The Machine is using us

A message “The Web is us” keeps lingering on me after my viewing of the YouTube video “The Machine is Us/ing us”. The machine, of course, refers to the Web. No matter how absurd it may sound, but there is actually truth in saying that we are the Web. The core and the most impressive element of the Web is hyperlinking, an organized means to access all possible related knowledge on the same theme. This embedded structure of webpages is indeed a demonstration of human’s brilliant knowledge extended across time, territories, and topics. After XML has replaced HTML, composing e-texts is no longer a privilege of the computing codes professionals. With the unbundling of content and format, almost everyone can start a webpage and upload their views to the Web with ease. With billions of bloggers and browsers using the Web every day around the world, humans are literally feeding new knowledge to the Web and telling it what information is sought or considered significant by the mankind. Through participating on the Web, whether creating, downloading or interacting, humans are connected, in both the perspectives of human to human, and human to computer exchanges. In fact, to generations like us who grow up with the Internet, the Web is never a ‘virtual space’ but a part of reality. Online communication is not only natural, but is even more intense and efficient than the conventional in-person interchange. Via the Internet, we make friends, receive online education, and collaborate in work. It is common for us to get entertainment from the Web, to trade, and even start or break a romance there. The Web is our shared memories after we have uploaded so many of our photos and experiences to the Internet. The Web is more than a tool to us; it is part of our life. We are so used to its being around and we are more and more addicted to it. We have so merged with it that we can be considered half human-half machine. With our vast extent of devotion and contribution, I think it is justifiable to acknowledge ourselves the Web.

Erik Hanberg’s visit

2019 marks the 10 th year of Erik Hanberg’s self-publishing venture online. Following his interpretation, this selling of e-books is a way of getting paid without trading time for money, as the income in years after a book is completed needs no time investment at all. The work is already done, and any sales in later years would only render the time previously spent on writing more and more prized. Now, Hanberg has authored more than ten books in e-book, paperback, or audiobook formats, and sold more than 52,000 copies, an accomplishment that an author can be proud of. . Surely, Hanberg’s success reflects a good blending of his writing interest and business sense. Yet, it is also a verification of the unlimited opportunities that the Internet can offer in accumulating capital and relation linkage. Hanberg’s entrepreneurial vision of the Internet is shown in two ways. First, he is able to take advantage on the early days of Kindle publishing. He gets a free ride, succeeds to self-publish his works at a low cost, and starts to collect readers. According to Hanberg, to go self-publishing is far more lucrative than utilizing services from a conventional publisher. An author can retain a larger portion, around 70%, of profit from sales through self-publishing. Moreover, the process of write and publish is a convenient takeaway for authors like him who write fast. Second and more importantly, Hanberg can make use of the Internet to get marketing benefits. He enrolls his book The Marinara Murders in Amazon’s KDP Select to offer the book free for 5 days. With a rise of free downloads, and the information revealed by the website EReaderNewsToday.com, Hanberg successfully uses the ranking algorithm of the website to place his novels at a higher popularity rank than works that affiliate with the major publisher Amazon. To me, Erik Hanberg’s success is definitely a tale of “Internet people” at the New Age of Virtual World.

From dot-com to dot boom

1994 to 2000 observed a massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet due to advances in digital connectivity. Computer was no longer a luxury but a necessity. Many online shopping companies emerged and this gave birth to an economy that was based on information technology. A dot-com refers to a company that does most of its business on the Internet, usually through a website on the World Wide Web that bears a top-level domain “.com”. With Bill Gates’ forecast of an approaching “Internet Tidal Wave”, and the surge of share prices of Internet Netscape from an opening US$28 to $75 within hours when it went public in August 1995, people became speculated about the prospect of making money on Internet dot.coms. Online shopping was then widely perceived as a new way of doing business, and excited investors blindly bet on dot-com stocks and paid significantly more than their fundamental value. It was this big discrepancy between perceived value and actual worth, together with an absence of practical business plans and experienced CEOs in the dot-coms, that created a market bubble that doomed to burst in March, 2000. Though technology companies of a market value of 5 trillion did erase in the following 2 years, and thousands of IT workers went jobless, I think such bubble burst has served its function in bettering the environment for e-commerce. Buying online is a big business and to get big takes time. Construction period must be allowed to let pioneers remedy their mis- steps and mistakes. Share prices of Internet firms have to be evaluated on their actual profits or sales rather than just a proposed future. Today, companies like Amazon that survived the burst have become household names, and the World Wide Web stands as the greatest publishing platform in history. The end of the dot-com boom is definitely not the end of dot- com.

startup.com reflection

Startup.com is a 107-minute documentary released on 1 June 2001 in USA which is presented by D A Pennebaker. It records the birth and failure of the dot-com start-up media company “govWorks.com”, a bona fide realization of the rise and fall of the American dream. This film is inspirational as it shows how powerful creativity can be. We can start a business with just an idea, and we can fuel the growth of computer technology by devising new use it can offer. The dot com bubble is so promising at the time of filming as it offers so many hopes to the users. As what govWorks.com has claimed, it is more than a company. Being a collection interface for municipal governments, via the launching of virtual tool stores, on-line wedding registries, and cashiers for parking tickets, the mission of this dot-com media is to help people. Yet, entrepreneurship is something more than ideology. Though Tuzman and Herman, the co-founders of govWorks.com, have been great friends since high school, and have continuously polished their idea in building up their dot com company, their blood, sweat and tears still end up in a failure. At the time of dot com boom, it was easy to borrow venture capital based solely on a computer technology idea. Thus, Tuzman and Herman met little difficulty in raising 50 million USD from funds to invest on their on-line revenue collection interface idea. Their employee crew grew from 30 to 233 in just nine months, and Tuzman invited his friend Chieh Cheung to be a third partner. It is exactly the non-commitment of this third partner, together with the under-performance of the actual mechanics of their website, foretell the decline of the company. A burglary into their company that results in a loss of technical details, forms the last straw to bring about the death of govWorks.com So, from concept to company, it really involves many down-to-earth factors other than creativity.

epic 2015 reflection

EPIC 2015, a flash movie filmed by Robin Sloan in 2004 for the Museum of Media History, is a prophecy on online media. At the time of production, Internet was just at its infancy stage but the movie presents itself as a history development recap of the Net through 2015. It is in fact a future history of the Internet. Yet, the pre-vision is scarily accurate. A forecast of what could happen turns out to be something that is actually going on. All milestones, except the merging of Google with Amazon to form Googlezon, more or less spring up. We are indeed living in a world of EPIC, the Evolving Personalized Information Construct. Benefitted by the development of Information Technology, we now have IPod emerges as a portable media player and multi-purpose pocket computer that functions as a personal tailored portal of music, images, videos, and online contacts. Google, as forecasted, materializes to be the most popular gateway for searching. The coverage of “Google Grid” is possibly extended over the entire world which makes real time message exchange feasible. This boosts the growth of online news and poses a great threat to the traditional print form of a newspaper. Today, printed copies of newspaper are really preferred by elite officers and businessmen while the young generation and general public usually choose a soft copy subscription. Improvement in convenience and application is also witnessed these years. The availability of high data transmission rate and cloud computing enable Net users to exchange and store up massive amounts of data easily while Google map can provide real-time geographical directions. Easy-to- use tools like Blogger and social network platforms like Facebook are open to everyone for sharing personal thoughts and images. Google, through tracking these users’ history of search terms, can build up a detailed profile of the Net users, and contribute to a Personalized Information Construct. Say, Digg, is a news aggregator that offers selected stories according to the favoritism of the Internet audience. Yet, the collection of such information can be a breach of personal privacy and so official regulations are in force to avoid over-sharing. For instance, Facebook has implemented a customizable set of privacy controls to allow its users to shield their information from uninvited individuals.

Reflection on scavenger hunt

This surfing practice makes me realize that to retrieve information online can be more complicated and time-consuming than what I have thought. First, there are a variety of webpages which may provide useful information but contain numerous other features as well. For instance, when I look for itinerary for Disney Aulani and Jimmy Buffett’s collaborators, I need to browse through the pages to screen for relevant content. Second, just a blind input of the keywords may not be enough for a searching and I need to have some ideas where I can likely find the information. Say, in getting the price quotes of item 2, I need to search for online shopping sites for general items before I can really perform the purchase and review the best price. Third, even though no matching result comes up, I need not give up too quickly as the content may be just there waiting for me to type in the right searching keyword. This happens when I try to locate a 3-bedroom-house from Redefine. The website shows that there is no offer that meets my budget at the beginning, but after I eliminate the region constraint and look through all the available property nearby, then the target house shows up. Fourth, I now recognize that that there are quite a number of search engines other than Google, Yahoo, and BING, and there are free websites that help net-users create visual presentation of text data in other forms like tag clouds.

Reflection on HTML

To an ordinary layman like me, HTML (HyperText Markup Language) appears to be a hyper-scientific term which implies high-end computing knowledge as the acronym is associated with assorts of impressive electronic documents that are found on the World Wide Web. In fact, HTML is not a complicated programming language but just a collection of codes written in everyday US English. HTML is just a basic framework which confines the format of the web content so that it displays in the exact appearance that the writer wants it to be. For any text, images, sounds or videos to be displayed in a web document, the writer only needs to put them in markups of a pair of pointed brackets “<” and “>”. These contents need instructions in pointed brackets called tags that direct the exact display format, and most tags consist of opened <tag> and closed </tag> instructions. HTML is simple to learn and use, and it only requires us not to commit any typo mistakes. Despite its easiness, the effectiveness of HTML is boundless. It can enrich a webpage by empowering it the access to multitudes of related web documents via a creation of hyperlinks. Thus, it’s really worthwhile to invest time in learning what HTML can bring about in constructing a webpage.