Future Journalism

Many information are posted on the Internet for people to read. Newspaper publishing companies has turned online as well. Many younger generations are getting the information of the world on the Internet. Reading of the latest news on the Internet is not new now. This trend is putting many newspaper companies on red alert because ordinary people can report the lastest news, and put it on their blog. The introduction of blog has allow everyone and anyone to become a citizen journalist. Therefore, the traditional medium companies cutting their editorial staffs or asking reporters to become "backpack journalists" who can do everything -- shoot video, take photographs, write stories. The freedom of speech online has not create gatekeepers to verify the truths of the reportings done by citizen journalists. This would have the question of " Do we still need trained journalist?" Columbia University's Sreenivasan has mentioned that we still need journalists who are trained to report on the wars, the politics, etc. This is because citizen journalists write only whatever they wanted.
I came across the video on 2007 New Yorker conference about The Web:2012 (http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2007/web2012). I find it is a good video as it talks about the future of commerce, journalism, and community on the Internet, featuring Barry Diller, Arianna Huffington, and Craig Newmark. The founder of Huffington post, Arianna Huffington talks about the changes in the world of journalism in 2012. She said that the news would be in real time, and citizen journalists together with mainstream journalists would worked together to provide the news coverage. Criag Newmark has also mentioned in the video that citizen journalist who have accuracy may be better than professional journalists in the future. Arianna feels that the future of news would be taken over by citizen journalists. The reason for this is because headline news would be updated constantly by them causing newspaper publishers follow as well. It is also believe that news would be more transparent and accurate.

References:
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/57193.html
http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2007/web2012
http://www.helium.com/items/511212-triumph-waiting-digital-journalismone

Power and limitations of Internet for political campaigning

Internet is becoming a more important medium nowadays. The political arena in the US is making use of the Internet to campaign for the Presidential election that will be held this year. The Internet is a powerful that can reach out to millions of people, and has up-to-date information. Candidates of the Presidential election created their own social network to interact with the people. This allows the people to provide feedbacks to the candidates as well. The use of Internet for the Presidential elections could reach out to people of the younger generations who uses Internet as the main medium for information. Information on the Internet travels faster to the people than on the traditional medium. Internet communication is an essential tool for supporters to get out to vote for the candidates for the US Presidential election. The tools on the Internet also help supporters of various candidates to communicate with each other on the forums.
However, there are limitations for the campaigning on the Internet. The older generations and people who are not technology savy would not be able to access the Internet. There are some people who are too poor who cannot afford to own a computer would not be able to go online as well. Internet is able to reach large number of people, but has proved to be much less effective at swaying voters who are not interested in politics. Internet campaigning would not be able to replace human contact in the campagin itself as one could not be feel the kind of ambience at the rally by watching it online.
Therefore, Internet can be a complementary media, but not a sole media for campaigning because certain groups of people would be left out. A combination of medium would work better to reach out to the different population of the people. Internet may not be the sole media to do campaigning now, but it can become the only media for doing campaign in the future.

References:

http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itdhr/1007/ijde/carvin.htm

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9849169-7.html?tag=nefd.only

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/washington/02campaign.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2&oref=slogin

http://www.wacotrib.com/news/content/news/stories/2008/02/19/02192008waconlineorganize.html

http://www.usip.org/virtualdiplomacy/publications/reports/vburma/vburma_three.html

NewsML

NewsML is an Extensible Markup Language (XML) to designed, and to provide a media-independent, and structural framework for multi-media news. NewsML is created by International Press Telecommunications Council(IPTC). This design is used to publish news in any format. It is used by the news providers to combine pictures, video, text, graphics and audio files in news output available on web sites, mobile phones, high end desktops interactive television and in any other device. This helps the publisher to create packages of information that is targeted at specific audiences. The would help the consumers to personalized their news. NewsML provides an accurate, objective set of description tools, which help to qualify the information and make the search more precise. Users will be able to search the news by using description. NewsML is able to contain stories in differenct languages.

References:
http://about.reuters.com/newsml/contacts.asp
http://about.reuters.com/newsml/whynewsml.asp

Cyber Crime

Cyber crime is a serious crime in Singapore, and the fastest crime growing in the world. Hackers in Singapore can be jailed for up to three years or fined up to S$10,000. Cyber crime is a threat for Singapore because terrorists who plan to attack a country could send a carefully engineered packet of data into the computer systems which control the network for essential services. This would threathen the safety of the people in Singapore. Cyber crime in Singapore has raised from 10 in 2000 to 19 in 2001 and 41 in 2003. Singapore has joint hands with various Asia countries to combat cyber crime by having seminars to exchange informations on Internet security. The examples of cyber crime are

• computer or network is a tool of the criminal activity include spamming and criminal copyright crimes, particularly those facilitated through peer-to-peer networks.
• computer or network is a target of criminal activity include unauthorized access (i.e, defeating access controls), malicious code, and denial-of-service attacks.
• computer or network is a place of criminal activity include theft of service (in particular, telecom fraud) and certain financial frauds
• traditional crimes facilitated through the use of computers or networks include Nigerian money fraud or other gullibility or social engineering frauds (e.g., hacking "phishing", identity theft, child pornography, online gambling, securities fraud, etc.).
• Cyberstalking is a traditional crime (harassment) that has taken a new form when facilitated through computer networks.

The cyber crime article relating to Singapore that I found is email bombing. This article is about a Singaporean guy who has sent 75000 emails to goverment agency. The message was sent to 3 computer server of the Housing and Development Board (HDB). I find that this crime may be minor to some people, but it is a serious crime in the law of the eyes.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybercrime

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/world/asia-pacific/751817.stm

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/11/11/singapore.internet.reut/

Google tool and services

Google has a wide range of tools and services for its users. The tools and services are divided into four categories. They are Google Tools, Google Services, Google Programs and Google Download. Each category have different things.

Google Services

1)Google Alerts

Google Alerts are emails automatically sent to you when there are new Google results for your search terms. Google currently offers three types of alerts: 'News,' 'Web,' and 'News & Web.'

2)Google Catalogs

The searching of various catalogs are made available by Google catalogs. It used character recognition, users can search for a text string in these catalogs in a similar fashion to how they would search for materials on the general web.

3)Google Directory

The directory is a subset of the links in Google's database arranged into hierarchical subcategories like an advanced Yellow Pages of the web.

4)Froggle

Google announced Froogle in Dec 2003, a price engine-like spin-off that searches online stores for particular products. It is now offering in Wireless Markup Language (WML) form and can be accessed from cellphones or other wireless devices that have support for WML. Froogle organizes its results by relevence.

5)Google Groups

Google maintains a Usenet archive, called Google Groups. Its Groups service includes archives mailing lists in addition to usenet posts, using the same interface as Gmail. Google Groups is much more advanced than the last, letting you more easily join a group, make a group, and track your favorite topics.

6)Google Images

Google Images allows users to search the web for image content. The keywords for the image search are based on the filename of the image, the link text pointing to the image, and text adjacent to the image.

7)Google Labs

Google Labs consists of all of Google's experimental technologies. The Google Labs site allows user to access Google Suggest, Google Desktop Search, and other web technologies.

8)Google Local

Google Local helps one to focus the search on a specific geographic location. Google Local display the website of the businesses, phone number and address. It is now the basis of Google Maps.

9)Google Maps

The service features draggable maps, a location search, and turn-by-turn directions. It has received praises for the speed of its operation, produced by the pre-rendering the maps.

10)Google Mobile

It allows users to search using Google from wireless devices such as mobile phone and PDAs.

11)Google News

The service covers news articles that appeared within the past 30 days on news websites in different language, from various countries. It provides around the first 200 characters and links to the full article. Users can request Google News Alerts on various topics by subscribing while using key words. An email is sent when a news article matching the request comes online.

12)Google Scholar

Google Scholar indexes and searches academic literature across an array of sources and disciplines. Results are ranked by the "relevance", which is based largely on the number of citations.

13)Google Special

It allows users to perform special searches such as U.S. Government Search, Linux Search, BSD Search, Apple Macintosh Search, and a Microsoft Windows Search.

14)Google University

Allows users to search within certain University domains.

15) Google Video

It allows users to search through television content based on title, network or a closed caption transcript.

16)Google Web Search

Google is most famous for its search engine. It has indexed over 8 billion Web sites, has 200 million requests a day and is the largest search engine on the Internet.

Google Tools

1)Blogger

Blogger is a service to make weblog publishing easier. The user does not need to write any code/ worry about installing server software or scripts. The user can influence the design of his blog freely.

2)Google Browser Buttons

This tool allows users to put links to Google services in their web browsers.

3)Gmail

A free webmail service by Google. It can generate revenue by displaying advertisements from the AdWords service based on words in users' e-mail messages.\

4)Google Language Tool

This tool allows users to use Google in many different languages. Furthermore, it can translate from one language to another.

5)Google Web API

The Google Web API is a public interface for registered developers. It uses Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), a program that writes services for search and data mining twhich rely on Google's results. Furthermore, websurfers can view cached pages and make suggestions for better spelling.

Google Programs

1)AdSense

AdSense enables text or image advertisements to be displayed on Web sites that need advertisments to raise money. The ads are administered by Google and it generates revenue on per-click basis.

2)AdWords

AdWords is a service that allows advertisers' advertisments to appear on any Google search page, GMail or AdSense when certain keywords are displayed using a self-service system. The AdWords service is Google's largest source of income. The advertiser pays Google on per-click basis, and there is a bidding system to determine ad's ranking.

Google Downloads

1)Google Earth

Google Earth uses online satellite maps that has the ability to view geographical information in 3D view. It covers over 80 major metropolitan areas and thousands of cities. The data is updated every two to three years on average.

2)Google Desktop Search

It runs locally on a PC and will index all Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape Mail, Thunderbird emails, text documents, Microsoft Office documents, AOL Instant Messenger conversations, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox,and Netscape history on that PC, PDF, music, images, video, and allow the user to search them from a browser. Google Desktop Search is an extension of Google Search. After indexing a user's files, his or her local results will turn up on normal Google search on his or her local computer.

3)Picasa

The aim of the software was to make photo editing simple and easy to use. It also allows managing and sharing of digital photos.

Reference: http://www.linksandlaw.com/technicalbackground-Google-Services.htm