Naturalness and simplicity. Two words that can pretty well sum up a good presentation. The presentation zen article tells us that these two things come with practice and are a skill. However, complication and elaboration are 'natural' to us, which shows the irony in this article. Again, these two things are the difference in which 'presenter' is better at selling their product( Bill Gates, Microsoft, and Steve Jobs, Apple). Steve jobs' presentations are always very 'empty' and 'simple', which is usually best as it engages the audience into listening and not just visualising. Bill Gates goes for a different approach and usually has many headings, pictures and bullet-points.
This is why I think that Steve Jobs has the advantage out of the two.
But I must point out that Steve jobs' presentation,particularily the one on the "iphone 3G", was rather dull and boring. Gates' presentations usually contain more humour but I guess the point of a presenation is to sell your product( for these two men anyway) so maybe humour is sometimes purposefully neglected to make way for impressive facts and figures.
Don Macmillan's presenation on 'how NOT to use powerpoint' was very useful and he covered the topic well ,with good humour, with his key points being:

• Writing every word you are going to say onto your presenation
• SPELL CHECK. IT'S THERE FOR A REASON SO USE IT!!
• Don't use too many bullet-points. Your main points are neglected.
• Detailing/animating graphs too much and using bad colour schemes.
• And finally(a new one to me!),choose your font carefully as it tells the audience what type of person you are. WATCH OUT!!
  

Wikipedia

Wikipedia, THE MOTHER OF INFORMATION ON THE WEB!!, well...to me anyway. I know it's not good, and we're constantly advised not to, but I am one of those terrible sinners that take information straaaiiight off wikipedia( I don't mean "copy and paste" but I don't cross check that the information is completely factual and is all correct).
But probably the most interesting and useful thing I have found out about is the fact that you are able to trace changes and modifications in articles back to the precise location of the computer where it was edited (generalising that all edits are done on a desktop computer).

This tool also allows any user to view the history of the page's edits which can be useful in checking the reliability of the source, e.g. if the article was vandalised moments before you were viewing the article, or if months ago, the latter being the more reliable and therefore useful.
By memorising the IP address of every computer to edit an article or page on wikipedia, you are able to cut down vandalism dramatically by blocking certain computers form editing on wikipedia at all.
Very few people will bother going to another computer just to vandalise an article as many people just do it for fun or fr a joke and is usually a one off thing.

I just saw this a few days ago and had to include it.

Web Tagging (to the extreme!!!)

Before this week's lesson, I'd seen Delicious all over the web, but I'd never bothered to actually type those letters into google.
It wasnt till now that I actually realised how useful it could be and what it could achieve.

People who did realise this were Yahoo and although they realised the potential of delicious two years after it was first released, on 5th December 2005, Yahoo made a great investment.

You may not actually realise how many 'social bookmarking' sites there are on the web, but its closing in 100. But delicious is by far the one leading the way and creating the example.

I currently have only a few bookmarks with Delicious, but I'm sure this will grow due to school and work, and to pages I just find interesting!
The fact that you could share your bookmarks with people of similar interests has made Deliocious as popular as it is.

That is what I believe the best part of it and is why I'm going to stick with Delicious.

Flickr

Flickr started off life as an online game which incorporated sharing photos into it. But little did the creators of flickr know that it would turn out to be as big as it is today.
"Had we sat down and said, 'Let's start a photo application,' we would have failed," Caterina Fake says, a co-founder of Flickr . "We would have done all this research and done all the wrong things."
The game was never released though and in March 2004, Yahoo bought the company for an undisclosed fee and moved the 11 'Flickr' team members, with its company, from its home country, Canada , to the united States.
Flickr's traffic grew 448% to 3.4 million from December 2004 to December 2005, according to Internet measurement firm Nielsen/NetRatings. In the nearly 12 months since Yahoo purchased it, the site went from 250,000 registered users to more than 2 million.
Flickr is such a massive photo base, and has so mnany people using it world-widem, that in the last minute that i have been writing this blog, over 42,000 photos have been updated onto the website. The site has revoulutionised the way we use photo sharing.

With over 175 million people all around the world (that's 3% of the world) on facebook, its no wonder that facebook's terms and conditions page is extremely long aswell as all its safety and advice pages.
With this high number of people on facebook it is also no surprise that facebook cannot change a thing about the network without someone starting a group or page against it.
And thats one thing that facebook got wrong. They thought that they could change their terms and conditions page drastically with very few complaints and people skipping to the end and pressing accept (myself included).
What I learnt in the past two lessons is that not many people realise the amount of information that they are putting onto facebook, with some people they are putting ALL of their personal information onto facebook, because they read only one word in facebook's terms and condiyions list: that all of it would be SAFE.
Little did these people know that to be truly safe they would have to manually go into their accounts settings and change it to their level of privacy. I personally only have my email adress and phone number on facebook, but , because of the last two lessons I have had in ICT, I have made sure that only people that I have agreed to be friends with on facebook canm access this information about me.

Facebook

• Facebook chat: MSN KILLER

• Status updates: Social or Nosy?

• Your profile wall: Part Of Your Life

• Applications: Fun Or An Invasion Of Privacy?

• Simplicity: What makes a network ...urrr...WORK!!
  

Privacy in the internet world

Privacy is something that everyone in this world wantsm ut not something that everyone has.
You may say that some celebrity dont have any privacy, but they are exceptions.
As I said in one of my earlier blogs, "the web is a dangerous tool if used badly, but you must embrace the power of it with open arms"; it can be a dangerous tool because of the amount of information that people store on it.
Almost 100 million people are on social networking sites, such as facebook, and the amount of information that is on a website like that is staggering. You can find out peoples phone numbers, their email adress, where they live and a lot more. Starting a network such as facebook is an enormous responsibility.
One of the creators of facebook in a recent interview said that the site was originally started so that several universities could communicate and keep in touch with eachother and he had no intention in it growing as big as it is today.
I am on about four or five different sites such as twitter and facebook, and on both of these sites I have given only my name and e-mail address.
This reveals very little about me which is what you need on the web, privacy, because without that, what have you got?

Microblogging!

Blogging,as we all know,is alive and well and is growing at an incredible rate. But dont you think that it is a bit of a devotion to be writing full length articles all the time? CHANGE HAS COME TO BLOGGING!
Microblogging is the all new form of blogging in which you write short sentances (only 140 characters!) about what you're doing at any moment in time.You can update it anytime so that your friends and family can see what you're doing.
You simply sign up to a microblogging site(e.g. Twitter) and you're off on your exciting new journey to the land of the future...
You may think that you won't have time to log in very frequently during the day onto your computer, but never fear.Twitter is also available on your Phone! So you really can update it wherever and whenever you want.
You may not realise it but you are probably using microblogging already. Facebook is a great example of this as at the head of your homepage, it says ' What are you doing right now?' which is what microblogging is all about.
This is one of the best features of facebook and is one of the many reasons I think that Microblogging will take over the world of blogs.
Because it is so similar to facebook, I don't think that there is going to be a huge surge of microbloggers on twitter as there was on such sites as blogger when blogging first became big,but don't get me wrong;Microblogging is the future....

wikis 2

The science museum’s wiki "object wiki" has an intersting homepage, with a featured object column, but apart from presentation, there seems to be very few signs of life.

There are only 250 articles about what the museum contains and possibly only three paragraphs of information on each, sometimes less.

There is an opportunity on every article to "add your memories"where anybody can post what they thought of the object and their opinions on it, which is a good idea, but because of the lack of people going on the wiki, there are very few responses and therefore almost becomes pointless.

"Think wiki's" page contains just over 1,000 pages and 6,000 members, it is therefore considerably bigger than the science museum's. And with over 35,000 page edits, it shows more signs of life as well.

On its homepage, it has a lot more links and it is easy to navigate around the site. It even has advertising so the site must get relatively high numbers of users for companies to pay them to advertise on it.

However, many of the articles seem to be only computer programs and some don't even contain any text.

The home page for "Wiki fish" seems somewhat bland and doesn't look very engaging because of it mostly being normal text.

The search engine on the wiki is extremely slow and extremely vague, giving over 50 results with not much relevance.

The Portable Globe!!

Google Earth is a three dimensional model of the planet that you can zoom in and out of to see almost any place in the world!
Google Earth works by using satellite images taken from space with varied resolutions depending on place in the world.
Apart from being used as an atlas, google earth can also be used as an information search engine where you can search for places of interest, and it will show links near the place giving sites on the internet that are connected to your search.
Webcams have been connected to the program so you can watch live videos of places around the globe!
You are even able to look around points of interest and places of historic importance, such as Tutankhamun's tomb.
Google Earth is also an excellent database for geographical features and contains many facts about specific places in the world.
The results of natural disasters, such as hurricane Katrina can be viewed and the results of global warming around alaska and many other places.
Google earth isnt just limited to the earth. You can even search the stars using it! There is also a specific program for viewing the stars and galaxies called google sky.
Even flying around the skies is a possibility with the new flight simulator.
Now that Google earth is available as an application on apple's iphone, you can search the world wherever you go!

Wikis

Wikis were created so that people could collaborate work and edit it over the internet. Anyone can create them for any purpose at all, from planning a holiday, to creating an information centre (Wikipedia).
The word 'wiki' comes from the hawaiin word which means 'fast'.
Larry sanger and Jimmy Wales Wikipedia originally started off as project by nupedia, a free English language encyclopedia.
Because anyone is able to edit an article on wikipedia, it is essential if using it to collect information that you make sure the information is correct by checking with other websites to verify the information collected.
There are over 12 million articles on wikipedia that have been contributed by the public in order to help others.
Not all of the articles have been written by proffesionals and is something that comes unsurprisingly.
However, every member of wikipedia can check every edit that is made to any of the pages and the vandalism of the articles can be kept to a small number.
From its first year, there was an increse of over 850% Wikipedia over the first three years.
Just like any other wiki, it started off as very small containing few articles.
But as time progressed and more people joined its community, it grew in numbers to what it is today and is still growing!

What's the point of blogs?

Weblogs help everyday people, from all over the world, transfer news to the rest of the world.
All types of people keep blogs; politicians, celebrities, sports personalities and many more.
A web blog is no different to any other web sites except that they are usually writen about something specific.
It is hard to distinguish and differentiate between a blog and a normal website. There is no exact cut-off for what a blog is.
You can use blogs for posting news about yourself.
For example, people will write about a trip they're going on and tell their readers of all the exciting things that had happened and keep them up to date with what they're doing.
Weblogs first came into existence just over 11 years ago when John Barger started to write daily posts and put links up of things that he thought were interesting (things like politics, books, culture, etc.). People started to catch onto this idea and started creating their own blogs about themselves and the things they liked.
Some people use blogs as online diarys and put a lot of personal information online for everyone to view. People do this on social networking sites aswell, sometimes by accident, and that is why you should always check your privacy settings regularly setting them to your level of comfort.
It's important you do this and that you are aware of the dangers of sharing personal information to anyone that you dont know.You should be aware of this, but also accept the internet as being a tool to share things and be accepting of it.
Another main feature of blogs was the creation of RSS (Really Simple Syndication).
This allowed people to customize their blogs and show what they were interested in and share it with constant feeds from their favourite websites.