Presentations and PowerPoints

This is Michael's blog on Presentations and PowerPoints. From Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic, I took away that if you want to make a good presentation, it should involve simplicity. Simplicity is vital in the sense that all unnecessary information is eliminated and therefore the speech is more controlled more relaxed. Another hugely important part of making a good presentation is to take all of your words from your heart. This means that what you are saying to your audience is genuine and what you believe in. After seeing Don Macmillan's "How Not to use PowerPoint", I understood that some common problems could ruin a presentation. Problems include:

Writing everything that you say on the slides: This makes slides 'crowded, wordy and boring', thus losing the audience's attention.

Not running spell check: This makes the orator seem like a fool, as he cannot even spell correctly.

Bullet-pointing every point: Too many bullet points will dwarf the main message. Only bullet-point important/main statements.

Usage of bad colour schemes: Bad colour schemes can confuse, nauseate and distract the audience. Sometimes they make the text unreadable.

Over-inclusion of data: Some people think that the more data present, the better a presentation is. If there is more data, there is more confusion, and slides are harder to read.

Over-animation of slides: If members of the audience are visual learners it can be good, but on the whole pointless motion distracts the audience more than it helps them.

Usage of boring fonts: Once in a while, interesting fonts can liven the presentation. However, elaborate fonts should be used in moderation, as they can distract, render the text illegible or make the presentation seem ridicule.

Tagging

1. This is Michael's blog on Tagging. A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system. On a website in which many users tag many items, this collection of tags becomes a folksonomy.
   Tagging was popularized by websites associated with Web 2.0 and is an important feature of many Web 2.0 services. It is now also part of some desktop software. The use of keywords predates the internet and carried over to early websites as a way for publishers to help users find content. In 2003, the social bookmarking website Delicious provided a way for its users to add "tags" to their bookmarks (as a way to help find them later); Delicious also provided browseable aggregated views of the bookmarks of all users featuring a particular tag. Flickr allowed its users to add free-form tags to each of their pictures, constructing flexible and easy metadata that made the pictures highly searchable. The success of Flickr and the influence of Delicious popularized the concept, and other social software websites – such as YouTube, Technorati, and Last.fm – also implemented tagging. "Labels" in Gmail are similar to tags.
   Websites that include tags often display collections of tags as tag clouds. A user's tags are useful both to them and to the larger community of the website's users. This collective set of tags is known as a folksonomy.
   Tags are a "bottom-up" type of classification, compared to hierarchies, which are "top-down". In a traditional hierarchical system (taxonomy), the designer sets out a limited number of terms to use for classification, and there is one correct way to classify each item. In a tagging system, there are an unlimited number of ways to classify an item, and there is no "wrong" choice. Instead of belonging to one category, an item may have several different tags. Many blog systems allow authors to add free-form tags to a post, along with (or instead of) placing the post into categories. For example, a post may display that it has been tagged with baseball and tickets. Each of those tags is usually a web link leading to an index page listing all of the posts associated with that tag. The blog may have a sidebar listing all the tags in use on that blog, with each tag leading to an index page. To reclassify a post, an author edits its list of tags. All connections between posts are automatically tracked and updated by the blog software; there is no need to relocate the page within a complex hierarchy of categories.

Facebook II

This is Michael's second blog on Facebook. This blog shall be on the controversies of Facebook. Facebook has met with some controversy over the past few years. In October 2005, the University of New Mexico blocked access to Facebook from its campus computers and networks. It cited a violation of the university's Acceptable Use Policy for abusing computer resources as the reason, stating the website forces use of the university's credentials for activity not related to the university. The school later unblocked Facebook after the website rectified the situation by displaying a notice on the login page stating the credentials used on the website are separate from the ones used for their school accounts. The Ontario government also blocked access to Facebook for its employees in May 2007, stating the website was "not directly related to the workplace".
On January 1, 2008, a memorial group on Facebook posted the identity of murdered Toronto teenager Stefanie Rengel, whose family had not yet given the Toronto Police Service their consent to release her name to the media, as well as the identities of her accused killers — despite the fact that under Canada's Youth Criminal Justice Act, it is illegal to publish the name of an underage criminal. While police and Facebook staff attempted to comply with the privacy regulations by deleting posts mentioning her name, they noted it was difficult to effectively police individual users who repeatedly republished the deleted information.
Due to the open nature of Facebook, several countries have banned access to it including Syria and Iran. The Syrian government cited the ban was on the premise that the website promoted attacks on authorities. The government also feared Israeli infiltration of Syrian social networks on Facebook. Facebook was also used by Syrian citizens to criticize the government, and public criticism of the Syrian government is punishable by imprisonment. In Iran, the website was banned because of fears that opposition movements were being organized on the website.
On February 5, 2008, Fouad Mourtada, a citizen of Morocco, was arrested for the alleged creation of a faked Facebook profile of Prince Moulay Rachid of Morocco.

Flickr

This is Michael's blog on Flickr. Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform. In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. As of November 2008, it claims to host more than 3 billion images.Flickr was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver-based company that launched Flickr in February 2004. The service emerged out of tools originally created for Ludicorp's Game Neverending, a web-based massively multiplayed online game. Flickr proved a more feasible project and ultimately Game Neverending was shelved.
Early versions of Flickr focused on a multiuser chat room called FlickrLive with real-time photo exchange capabilities. There was also an emphasis on collecting images found on the web rather than photographs taken by users. The successive evolutions focused more on the uploading and filing backend for individual users and the chat room was buried in the site map. It was eventually dropped as Flickr's backend systems evolved away from the Game Neverending's codebase.
Some of the key features of Flickr not initially present were tags, marking photos as favorites, group photo pools and interestingness, for which a patent is pending.
In March 2005, Yahoo! acquired Ludicorp and Flickr. During the week of June 28, 2005, all content was migrated from servers in Canada to servers in the United States, resulting in all data being subject to United States federal law.
On May 16, 2006, Flickr updated its services from beta to "gamma", along with a design and structural overhaul. According to the site's FAQ, the term "gamma", rarely used in software development, is intended to be tongue-in-cheek to indicate that the service is always being tested by its users, and is in a state of perpetual improvement. A further connotation, more specific to photography and the display of images, is that of gamma correction. For all intents and purposes, the current service is considered a stable release.
In December 2006, upload limits on free accounts were increased to 100MB a month (from 20MB) and were removed from Pro Accounts, permitting unlimited uploads for holders of these accounts (originally a 2GB per month limit).
In January 2007, Flickr announced that "Old Skool" members--those who had joined before the Yahoo acquisition--would be required to associate their account with a Yahoo ID by March 15 to continue using the service. This move was criticized by some users.
On April 9, 2008, Flickr began to allow paid subscribers to upload videos, limited to 90 seconds in length and 150MB in size.

Facebook

This is Michael's blog on Facebook. Facebook, formerly Thefacebook, is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. The website's name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook while he was a student at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 175 million active users worldwide.Facebook has met with some controversy over the past few years. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Syria and Iran. It has also been banned at many places of work to discourage employees from wasting time using the service. Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times. It is also facing several lawsuits from a number of Zuckerberg's former classmates, who claim that Facebook had stolen their source code and other intellectual property.

Digital Identity

I possess an oyster card, meaning that the police have the means to track my voyages by public transport, the average person is recorded by CCTV 300 times a day, so, being an average person, I am recorded by CCTV quite often, again this is a means for the police to track me, I also possess a mobile phone, which can be tracked, and if need be, this information could be disclosed by 'Talk mobile' to the police, giving them another means of tracking me and, although my passport does not have an electronic flea, it is scanned every time I pass customs, providing the police with more information about me. That is the extent of my offline digital identity. If needs be, the police could easily track me down, possessing my address, my phone number etc... However, only the police and the government can possess and use this information, in a way this is reassuring, because it means that it is not easy, even scarcely possible, for any random individual to track me down. However, can we trust the police and government to keep this information?Is our modern society starting to mirror Orwell's dystopic society of 1984? Well in a way, yes, we are 'monitored' by CCTV cameras, oyster 'swipes' and other things. But in another way our society has not reached the extremes of Big Brother's society, we are allowed freedom of speech, freedom of thought and the police and government is not abusive of their knowledge of us, their power.

Microblogging

This is Michael's blog on Microblogging. Microblogging is a smaller, simpler and easier from of blogging. Sites such as Jaiku and Twitter use microblogging. Microblogging is basically a form of blog that gives an update of whatever the microblogger writes to those who follow whim or her. Importantly, it is accessible by portable handsets and mobile phones. For example, you can get a kind of RSS feed to your phone from whoever’s microblog you follow and it will give you live updates from them, just like sending a text. Facebook has a form of microblogging called ‘status updates’. Write something in your status and your friends will immediately see it if they are logged into Facebook, and you will see anything your friends write.Machines and computers can also microblog. For example, the Tower Bride Twitter simply has some computer linked up to its systems. It posts a sentence saying ‘opening for’ or ‘closing for’ whichever ship passed through, and then the time. The houseplant Twitter has a device that measures the water levels in the soil at regular intervals and then sends a post that either tells the % water in the soil or says ‘water me please’ if it drops below a certain level. The River Thames Twitter gets data about high and low tides from some other source and then puts it into a post saying ‘if you hurry, you’ll catch my next high/low tide which is at …’.Twitter and Jaiku are an alternative to Blogger for people who don’t want to receive extremely long posts and want to stay in touch with friends easily. As Jyri Engeström‘s slideshow said, ‘the future is here, its just not evenly distributed yet.