Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Archives...

I looked at all of the archives and then looked a little deeper- clicked around. By far the best usability is the Rossetti site, with Whitman, Dickinson,and Blake next.The Markup site receives honorable mention. Rossetti is fabulous. It is the most visual and easiest to navigate. The thumbnails of works presented in the various categories are very clever and a stunning addition. The tabs across the top of opening page provide orientation. Blake is also visually beautiful- how could you go wrong with such material, but I find the opening page with its one graphic and yucky small text and then "enter" is off putting compared with a site that balances visual "WOW!" with an index of what to do and where to go. the link to the Nines project is a great addition and is a fascinating side trip. Walt Whitman also has an accessible first page- initially it was my favorite and the etching of him is compelling. However, upon entering the tabs it is clear that the graphic designers went home after page one. It looks sort of lame and vacant inside, a let down. the possibilities of radiant textuality are such that those who do not/ cannot avail themselves of its potential to be both navigable and beautiful are just dropping the ball. The Blake site is kind of confusing, while the Dickinson site is very well organized, again it falls off in the design area. after visiting the Rossetti site the others appear bleak in comparison.Why can't they LOOK at the page and see that vast expanses of beige with unattractive fonts scattered across them make a reader feel bereft? What is up with the state of design on the Web? Now as tools, strictly to obtain information they all seem fine, and it is a miracle to have these riches a click away instead of in dresser drawers and basements and private collections all over the world. I applaud what is being offered. I am simply giving my visceral reaction to the materiality of these web expressions, holding them all to a high aesthetic standard and critiquing them from that perspective. I mean-- we are talking aesthetics here- poetry, art... and some of the greatest of these ever made.Their sarcophogi should be as lovely as the textual bodies they house. Strike metaphor. Not meant to be visited-- inside. I guess you could call these sites houses, more like. We have a dedicated home you may visit, for each of these notables, in which to wander the gardens, galleries, libraries, take the tour, and sit with and among the works of these artists. Now I prefer the experience to be total. I want the grounds landscaped lovingly and all the fittings to resonate. I want a mood evoked. I want to visit a dwelling that in its own artistry honors the art within , not just a peek in a window at a strip mall in a parking lot. Nor do I want to visit the artist's home and feel lost or disconnected. I want the just right balance, a place that invokes the muse but answers questions in English.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

My malware is not working...

I have purchased Trend Micro virus protection for my laptop- but due to some error, I was notified by Best Buy that it was not functioning. 2 weeks later I am still waiting for it to be re-installed. I feel vulnerable, but my question is this: How effective is it, when fully functional, at repelling viruses, trojans, bots, worms, etc. I was so tempted to click on the "Attack Site!" anyway-- and see what was there. I just wonder if having the protective Trend Micro is like wearing asbestos? Or is it imperfect-- and by what percent is it ineffective?

Web 2.0- This is how We Dream

Lecture: Richard E. Miller, Dept. of English, Rutgers University

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KsEQnOkTZ0

You Tube video: History of the Internet

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4

Monday, April 13, 2009

MALWARE:

http://doit.missouri.edu/security/make-it-safe/frontline/frontline-spring08.pdf

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/11/malware_digital_devices/print.html

The first article is an internet saftey security page from the University of Missouri IT department's online newsletter.
The second is a report about the infected Chinese photo frames from last year. when you connected them to your computer to upload photographs they installed a bot that could then commandeer your machine for nefarious purposes.

What's up with the Web 2.0 workgroup page, and what's that MEAN, anyway?

Does the address line display something different like "http://www.gotyouscammed.com/paypal/login.htm? I guess that would be a clue, if one read the address bar!

"hotnudeactresses and nudecelebritypost" Perhaps they deserve to get botted, or it's at least funny anyway.

"The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence"

"Folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over time. A well-developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared vocabulary that is both originated by, and familiar to, its primary users. Folksonomies arise in Web-based communities where provisions are made at the site level for creating and using tags. These communities are established to enable Web users to label and share user-generated content, such as photographs, or to collaboratively label existing content"

Folksonomy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f4/Ambox_content.png

Some parts of this article may be misleading.
Please help clarify this article. Suggestions may be on the talk page.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f4/Ambox_content.png

This article contains weasel words, vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information. Such statements should be clarified or removed. (September 2008)

______________________________________________________________________________________

What’s a weasel word?

Wikipedia:Avoid weasel words: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Nutshell.png

This page in a nutshell: Avoid using phrases such as "some people say" without providing

sources.


Weasel words are words or phrases that seemingly support statements without attributing opinions to verifiable sources. They give the force of authority to a statement without letting the reader decide whether the source of the opinion is reliable. If a statement can't stand on its own without weasel words, it lacks neutral point of view; either a source for the statement should be found, or the statement should be removed. If a statement can stand without weasel words, they may be undermining its neutrality and the statement may be better off standing without them.

For example, "Montreal is the nicest city in the world," is a biased or normative statement. Application of a weasel word can give the illusion of neutral point of view: "Some people say Montreal is the nicest city in the world."

Although this is an improvement, since it no longer states the opinion as fact, it remains uninformative:

  • Who says that? You?
  • When did they say it? Now?
  • How many people think that?
  • How many is some?
  • How many is most?
  • What kind of people think that? Where are they?
  • What kind of bias might they have?
  • Why is this of any significance?

Weasel words don't really give a neutral point of view; they just spread hearsay, or couch personal opinion in vague, indirect syntax. It is better to put a name and a face on an opinion than to assign an opinion to an anonymous source.

What is the difference between web 1.0 and web 2.0 anyway? ( The following is taken from the web 2.0 explanation page) RSS: One of the things that has made a difference is a technology called RSS. RSS is the most significant advance in the fundamental architecture of the web since early hackers realized that CGI could be used to create database-backed websites. RSS allows someone to link not just to a page, but to subscribe to it, with notification every time that page changes. Skrenta calls this "the incremental web." Others call it the "live web".

It may seem like a trivial piece of functionality now, but it was effectively the device that turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities. For the first time it became relatively easy to gesture directly at a highly specific post on someone else's site and talk about it. Discussion emerged. Chat emerged. And - as a result - friendships emerged or became more entrenched. The permalink was the first - and most successful - attempt to build bridges between weblogs.

In many ways, the combination of RSS and permalinks adds many of the features of NNTP, the Network News Protocol of the Usenet, onto HTTP, the web protocol. The "blogosphere" can be thought of as a new, peer-to-peer equivalent to Usenet and bulletin-boards, the conversational watering holes of the early internet. Not only can people subscribe to each others' sites, and easily link to individual comments on a page, but also, via a mechanism known as trackbacks, they can see when anyone else links to their pages, and can respond, either with reciprocal links, or by adding comments…If an essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect…If it were merely an amplifier, blogging would be uninteresting. But like Wikipedia, blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter. What James Suriowecki calls "the wisdom of crowds" comes into play, and much as PageRank produces better results than analysis of any individual document, the collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value.

While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls "we, the media," a world in which "the former audience", not a few people in a back room, decides what's important. Database management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies, so much so that we have sometimes referred to these applications as "infoware" rather than merely software.

This fact leads to a key question: Who owns the data? Much as the rise of proprietary software led to the Free Software movement, we expect the rise of proprietary databases to result in a Free Data movement within the next decade. One can see early signs of this countervailing trend in open data projects such as Wikipedia, the Creative Commons, and in software projects like Greasemonkey, which allow users to take control of how data is displayed on their computer.

It's also no accident that scripting languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, and now Ruby, play such a large role at web 2.0 companies. Perl was famously described by Hassan Schroeder, Sun's first webmaster, as "the duct tape of the internet." Dynamic languages (often called scripting languages and looked down on by the software engineers of the era of software artifacts) are the tool of choice for system and network administrators, as well as application developers building dynamic systems that require constant change.

http://www.railsonwave.com/assets/2006/12/25/Web_2.0_Map.svg

See below for map from this link:File:Web 2.0 Map.svg

Thursday, April 9, 2009

More on wiki

I thought "this is so easy!" and scarily so. Truly anyone could do this. If all students performed this exercise they would really wonder about the source's reliability. But, what I use Wikipedia for is pretty verifiable-- in other words, I look for book titles, or other names of related people that i could explore some other way. also, I am curious about who spends a lot of time writing articles and doing scholarship for this forum. Are they shut ins? Elderly, retired, out of work? It is a certain expression of altruism to make free public knowledge but who has the time?