or four years down
the road, NT-related systems could become significant
revenue generators." (As quoted in McGee (1994),
p. 22.) (See also Windows
DNA, Windows
Cairo, Windows
Chicago, Operating
system, Alpha
processor, and OS/2)
Windows
Alternatives = See Operating
Systems and Scopeware
Windows Cairo = A planned
upgrade (scheduled for 1996) of Windows 2000 from
Microsoft Corporation that will have many of the
Windows Chicago object-oriented features. Cairo was originally scheduled
to ship in early 1995, but in May 1994, Microsoft
Corporation announced that it would be delayed due
to efforts to complete Daytona, the second release
on Windows 2000.
Windows Chicago
= The significant Version 4.0 upgrade of Windows
to Windows 95 in year 1995. This was later
upgraded to Windows 98
in 1998. Windows Chicago,
Windows 95, and Windows Version 4.0 are synonyms
for the first version of Windows attempting to free
itself from the constrains of Microsoft DOS. Latest
information on Copeland and other operating systems
can be obtained at <http://techweb.cmp.com/iw/center/default.html>.
Details are provided in Information Week, April
29, 1996, p. 15. In October 1994, Syllabus
on Page 23 asserts "Windows 95 is expected
to become the next major operating system for the
mainstream desktop and portable PC." Between
now and the time most users are using forthcoming
native software designed for Windows Chicago (later
called Windows 95), users may efficiently run their
old 16-bit Windows applications on Chicago's operating
system. Windows Chicago is a 32-bit multitasking
operating system that satisfies a wider array of
users than either Windows 3.1 or DOS. Microsoft
spent millions of dollars studying how to make Windows
Chicago easier to operate than its predecessors.
It is designed to be a plug and play system with
enhanced features for hardware setup and multimedia
device operations. It also has Internet utilities
but is not the full networking operating system
of Windows 2000 that will eventually become the
most widespread operating system in the world according
to many analysts. At the end of 1993, there were
over 40 million Windows 3.1 users as compared with
4 million OS/2 adopters and 250,000 adopters of
the new Windows 2000 32-bit processors. Since Windows
2000 and even OS/2 are not well suited to most of
the existing 386 and 486 computers in the world,
Windows Chicago fills a big market niche until users
replace older machines with higher speed and higher
memory capacity PCs. In an article entitled "Chicago
Blues" in Information Week, December 20, 1993,
p. 14, however, it is reported that Microsoft will
have to compromise on some of its 32-bit system
promises for Chicago in order to allow the system
to be squeezed into customer machines that only
have 4Mb of RAM. This is the classical problem of
having to compromise power of an operating system
for hardware limitations of a large customer base.
As a result, Windows Chicago may suffer from the
same crashing problems as Windows and still be confined
to 16-bit graphical device interfaces (GDI). (See
also Operating
system.) Bott (1994),
however, denies that Chicago
will have crashing problems. In an article comparing
Windows Chicago with the other leading 32-bit systems,
Bott (1994)
calls it the "most promising software system
in years" that will capture even greater market
share than the earliest Windows version as a "sure
thing." Whether or not Windows Chicago is truly
better than the IBM and Apple competition operating
systems may be a moot point if there are over 40
million Windows users that have installed or soon
will install Windows Chicago. Market share determines
the number of native software applications being
developed for operating systems. Mac, UNIX, and
other operating systems are losing the native software
development war to Windows Chicago and Windows 2000.
Windows Chicago is almost certain to become the
PC operating system standard of choice until its
upgrade called Windows Cairo rolls off the line
and/or Windows 2000 with upgraded object-oriented
programming features become the operating systems
of choice among users having newer hardware speed
and memory components. In answer to the question
of whether Windows 95 (Chicago) will be a flop,
Bott (1994),
p. 139 contended: "You might as well put your
money on Wile Coyote to finally catch Roadrunner."
(See also Native,
Windows,
Windows
Cairo, OS/2
and Windows
2000)
Windows Daytona
= (See Windows
2000)
Windows DNA
= Windows
Distributed interNet Applications
bundling of Windows 2000, Host Integration Server
2000, Application Center 2000, BizTalk Server 2000,
Commerce Server 2000, SQL Server 2000, Internet
Security and Acceleration Server 2000, and Visual
Studio 2000. Microsoft hopes that many companies
will soon tire of integrating best-of-breed products
and will opt for an integrated solution. That's
why the software vendor is preparing to release
the components that make up its Windows DNA 2000
product group. See Windows
2000.
Windows
File System (WFS)
February 14, 2003 Exclusive: A Chat with Bill Gates --- http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,889423,00.asp
MM: What's WFS?
BG: It's the Windows File System. The new Windows file system is much,
much, more than a file system. It's not just a database,
and it's not just a file system. It's a new thing.
So, anyway, Tablet PC and SPOT—I love those. These are special projects
of mine because they bring in some new concepts—new
approaches that I am very excited about. Xbox Live
has also been very neat to work on.
But the biggest thing has been building this one standard way of doing
the plumbing that I've described. The centralized
architectural approach I've described is something
that requires an R&D budget on the scale of
Microsoft's. It requires thinking about transactions,
messaging, databases, the Office software suite,
and management plumbing. The new architecture requires
that you have all those things lined up.
Workflow, security, and even just keeping software up to date have been
so hard to do well because there isn't one architecture
to tie all those things together. People in computer
science might look at the architecture I've described
and say, "Isn't it very ambitious to take on
these new protocols, a new messaging layer, managed
code, new schemas, and then go to build everything
around these?"
The answer to that is yes, it is ambitious, but even if you just gave me
the challenge of building management software so
that it's really good, or the challenge of doing
e-commerce well, I would make all these architectural
moves I've described. You need self-description,
scalability, and auditability to do e-commerce well,
for example.
Windows
Scripting Host (WSH) = (See ActiveX.)
Windows XP
= A significant revision (code named Whistler) of
the entire Windows operating system from Microsoft
Corporation. Windows XP is built on the Windows
2000 kernel but brings a nee look to the desktop
that will also make it easier for users to scan
or import images and to acquire music files on the
Web and transfer them to portable devices. The new
Windows will allow different users to have their
own private sets of files. The Start Menu
has been redesigned to make the most-used programs
easiest to find. Windows XP will come in a Professional
version and a Home Edition version.. More
importantly, Windows XP is more stable than Windows
2000 and Windows NT. See http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/default.asp
News
from Microsoft --- http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/migrate/unix/default.asp
As the Windows platform continues to evolve to address changing business
computing needs, many organizations currently on
UNIX platforms are turning to Windows to run their
new client and server business applications. They're
discovering that moving to the Windows platform
does not require abandoning existing investments
in UNIX applications and infrastructure.
This section explains why customers should consider migrating to Windows
from UNIX. It also provides detailed information
for IT professionals and developers on how to move
from UNIX systems to Windows XP, Windows 2000, and
the upcoming Windows .NET Server and Microsoft .NET
Web services platforms.
Wintel
= a combination
of a Microsoft Windows operating system in an Intel
CPU microprocessor. For years, Intel CPUs
would only run on Windows 3.x and Windows 95 processors.
Now they run on Windows 2000 as well. Only
when Linux came about did Intel CPUs have some alternative
other than Microsoft Corporation operating systems.
WinGopher
= (See Gopher)
Wireless communications
=
With
70,595 Wi-Fi hotspot locations in 103 countries,
JiWire's global hotspot directory makes it easy
to find places to connect wherever you go.
WiFi Hotspot Finder Widget --- http://www.jiwire.com/
"No
Wires, No Rules," by Heather Green, Business
Week, April 28, 2004 --- http://www.businessweek.com/
High-speed Internet access has been as rare as sunshine in winter in Campsie,
a tiny village on the northern coast of Northern Ireland. The town is located
in a sparsely populated rural area, which makes
it too expensive to install traditional broadband
technology. And the town is too far from larger
cities like Londonderry
to use their Internet facilities.
The people of Campsie shouldn't give up hope, though. Earlier this year,
British telephone giant BT Group PLC (BT ) invited
about 100 Web surfers in the village and three other
rural areas to sign up for a promising new wireless
Internet service. BT has installed a series of radio
towers that beam signals across the countryside
to small antennas on the sides of customers' homes.
The system is about as fast as traditional broadband
but much cheaper to set up. Why? BT is using less-expensive
equipment and a free, unlicensed part of the radio
spectrum, avoiding billions of dollars in fees.
If the test in Campsie goes well, BT may roll out
the service to consumers across Britain by next
year. "This will revolutionize society, just
as mobile telephony revolutionized society in the
1980s," says Mike Galvin, director of Internet
operations at BT.
It's just one example of how the unlicensed portion
of the radio spectrum is turning into a hothouse
of technological innovation. For years, these radio
frequencies were neglected, the lonely domain of
cordless phones and microwave ovens. In the past
few years, however, engineers at institutions from
Massachusetts Institute of Technology to Dutch giant
Royal Philips Electronics (PHG
) have been hard at work on a grander vision for
the unlicensed radio frontier. That tinkering is
what sparked the creation of Wi-Fi, the wildly popular
wireless Net technology that took off last year
with the support of chip giant Intel Corp. (INTC
).
Wi-Fi is just the first step, though. Hard on its
heels are four equally innovative technologies --
WiMax, Mobile-Fi, ZigBee, and Ultrawideband -- that
will push wireless networking into every facet of
life, from cars and homes to office buildings and
factories. These technologies have attracted $4.5
billion in venture investments over the past five
years, according to estimates from San Francisco-based
investment bank Rutberg & Co. Products based
on them will start hitting the market this year
and become widely available in 2005. As they do,
they will expand the reach of the Internet for miles
and create a mesh of Web technologies that will
provide connections anywhere, anytime. "Now
you have a toolbox full of wireless tools that can
help with each problem, whether it's reaching a
couple of inches or a couple of miles," says
Ian McPherson, president of Wireless Data Research
Group, a market research firm in San
Mateo, Calif.
These technologies will usher in a new era for the
wireless Web. They'll work with each other and with
traditional telephone networks to let people and
machines communicate like never before. People in
what have been isolated towns, be it in Ireland
or Idaho, will find themselves
with blazingly fast Net connections. Zooming down
the highway, you'll be able to use a laptop or PDA
to check the weather or the traffic a few miles
ahead. Back at home, couch potatoes will be able
to dish up movies from their PC and transfer them
to the flat screen in the living room -- without
any wires at all. And tiny wireless sensors will
control the lights in skyscrapers, monitor utility
meters in suburban neighborhoods, even track toxicity
levels in wastewater. This will give rise to the
Internet of Things, networks of smart machines that
communicate with each other.
What are the technologies behind this vision of
the future? ZigBee, along with its radio standard,
is the technology that coordinates communication
among thousands of tiny sensors. These sensors can
be scattered throughout offices, farms, or factories,
picking up bits of information about temperature,
chemicals, water, or even motion. They're designed
to use little energy because they'll be left in
place for five or 10 years and their batteries need
to last. So they communicate very efficiently, passing
data over radio waves from one to the other like
a bucket brigade. At the end of the line, the data
can be dropped into a computer for analysis or picked
up by another wireless technology like WiMax. Products
based on ZigBee, which has been nurtured by giants
Philips and Motorola, are expected to start hitting
the market later this year.
HUGE HOT SPOTS
WiMax is similar to Wi-Fi. Both create "hot
spots," or areas around a central antenna in
which people can wirelessly share information or
tap the Net with a properly equipped laptop. While
Wi-Fi can cover several hundred feet, WiMax has
a range of 25 to 30
miles. That means it can be
used as an alternative to traditional broadband
technologies, which use telephone and cable pipes.
It's an early version of WiMax that's bringing the
Net to Campsie. WiMax can't be used right now if
you're moving, say in a car. But backers of the
technology, including Intel and Alcatel (ALA ), plan to have a mobile version out within a few years.
A similar standard, known as Mobile-Fi, will be
available two or three years from now. It will let
people surf the Net at speeds even faster than their
home broadband links today -- while they're racing
along on a train or in a car.
Ultrawideband serves a very different purpose. The
technology lets people move massive files quickly
over short distances. In the home, that will allow
users to zap, say, an hourlong Sopranos show
from a PC to the TV without any messy cords. On
the road, a driver who has his laptop in the trunk
receiving data over Mobile-Fi could use Ultrawideband
to pull that information up to the handheld computer
in the front seat. Although the standard hasn't
been finished yet, Motorola already is selling chips
based on an early version of the technology.
One reason for this flurry of innovation now is
the nature of unlicensed spectrum. Traditionally,
a big company like AT&T Wireless (AWE ) paid billions
of dollars to the federal government for an exclusive
license to use a swath of the radio waves. That
allowed the company to provide mobile-phone service
to its customers without any interference, but it
blocked other players from using the same radio
frequencies. By contrast, most of these technologies
use unlicensed spectrum. That means that anyone
-- really, anyone -- can try out any idea they can
imagine on those frequencies. Think of it as open-mike
night at the local pub. "The licensed world
tends to move in this fairly ponderous way, but
with unlicensed spectrum people can try out other
things and learn there is a whole market sitting
out there," says Kevin Werbach, an independent
technology strategy consultant.
Wi-Fi set the pattern for stardom that these emerging
technologies hope to emulate. A group of companies
got together to establish a standard for the technology,
touching off a virtuous cycle. High volumes brought
the cost of Wi-Fi gear down, low costs boosted demand,
and strong demand led to even higher volumes. Now,
Intel, which stoked the frenzy with a $400 million
marketing push last year, sells its Wi-Fi chips
to computer makers for $20 each, down from $45 a
year ago. Some 54 million laptops, PDAs, and other
devices with Wi-Fi are expected to be sold this
year, according to researcher In-Stat/MDR, four
times as many as in 2002.
For all their promise, these new technologies face
steep challenges. Giants are battling over the exact
standards for Mobile-Fi and Ultrawideband, and a
final resolution may not come before 2006. Until
that happens, equipment makers won't be able to
start mass production, meaning costs won't be driven
down by economies of scale. Mobile-Fi, which is
planned for licensed spectrum, may be subsumed by
WiMax once it adds mobile capabilities.
What's more, these innovations aren't emerging in
a vacuum. Cellular companies already are rolling
out technology that will let their customers get
speedy Net connections on their mobile phones or
laptops. This third-generation, or 3G, gear will
compete directly with WiMax and Mobile-Fi. Verizon
Wireless installed its 3G networks in Washington,
D.C., and San
Diego last year, and it plans
to add 98 more markets by the end of 2005. Other
cellular companies are providing similar service
in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
The 3G technology may be slower than WiMax, but
it has the benefit of being reliable -- and available.
"WiMax, all of a sudden, has caught a lot of
attention, but we have been commercial for two years,"
says John Hambidge, senior director of marketing
at IPWireless Inc., which makes 3G equipment. "We
have a huge time-to-market advantage."
Even if WiMax and its brethren can compete with
3G, another challenge looms: a spectrum shortage.
As all these devices begin chattering away over
the same radio frequencies, they may begin to bump
into each other. To avoid such a shortage, Intel
(INTC
), Microsoft (MSFT
), and other tech companies are lobbying the Federal
Communications Commission for more spectrum. Their
target? The major TV broadcasters, including ABC
(DIS ), NBC (GE ), and CBS (VIA ), which are sitting on
vast amounts of spectrum for transmitting TV programs.
The FCC long has supported the development of technologies
for unlicensed spectrum, but it's unclear whether
the commission wants to take on the powerful broadcasters,
especially in an election year. "The broadcasters
hate it, but as demand just keeps going up, it gets
harder and harder to defend policies that are restricting
supply," says Michael Calabrese, program director
at the New America Foundation, a public policy institute
in Washington
that advocates providing more spectrum for these
new technologies. "Over the long haul, I am
optimistic."
AUTOMATION ACCELERATION
One reason for such optimism is that these technologies
offer benefits that could ripple through the economy.
The wireless Internet promises to spur productivity
by collecting data that could never be tracked before
and by making information available exactly when
it's needed. It will speed automation, allowing
people stuck behind, say, a cash register to do
more productive work. Already, J.C. Penney salespeople
use Wi-Fi to check inventory and prices. Now the
technology is moving into construction, rescue services,
health care, and other markets. Combined, these
technologies are expected to reach $17.3 billion
in sales by 2007, up from $3.3 billion in 2003.
"The next wave of personal productivity at
work is about mobility, people wanting to get access
anywhere," says Sean M. Maloney, executive
vice-president and general manager of Intel's communications
group.
Continued in the article
New
wireless and mobile technologies --- http://www.thinkmobile.com/
"Before
Going to Buy High-Tech Devices, Learn the New Terms,"
by Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal,
November 16, 2006; Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/personal_technology.html
Draft N: This is a new,
faster, longer-range version of the popular Wi-Fi
wireless networking system, and many new Wi-Fi products
are built to comply with it. It succeeds the common
"G" flavor of Wi-Fi. But, there's a catch.
As the name implies, this technology is based on
a draft of the forthcoming new Wi-Fi standard, to
be called "N." And the final standard
could be different enough to make Draft N gear outdated
in 12 to 18 months.
The
Future of the E-Wireless Revolution Watch out, Asia
and North America!
Europe is defining
message-delivery models for the years to come and
quite possibly could become the e-wireless leader.
http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID
=3580
Many
web marketers are looking at the wireless web frenzy,
wondering how they can jump aboard the hype train.
http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID
=3586
From
Information Week Newsletter on March 6, 2001
The future is wireless, or so we're told. While vendors work out the formula
for devices and services that will put wireless
clients into every consumer's hands, at least one
wireless networking technology has moved out of
the early-adopter stage. Wireless Ethernet, defined
by the 802.11b standard, is coming into its own
as a common technique to connect clients to networks.
It is this genuine maturity that new technologies
are pushed to achieve. This is the magic place on
the product life curve when companies can begin
ordering and installing the technology as a solution
rather than as an experiment.
We took five separate 802.11b systems to the Review Bunker at the University of Hawaii's Advanced Network Computing Lab
to see whether these products truly are as mature
as they seem. We wanted to see whether the wireless
networking systems would be easy to integrate into
an existing network and easy to forget once they
were installed. In short, we wanted to find out
whether wireless networking systems can replace
standard 10Base-T with no performance or management
penalties for users and administrators.
Five companies accepted our invitation to this lab test. Cisco, Enterasys
Networks, Intel, Proxim and Symbol Technologies
brought network access devices, management software
and wireless PC cards to the Review Bunker and helped
us put the systems through their paces. In the end,
we found that there's a lot of good news in wireless
networking, along with one little detail that will
cause you some trouble. --Curtis Franklin
Read on to find out how they performed: http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y =eCoW0Bdl6n0V30LWBN
***************************************************
Providers
Overcome Bluetooth Blues
Bluetooth--a technology that backers in the wireless and computer industry
promise will enable cheap, short-range wireless
networking--is set to become a reality after more
than two years of development.
By this summer, wireless operators will be selling phones with Bluetooth
transceivers, small chips that can communicate at
distances up to 30 feet and wirelessly connect
to PCs and PDAs.
Wireless service providers are excited about the prospects. They expect
gadget fans and road warriors to use their cellular
networks to connect Bluetooth-enabled devices to
the Internet and corporate LANs.
The coming of age of Bluetooth means more traffic over the network and
more demand for wireless services, say wireless
operators. --Jonathan Collins, tele.com
Read on: http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y =eCoW0Bdl6n0V30LWCO
The
Long Wait for Bluetooth --- http://www.msnbc.com/news/568898.asp
BLUETOOTH IS a short-range radio technology that allows wireless devices
to communicate over distances of about 30 feet. It was a seductive idea when the Swedish
telecommunications gearmaker Ericsson first came
up with it. The idea was that it would be indifferent
to the devices’ underlying operating systems—hence
the name (Harald Bluetooth was a 10th-century Danish
king who overcame his country’s religious differences).
It would be a major technical advance over infrared
transmission, the dominant technology for wireless
communication between devices. Think of the Palm
family of personal digital assistants. Not only
must they be pointed directly at each other for
the infrared connection to work, they must also
be no more than about three feet apart. Bluetooth
is designed to work at about 10 times that distance,
and doesn’t require that the devices be within line
of sight. A Bluetooth-enabled TV remote control
could change channels from two rooms away. For all
digital devices, the elimination of wiring is “similar
to the way in which the mouse was eventually integrated
[directly] into the laptop,” says a Motorola official.
“Pretty soon you won’t even know it’s there.” The
growing popularity of wireless has attracted rivals.
A competing technology, commonly known by the exasperating
alphanumeric monicker of 802.11b (pronounced eight-oh-two-dot-eleven-bee
), is capturing the corporate market. Designed as
a wireless local-area-network (LAN) technology,
802.11b allows, for example, salespeople to log
on to corporate intranets without using conventional
telephone lines. Bluetooth is more of a consumer
technology. But 802.11b may already be getting in
its way. Last month Microsoft announced that it
would not support Bluetooth in the initial release
of Windows XP, planned for the end of summer, though
last week the company hinted that the date may slip
all the way to 2002. The Redmond, Wash.,
software giant will, on the other hand, support
802.11b, for one simple reason: it exists. Networks
using 802.11b are up and running at places like
Stanford University
and the Dallas-Ft.
Worth airport.
What’s the difference between the two? Bluetooth is slower. It moves data
at about 720 kilobits per second (Kbps), almost
13 times faster than the fastest dial-up modem speed
today. But 802.11b is 14 times faster than that,
at 11Mbps (megabits per second). On the other hand,
802.11b requires a network infrastructure. It does
not allow individual devices to talk to each other.
In geekspeak, 802.11b has a client-server architecture,
while Bluetooth resembles peer-to-peer. This alone
will make Bluetooth attractive to people who seek
“personal area networks” in which all their devices
communicate. One major problem: Bluetooth and 802.11b
use the same slice of the electromagnetic spectrum,
the unlicensed 2.4GHz portion used also by common
devices like microwave ovens. There have been reports
of interference when the two technologies operate
in proximity. And as if the picture weren’t murky
enough, a third wireless standard waits in the wings:
802.11a. The Sunnyvale, Calif.,
chipmaker Atheros says it will ship an 802.11a wireless
kit this summer. And while full implementation of
the technology won’t happen any time soon, it is
a threat to both Bluetooth and 802.11b because it’s
much faster—up to 54 megabits per second—and operates
in a less crowded part of the spectrum.
(See
PDA)
Forwarded
by Scott Bonacker, CPA [scottbonacker@moccpa.com]
1. = = = = IN FOCUS = = = =
(contributed by Mark Joseph Edwards, News Editor,
mark@ntsecurity.net)
* CAN OTHERS STUMBLE INTO YOUR WIRELESS NETWORK?
In the August 7, 2002, edition of Security UPDATE, I wrote about a new
trend called warchalking. As you know, warchalking
is the act of marking buildings in the vicinity
of wireless networks. The idea is to provide a visual
clue indicating the presence of wireless networks
so that people can obtain a free Internet connection.
Warchalkers use distinctive markings and include
information about bandwidth and various connection
perimeters.
http://www.secadministrator.com/articles/index.cfm?articleid
=26207
The trend is catching on, so much so that, according to VNU Business Publications,
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recently
issued an unofficial warning that businesses should
check the security of their wireless LAN (WLAN)
equipment to ensure that adequate security is in
place.
http://www.vnunet.com/news/1134451
Recently, I learned about a new Internet site, NetStumbler.com, that aids
users in identifying and locating WLANs around the
country. Among other features, the site hosts a
national map that shows cities that have open WLANs
and a searchable database that helps users query
for information about specific locations.
http://www.netstumbler.com
NetStumbler.com also hosts a downloadable program called NetStumbler that
lets users investigate a given WLAN's security.
Security administrators can use it to test their
sites. Anyone can download a copy (291KB) at the
first URL below. According to the Web site, "NetStumbler
is a Windows tool that allows you to [scan for]
802.11b (and 802.11a, if using Windows XP) wireless
LANs. It includes [global positioning satellite
(GPS)] integration and a simple, intuitive user
interface. Though primarily targeted at owners of
wireless LANs, it has been the de facto tool for
casual users such as war drivers for over a year."
The tool apparently even won a "PC Magazine"
award earlier this year (see the second URL below),
which named the tool its favorite innovative networking
technology in the wireless software category.
http://www.netstumbler.com/download.php?op
=getit&lid =22
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,3666,00.asp
NetStumbler runs on Windows 2000, Windows 98, and Win95 but doesn't work
yet on Windows XP, Windows NT 4.0, or Windows Me.
To see what it was like, I downloaded a copy and
installed the tool. NetStumbler has a typical GUI,
lets you choose a wireless NIC to use for scanning,
and has scripting capabilities. After you've scanned
an area and discovered WLANs, you can save the NetStumbler
output and upload it to the NetStumbler.com Web
site, where an application on the Web site converts
it to Microsoft MapPoint 2002-compatible output.
The process helps you plot WLAN points on a graphical
map.
http://www.microsoft.com/mappoint/overview.htm
With resources such as NetStumbler and NetStumbler.com freely available,
you should definitely take time to ensure that your
WLAN security is adjusted to permit only authorized
users access--unless you want to intentionally leave
it open and available to anyone. The bottom line
is that if you run a wireless network, you must
keep it secure. If you don't, expect that someone
will identify your network, chalk it up, and possibly
submit it to the NetStumbler.com Web site--where
everyone can find it quickly. For information about
securing your WLANs, read Allen Jones' article,
"Securing 802.11 Wireless Networks" (see
the first URL below) and Paul Thurrott's article
"Securing Your Wireless Networks" (see
the second URL below).
http://www.secadministrator.com/articles/index.cfm?articleid
=24873
http://www.secadministrator.com/articles/index.cfm?articleid
=24521
Also see iSync
Wireless Glossary of Terms
Tom
Hicks brought me up to date on wireless home firewall
computers. He recommends Linksys products
such as the one at http://www.linksys.com/splash/wcg200_splash.asp
The Linksys Wireless-G Cable Gateway is the all-in-one solution for Internet
connectivity in your home. The Cable Modem function
gives you a blazing fast connection to the Internet,
far faster than a dial-up, and without tying up
your phone line.
Connect your computer to the Wireless-G Cable Gateway via USB, or take
advantage of the built-in 4-port 10/100 Ethernet
Switch to jump start your home network. You can
share files, printers, hard drive space and other
resources, or play head-to-head PC games. Connect
four PCs directly, or daisy-chain out to more hubs
and switches to create as big a network as you need.
The built-in Wireless-G Access Point allows up to
32 wireless devices to connect to your network at
a blazing 54Mbps, without running cables through
the house. It's also compatible with Wireless-B
devices, at 11Mbps. The Gateway's Router function
ties it all together and lets your whole network
share that high-speed Internet connection.
To protect your data and privacy, the Wireless-G Cable Gateway features
an advanced firewall to keep Internet intruders
and attackers out. Wireless transmissions can be
protected by powerful data encryption. Safeguard
your family with Parental Control features like
Internet Access Time Limits and Key Word Blocking.
Configuration is a snap with any web browser. With
the Linksys Wireless-G Cable Gateway at the heart
of your home network, you're connected to the future.
Glossary
of Wireless LAN Terms
Access
Point (AP): A device connected to the wired local area network
that receives and transmits signals to wireless
clients; this device must also be connected to the
wired LAN if connections to external networks are
required.
Authentication:
A process that verifies that the user has permission
to access the network; often associated with the
process of joining a Bluetooth piconet or WLAN.
Channels:
Another name for frequencies, especially within
a defined band.
Direct
Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS): A spread spectrum technique
that uses a "chip" (redundant bit pattern
for each bit to be transmitted) to encode the signal
to ensure more reliable delivery; the technology
employed in IEEE 802.11 implementations.
Frequently
Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS): A spread spectrum technique
that uses a range of frequencies and changes frequencies
during the transmission; the technology employed
in HomeRF (SWAP) implementations.
Industry,
Scientific, and Medical (ISM) Band: An unregulated
radio frequency that uses the 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz
bands for communication; these bands were approved
by the FCC in 1985.
Orthogonal
Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM): A multiplexing
technique used in 802.11a WLANs; this technique
minimizes the effect of multipath distortion encountered
in 802.11b networks.
Spread
Spectrum Transmission (SS): A technique that takes a narrow
signal and spreads it over a broader portion of
the radio frequency band.
Unlicensed
National Information Infrastructure (U-NII) Band:
An unregulated radio frequency that uses the 5 GHz
band for communication; this band is divided into
three sub-bands and are intended for use by short-range,
high-speed wireless digital communication devices.
Wi-Fi
(Wireless Fidelity): Another name for IEEE 802.11b standard;
this trademark is owned by WECA and devices that
comply with it assure interoperability among vendors.
Wired
Equivalent Protocol (WEP): The IEEE specification for data
encryption between wireless devices defined by the
IEEE 802.1x standard.
Wireless
Local Network (WLAN): A local area network that is not
connected by wires but instead uses one of the wireless
technologies.
Additional
definitions from Network Computing July 10,
2000, p. 46
AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone Service):
This basic analog cellular service in the United
States and South
America typically operates at 800 MHz
and uses FDMA transmission technology. With
AMPS, when one person grabs a segment of frequency
for a call, nobody else within the cell can use
it. Digital cellular technologies offer ways
for carriers to allow more calls in a cell, using
the same amount of bandwidth.
CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access):
The dominate PCS standard in the United States, this spread-spectrum
technology, developed by Qualcomm, lets multiple
callers share a segment of frequencies.
CDPD (Cellular Digital Packet Data):
This packet-based technology allows either 9.6-Kbps
or 19.2-Kbps data rates over standard analog channels
in the 800- to 900-MHz range, by finding and employing
unused channels. AT&T's Wireless IP is
an example of a CDPD-based service.
FDMA (Frequency Division Multiple Access):
Used in the AMPS system, FDMA is a method of coordinating
radio traffic to prevent interference between users
sharing a set of frequencies. Only one subscriber
can access a given frequency at one time.
GSM (Global System for Mobil Communications):
A variant of TDMA, GSM is the closest to a worldwide
standard for cellular service. A single-frequency
GSM cellular handset may work compatibly in Europe,
Asia, India
and Africa--though not in the United
States.
PCS (Personal Communications Service): PCS
refers to the three predominant digital cellular
technologies operating in the 1.9-GHz band in the
United
States: CDMA, GSM
and TDMA, all of which can allow data to be sent
over cellular networks.
TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access):
TDMA is a method of dividing a single analog channel
into a number of time slots and assigning each user
a distinct time slot within a given channel.
This lets more users (usually three) access a channel
at one time without interference. TDMA is
one of the standard digital cellular technologies,
along with CDMA. GSM is a variant.
WAP (Wireless Application Protocol): This network-neutral
protocol is used for sending data to and from WAP-capable
devices, such as cellular phone handsets. You can
read more about WQP in "The WAP Rap,"
Educause Review, January/February 2002, pp. 50-51
--- http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0206.pdf
For explanations of more wireless terms, see www.wirelessdata.org/primer/terms.asp
.
Also see iSync
Workplace OS
= (See OS/2)
Workstation
= A networked personal computing device with more power
than a traditional PC or Mac, although the term
"workstation" is now used somewhat loosely
to describe any site performing complex tasks such
as an Amiga video workstation, a Mac AV workstation,
a CD-ROM recording workstation, a videodisc recording
workstation, a desktop publishing workstation, etc.
Typically, a "workstation" has operating
systems such as Unix, OS/2, or Windows 2000 that
are capable of running several tasks (multitasking)
at the same time. It has several megabytes of memory
and a large, high-resolution display. Examples are
SUN workstations and Digital DEC stations.
World of Boston
= (See Networks)
World Wide Web
= Hyperlinking system, also known as WWW or W3,
that creates a point-and-click way of linking within
documents, linking to other documents, and extremely
popular searching of the Internet. Whereas the Internet
commenced in 1969 with the linking of the Pentagon
with four supercomputing centers at universities,
the WWW was conceived in 1990 by particle physicists
(notably Tim Berners-Lee) at CERN in Switzerland.
The CERN group developed the HTML WWW coding language
and the HTTP protocols for reading HTML at WWW sites.
In 1993 there were only 50 WWW sites (mostly particle
physicists) that exploded to nearly 10 million sites
shortly after Mosaic and then Netscape added HTTP
to browsers. Internet use has exploded in commerce,
entertainment, and education since the advent of
the WWW. Millions of individuals and organizations
are setting up web sites (home pages). Web publishing
is overtaking hard copy publishing. WWW shopping
and education alternatives are exploding. Students
can set up free web sites at <http://www.tripod.com/>.
Virtual Servers Inc., for a monthly fee, will provide
web server space to business firms and other parties
wanting to set up network application servers. The
Virtual Server home page is <http://vservers.com/>.
For interactive computing on the web, see Distributed Network
Computing. Software options for 3-D rendering
on the web are reviewed in the NewMedia,
May 5 1998, pp. 52-64. The NewMedia web site is
at http://www.newmedia.com
Those authoring packages rated as "Awesome"
include Live Picture Reality Studio at http://www.livepicture.com
(800-724-7900) and Platinum Technology VRCreator
at http://www.platinum.com (800-442-6861).
There are many other options rated as "Thumbs
Up" or "Does the Job." (See also
AVI, Browser,
Internet,
Cookies,
Image
map, FAQ,
Finger,
FTP,
HTML, HTTP, Hyperlink,
IRC,
ISDN, ISP, Java, Smart agent,
TCP/IP,
Telnet,
USENet,
WAIS,
Apple AV,
Audio,
JPEG,
MIME, MUDs, PDA, QuickTime,
Resource
Description Framework, Search engine,
and Web browsers)
Tim
Berners-Lee Honored With $1.2M Prize http://update.internetweek.com/
The inventor of the web has been awarded the
first Millennium Technology Prize for creating the
ubiquitous World Wide Web.
Three quarters of the American population now have Internet access, with
women slightly more likely than men to spend time
surfing, a new survey says. Wired News, March 18, 2004
--- http://www.wired.com/ How Web Pages Work
--- http://computer.howstuffworks.com/web-page3.htm
How Internet Infrastructure
Works --- http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet-infrastructure.htm
How Computer Things
Work (including buying guides) --- http://computer.howstuffworks.com/
Personal technology
reviews by Walter Mossberg --- http://ptech.wsj.com/
"Keeping
the Web Royalty-Free: W3C unveils its formal
policy for handling Web patents," by David
Legard, PCworld.com, May 22, 2003 ---
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,110839,00.asp
The World Wide Web Consortium announced Wednesday its formal policy for
ensuring that key Web technologies, even if patented,
are made available on a royalty-free basis.
In a statement, the consortium said that the W3C Patent Policy is designed
to reduce the threat that key components of Web
infrastructure may be covered by patents which block
further development.
The policy states that:
- participants in the development of a W3C Recommendation must agree
to license essential claims, such as those that
block interoperability, on a royalty-free basis;
- under certain circumstances, Working Group participants may exclude
specifically identified patent claims from the
royalty-free commitment, but these exclusions
must be made known shortly after publication of
the first public Working Draft to avoid later
problems with surprise patents;
- W3C members who have seen a technical draft of a standard must disclose
their knowledge of any patents likely to be essential
to the standard;
- an exception-handling process will deal with any patent claims not
available with terms consistent with the W3C Patent
Policy.
Keeping Its Commitment
The policy formalizes a commitment to a royalty-free process which has
driven the development of the Web since its beginning,
according to W3C. The process has seen input from
companies, researchers, and independent developers
which have created technical interoperability standards
upon which a worldwide information infrastructure
has been built, W3C said in the statement.
"W3C members who joined in building the Web in its first decade made
the business decision that they, and the entire
world, would benefit most by contributing to standards
that could be implemented ubiquitously, without
royalty payments," Tim
Berners-Lee, W3C Director, said in the statement.
Some concern has been raised that companies seeking royalty payments for
their patented work--particularly in the area of
Web services--may choose to bypass the W3C approval
process and use another standards body such as the
Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information
Standards.
An
Internet/Web portal with 14 channels on marketing
and e-Commerce --- http://www.internet.com/home-d.html
- Internet
Technology
- Ecommerce/Marketing
- Web
Developer
- Windows
Internet Tech.
- Linux/Open
Source
- Internet
Resources
- ISP
Resources
- Internet
Lists
- Download
- International
- International
News
- International
Investing
- ASP
Resources
- Wireless
Other
examples of portals and vortals can be found at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/portals.htm
Question
How can you download an entire Website?
One
answer
HTTrack Website Copier 3.32-2 http://www.httrack.com/
HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility.
It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a
local directory, building recursively all directories,
getting HTML, images, and other files from the server
to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original
site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page
of the "mirrored" website in your browser,
and you can browse the site from link to link, as
if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also
update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted
downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has
an integrated help system.
WinHTTrack is the Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP release of HTTrack, and WebHTTrack
the Linux/Unix/BSD release.
See
the download
page.
WORM
= Write Once Read Many depicts
a write-once-read-many memory device that allows
an author to store prepared files once into memory
so that other users may read but not alter those
files. Alternately WORM also depicts a computer
program which replicates itself. The Internet worm
was perhaps the most famous; it successfully duplicated
itself on many of the systems across the Internet.
More commonly, however, the term refers to WORM
Drives such as CD-ROM recorders that will allow
authors to record computer files one time on a compact
disc but will not allow revisions or other materials
to be added to the disc at a later time. Of course,
it is often possible to download WORM files into
hard drive discs and make revisions that can then
be recorded on a new compact disc. The term WORM
now has a somewhat bad connotation since so many
destructive viruses transmitted over the email and
the Internet are WORM viruses. (See also CD-ROM
and Optical
drive)
Also
see Security.
Wrapper
= a Java
applette designed to display XML content
embedded in traditional HTML documents.. The
XML contents may either be authored into the HTML
document explicitly (as when the XML is authored
concurrently with the HTML document), or the XML
content may be unknown implicit (as when the XML
document is imported). In the first case it may
be beneficial for the XML elements to inherit the
style properties of the parent HTML document (e.g.
via. Inheritance from the parent style properties
or ID and CLASS attributes), in the second case
the XML content should probably be "hidden"
from the parent document. There may be multiple
XML documents within the HTML document. A
wrapper may use one or more "extracters"
to extract data from unstructured XML files.
Extractors utilize dictionaries to achieve sophisticated
lingustic processing of unstructured text.
Life is much easier for structured documents having
XML markups. An illustration in terms of
a web shopping guide is provided on Page 136 of
The XML Handbook by Charles F.
Goldfarb and Paul Prescod (ISBN 0130811521, Prentice-Hall
Computer Books, 1998). Note that the issue
of using an XML wrapper is quite different from
using an XML compliant browser. One such wrapper
uses <XMLDOC> tags. In XML, a
tag beginning with the sequence XML is not allowed
as these tags are reserved. XMLDOC however is not
an XML tag it is an HTML tag.
Related to a wrapper is the
concept of an XML "extractor"
for generating XML from HTML documents and databases
having no XML markups. In building a XML markups,
we need to provide a way for the tool to generate
XML documents from existing data sources. XML markup
assembly is a process of locating data (e.g., product
attributes) in repositories and merging them into
an XML structure that is consistent with the some
predefined schema. Asset repositories can be of
various types (databases, filesystems, etc.) and
the details of how information is retrieved from
them may differ considerably. Life is much
easier if the data sources have a fixed document
type definition (DTD). An illustration is provided in Chapter 9 of
The XML Handbook by Charles F. Goldfarb
and Paul Prescod (ISBN 0130811521, Prentice-Hall
Computer Books, 1998). In that illustration,
the Junglee Shopping Guide extracted XML markups
from book seller web sites that did not have XML
tags.
Also
see HTML
and Resource
Description Format.
W-VHS
= (See Wide-screen
TV)
WWW
= (See World
Wide Web)
WYSIWYG
= What You See Is What
You Get. The term is used mainly for
newer types of software that display on the screen
exactly what will appear after being printed. It
is frustrating when what appears on screen is in
code and what appears in print differs from what
is on the screen. It was common in the past for
word processors and spreadsheet software to be able
to print graphics inserts but not to be able to
display these inserts on the screen. Word processor,
spreadsheet, and graphics programs have tried to
overcome these frustrations by adding WYSIWYG options
(e.g., the Print Preview menu in Word for Windows).