Week 2

Social Media

Social media is a social instrument of communication. It means that a website that doesn't just give you information, but interacts with you while giving you that information. You interact with the media by giving your comments, vote on an article, or be recommended sources or movies based on the ratings of other people with similar interests.

A regular media is a one-way communication where you read a newspaper or listen to a report on television, but you have very limited ability to give your thoughts on the matter. Hence, social media, on the other hand, is a two-way communication that gives you the ability to give your feedback.

Social media is a broad term and it covers a large range of websites. But the one common link between these websites is that you are able to interact with the website and interact with other visitors.

Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, social news, wikis, podcasts, social pictures and video sharing, rating and social bookmarking are some examples of social media. Therefore, any website that invites you to interact with the site and with other visitors falls into the definition of social media.

Web 3.0
As we’ve learnt, Web 2.0 is a term coined to describe websites catering to Internet users to have a place where they can network and participate in a more interactive way, such as Wikipedia, a website where users can help to contribute to an article’s content either by editing or adding to it, and Flickr, where users can share photos. Compared to the conventional fashion of publishing, blogging allows readers to share their views by commenting on it hence falls under the web 2.0 family. Web 2.0 is built towards the social side of the online world.

However, as technology advances and improves, Web 3.0 is a new and upcoming phenomenon. Basically, Web3.0 allows web browsing with 3D experience. This would mean that Web 3.0 is expected to be where the money will be made by the corporations. Web 3.0 based applications are expected to be a virtual reality location where consumers can try anything. Although it have existed for quite some time now, but the exposure is for web 3.0 based applications more towards focused groups.

This up and coming phenomenon will be brought possible with the development of faster processors and hi-speed broadband access that keep on coming our way nowadays.

RSS and Podcast
I've first encountered and played the first podcast over the internet through MrBrown's website when his funny podcasts had caused a hoo-ha.

Frankly speaking, I thought that MrBrown’s podcasts were fantastic. Not only is it hilarious, the contents in his podcasts were very witty. His podcasts never fails to liven up my day if I were to listen to them. So what is podcast really about? According to Wikipedia, a podcast is “a series of digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication”.

After a couple of times listening to the podcasts on Mrbrown’s blog, I noticed a funny little orange icon beside his streaming. Then I went to find out what was it and realised its a RSS. RSS is a form of web feed used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. This benefits readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

Podcasting are highly linked to RSS through an enclosure tag. This enclosure tag is used in RSS feeds to include certain types of files such as an image, a data file, a video file, or an audio file. Hence, podcasting specifically refers to RSS feeds that contain audio files in their enclosure tag. Thus, the RSS aids me to have frequent updates on sites and podcasts which I choose to subscribe to and this is a highly efficient way to receive updates.

Three cheers to technology! :)