Folksonomy and the wonderful World Wide Web (2.0)

web (web) noun
1.A complex, interconnected structure or arrangement.
2.Something intricately contrived, especially something that ensnares or entangles.
3.A membrane or fold of skin connecting the toes, as of certain amphibians.

Now Then! Amazingly I felt like writing a blog again today, as it has again been a while. I must warn you though that this one is again, about technology and will be boring to most of you. It’s also a bit of a rant about social networking sites and the internet too as they have been in the news recently, like for the last 12 years.

So of we go. I’ve been trawling round various blogs, websites, forums, newsgroups, Wikis (during either my lunch hour or at home, Sweeney, in case you’re reading this!) and just generally reading about what the hell this Web 2.0 actually is. It seems to be a bit of a buzz phrase and is quoted all over the place, probably nowhere more than in corporate boardrooms and marketing strategy meetings. And you can guarantee that only a small percentage of people actually know what it means and the other 98% are too embarrassed now to ask what it means as the phrase has been in existence since 2004 apparently!

So I thought I’d have a stab at it.

Usually when you see a version 2 next to something, especially in IT, it means an upgrade of software, hardware or technology. This is where Web 2.0 doesn’t really follow that trend as it’s still the same World Wide Web that was in existence in 1989; Web 2.0 is more about the content, personalisation and how people use it.

Incidentally, for those that don’t know the WWW, was actually started at CERN, in 1989, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (it’s French don’t ask how they came to shorten it to CERN). It started as a way for nuclear physicists to share important information on scientific research from each of their computers. Little did they know what it would evolve into! This site actually brands itself on being the most pointless site on the internet, surely that belongs to this site (In case you can’t be arsed clicking on the last link, it’s Vanessa Felz MySpace page. p.s. I think it’s a wind-up check out some of her friends. Mr.T??? )

Anyway, where was I? Yes, Web 2.0, is a trend that encourages creativity, information sharing and collaboration; exactly what the WWW was invented for, but this second wave is all about you and me posting our own content. The example that you’ll all have heard of is social networking sites, e.g. MySpace, Facebook and maybe Del.icio.us. I only started using Del.icio.us a few days ago and to be honest I’m still not convinced that it’s anything else than an online bookmark depository, enabling you to access your browser favourites from any computer. But others use it for sharing bookmarks; like I said I’m not convinced.

Now depending on your age and/or social ability you’ll either be using some or all of these sites or completely not interested. Now to tell the truth I did use Facebook while we were away as it was a good way of keeping in touch, posting photos, playing scrabble (??), but now that I’m back I’m really not interested in whether an acquaintance from 15 years ago has added the “Which Thundercat character do you most resemble” application. I did try to cut down my use and even delete everyone but my real friends, but it still got on my nerves. Some Facebook addicts in my initial “friends” list updated their status that often I used to get 4 pages of news feed when I logged into it. Some people have over 300 people in their friends, I don’t think I even know 300 people let alone be friends with them. I’ve even heard of one Facebooker who has been sacked from work as he/she was penning less than salubrious comments about their employer on their Wall (must have been someone from Dixons). There will be some people who are reading this who are lucky enough to have never used Facebook and won’t have a clue what I’m on about. You don’t know how lucky you are.

I’ve come to that conclusion that there are 3 types of these social networking whores, and I’ve categorised them below:

1. Under 25’s. This bunch are probably the biggest users and to be honest, these sites are aimed at them. They spend most of the life on the internet anyway, and haven’t really developed the social skills to hold a conversation. Most have at least one ASBO and probably know someone who is/was a member of a Welsh suicide pact. They are members of every single social networking site available and need to spend 4 hours every night, after Eastenders, Corrie and Emmerdale obviously, updating their status, photos, emotion, writing on their 300 friends walls, joining the latest “If I get 1000 members I will name my first born child Charlton Heston” group. They have very pasty skin, ginger/dyed black hair, wear hoods with everything and listen to “My Chemical Romance”. These people are a paradox. They are the most anti-social of all social networking users!

2. 25-40 Year Old’s. These people are either single and trying to cop off with the boy/girl (or both) that they fancied at school or they’re trying to find out what all their “mates” are doing, where they are living and how much they are earning. In fact, I’m surprised that Facebook haven’t added a Salary field in the personal details section for these users, as lets face it, that’s what it all boils down to at this age. People in this group are quite sociable actually, but feel a need to go on these sites as they don’t want to get left behind or feel they are missing the next technological phenomenon.

3. 40 years old (and beyond). Let’s face it, people on Facebook over 40 probably signed up by mistake and can’t work out how to delete their profile. There really is no need for people this age to be on Facebook. Usually their profile picture is one from the 1960’s when they were cool and their religious views are probably set to atheist or agnostic as they don’t want to give too much away. They only have a few friends as they can’t find anyone they know. They may have offspring listed as their friends, but only with limited access to their profile.

I read somewhere on a blog some comments people had on a relatively unknown social networking site (can’t remember the name of it). Some users were championing the fact that you could keep some professional friends (work colleagues) separate from other friends and so information you would share with your non-work friends wouldn’t be visible. An example was cited of uploading pictures from a friend’s stag-do for instance. Now, forgive me for stating the obvious, but would you really upload photos that you considered risque onto the internet. Regardless of whether you want your professional colleagues to see them or not, surely common sense would prevail and you wouldn’t do it in the first place. People are getting carried away with this whole concept of publishing everything you’ve ever done on the internet and even more irritating is they think that everyone else is interested in it. Even this blog, for instance, is a little bit “me, me,” or rather “we, we” by this I mean the 1st person plural not urine! The blog was written as much for our sakes as it was for your sakes, as a memento of what we did on our travels and how we were feeling at the time. (Admittedly you could argue that I’m as guilty as anyone for even writing this blog in the first place!)

So, I won’t be using social networking sites such as Facebook anymore. Or MySpace, Bebo, iLike, FriendsUnited, Habbo, Reunion.com, Student.com, etc. However, I will be using Flickr as a means of backing up my photos, not necessarily for sharing them, and Del.icio.us, for again storing my bookmarks online and not sharing them.

And just to wrap it up, a word on the WWW itself. I remember first “seeing” the web in 1993 in the computer lab at Surrey University. A non-professional friend of mine, (he wasn’t in anyway professional at the time although he probably is now), showed me a browser, Mosaic, to be specific, and said “Look at this page, it’s hosted on a computer in the US”. I wasn’t exactly bowled over by it, and said something along the lines of “So what, what’s the point of that, I can’t see that taking off”. I think that comment even beats the one from Surrey University’s Entertainments’ Officer saying, when asked if he wanted to book a band called Oasis in 1993, “No thanks they’re crap. No-one will pay to see them”

Adios,

p.s. Going back to the definitions at the top I think the 2nd one is the most appropriate. Once you use the WWW you’re hooked, or I know I am (and Geoff is)

p.p.s. Folksonomy is a posh word for social bookmarking apparently. You learn something new every day.

p.p.p.s. Check out the links to the social bookmarking sites on the right. Just because I’m not using these sites doesn’t mean some of our many readers aren’t!

If you don’t like computers or technology then don’t read this!

Now then! It has been an absolute age since I've blogged, in fact I know exactly when it was, the 22nd Dec 2007. Michelle has blogged a massive 16 times since then and as usual her blogs are a lot more interesting than mine. In fact ‘I’m getting bored just trying to write this and I’m only 3 sentences in! I remember reading “Palace Fans Blog” a while back, where he said he’s getting quite “blogged down” with all this blogging business; “nothing interesting to say”, “can’t be bothered telling people about mundane, every day life stuff”, “not allowed to slag off work as some regular readers are from work, and I might get sacked”, etc.etc. Well I’m not stupid enough to slag off work on here, and to be perfectly honest, I’ve got nothing to slag work off about (at the moment!) as things are going well. I promised myself I wouldn’t get (as) cynical as I used to be and definitely wouldn’t get stressed anymore. There’s people in Bolivia who live at 4500m above sea level in concrete huts, with no running water, heating, let alone a 50inch plasma tv and 4 computers under one roof (more on later!)

So what shall I write about then? Well there’s not a lot I can write about except maybe my new PS3!!. At this point I have to apologise in advance to Michelle and Kirsty as to be honest they’re getting sick to the back teeth of me and Stewart talking about gadgets, tv, computers, routers, WEP, DLNA, PVD, BluRay, HD, etc. So, sorry girls.

So on we go. You probably don’t know this but a vast amount of my time during the last two weeks in Chiang Mai was talking and thinking about technology with Alan (from eComet). The remainder of my time was spent sunbathing, eating Thai food, and drinking Chang beer usually in that order. Anyway, back to technology. Alan is, like myself, and Palace Fan for that matter, an Apple geek. We love to talk, think, live, breathe and dream about Apple computers, iPods, iPhones, and iAnything. I can understand Michelle showing no interest in these conversations and to be fair I show no interest in shopping conversations, or discussions about applying foundation cream before blusher. In case your wondering we do have a lot of things in common though, we both love travelling, obviously, reading, watching films, walking, eating, drinking, sleeping, I could go on. Another point worth mentioning is that Alan is such an Apple lover that even his wife is called Apple! And along a similar line, Palace Fan called his first-born Max, get it Macs, Max?

Anyway, back to Chiang Mai. One of the things I promised myself when we got back and had earned some money was a games machine of some sort, be it an XBOX360 or a PS3. Now I’ve always favoured Sony Playstations and have owned all of them at some point. I sold my PS2 before we left for the bargain price of £30 to Wellsy from eComet. I hadn’t used it for ages and knew that it would be obsolete by the time we returned. There seems to be a massive debate at the moment in various forums over which of the two games machines are better, XBOX or PS3. There are all sorts of factors, which I won’t bore you with here, to consider. To be honest I think the XBOX is probably winning at the moment, for two very good reasons; there are more games out and the Live/Online play looks better than the PS3. New games are usually written for the XBOX and then ported across to PS3, with the old PS2 this was the other way round. However, one of the main reasons I opted for the PS3 was the Bluray player. Anyone who is remotely interested in TV/DVD will know that Bluray was declared the victor in the High Definition DVD wars (not to be confused with the War on terror that has probably had less coverage!). So, now that Toshiba has thrown in the towel it seemed a good idea to opt for a games machine with a built-in player. It’s worth noting too, that the Bluray player in the PS3 is by all accounts a pretty damn fine one. I remember when I bought my PS2, with build-in DVD player, and DVD was really taking off at the time. However the player in the PS2 was absolute sh*te; every film watched through it had a slight green tinge. This worked fine with the George Romero classic “Dawn of the Dead” as he purposely filmed it to give everything a green tinge, but anything else was appalling. I suppose Shrek would have looked quite decent though!

I’ve read that not many of the games out currently stretch the PS3 to it’s limits, but this will change over the next 12 months, when the developers get to grips with all the technology. Incidentally, the games that I’ve played on the PS3 look pretty damn fine, so I’m looking forward to the next 12 months. It’s not just about the games though anymore, as now this black box is supposed to be the centre of your universe, or as they call it a media hub. You can surf the net, look at your photos, watch tv through it (or you can when Sony release the Play TV attachment in a couple of months), stream music/video from your PC/Mac. Now this topic deserves another blog on it’s own and that would be really boring. I spent most of last week trying to get the streaming working from the iMac to the PS3. This is where XBOX wins again as this is a lot easier to do. I’ve seen Ben’s working and it is pretty cool. Obviously a Mac isn’t as straightforward as a PC and of course it didn’t connect to the PS3. I even had to download some software (Nullrivers Medialink) which I got working but only intermittently. I’ve still not finished tinkering so maybe on my next blog, sometime in May at my current rate, I’ll have sorted it. I’m sure it’s something on the router, and my theory is that the traffic coming from the PS3 is caning the router which thinks it’s a Denial of Service attack and then just blocks it.

So, the PS3 is sitting underneath Stewarts brand new 50” Pioneer plasma TV. The picture quality on the games is absolutely stunning and the TV is not even full HD. It’s only 720p, the maximum is 1080p, although this is a bit of a sore point in the house, as it means Stew will be wanting another TV in about 12 months. (If Kirsty’s reading this, which I doubt as it’s turned into a rant about technology, she’s probably cursing me at this point! Sorry Kirsty!). I’ve been playing a game called Heavenly Sword last week in between fiddling with the router settings. It’s the usual story; lots of hacking and slashing, fighting medieval-type knights with huge swords, and generally trashing everything in sight. There’s one scene where you can smash food-laden tables up, and then pick up the food and throw it at the enemies. I picked up what looked like a grapefruit, threw it at a huge shield bearing knight. Needless to say it did little damage and he followed up with a skull-crushing blow to my head. Oh yeah, the main character in this game is a girl, I can’t remember her name, who wears a bikini (or something similar) and wields, yes you’ve guessed it a Heavenly Sword. She is hard as nails and some of the moves she pulls off are fantastic. I don’t know how she does it though as I’m just pressing buttons as fast as I can in any order. It seems to work though as I’m on the 6th level now.

The Bluray movies look even better. I’ve rented the BBC Planet Earth series, the one that BBC constantly broadcast on the BBC HD preview channel on SKY. I’m not that much of an AV geek like Stewart is and will settle for a fairly decent picture on a TV, but when you see this it just blows you away. You find yourself not really concentrating on the DVD itself, but just marvelling over the picture quality. “Look at that ant in the background, look how detailed it looks, you can even see the hairs on its legs”. This reminds me of a classic Carry on Film joke; it’s the one when they’re all going on holiday. One guy Bernard Bresslaw, I think, says to another, possibly Kenneth Williams, whilst sitting on the plane and looking out of the window, “Look at those people down there they look like ants”. The other replies “They are ants, we haven’t taken off yet! Classic.

The only downer is that Bluray disks cost about £20, so it’s not even worth thinking about upgrading all your existing DVDs to Bluray, like everyone upgraded VHS to DVD. I’ll probably wait a while before I buy any Bluray disks to be honest as I’m not willing to pay anymore than £10 for a film. Currently I/We rent them from Lovefilm.com which works out pretty well. You can rent games from them too, so even better. You can have any 2 films at home for as long as you want. You send them back when you’ve finished with them and then the next 2 off your list turn up. All the postage is free too. You can add what you want to your list and prioritise them. Most of the time they do send you what you want in the right order, although sometimes if you have a 5 disk series in your list, like Lost for instance, they send you them in the wrong order. You end up watching the end of the series finale before you’ve seen the start, although in the case of Lost I don’t think it makes much difference do you?

So that’s about it really; turned out to be one of my longer blogs, but I’m sure most of you are thinking it’s my dullest blog. Maybe I should have called it “If you don’t like computers or technology then don’t read this!”. In fact that’s what I’ll do, I’ll call it that and hope that only Palace Fan, Stew, Geoff, Ben and Alan reads it! If you have got this far down and you don’t like technology then sorry, but to quote Little Britain “ I did warn you!”

Adios

P.S. There’s over 1600 words in this blog! I used to struggle in GCSE English to write 400 words on “Discuss Wilfred Owen’s poetry and his use of alliteration and onomatopoeic phrases in relation to the First World War”. It’s amazing how much you can write when you’re not put under pressure or the subject is boring!