Good information about Internet Safety can be found on LDS.org on the Internet Safety page. It has references to Church magazine articles and good Web sites where you can learn more.
Also see the LDS.org page on pornography.
The latest Nielsen//NetRatings release on podcasting reports that 6.6% of the US adult online population — 9.2 million users — have recently downloaded an audio podcast; and 4% — 5.6 million users — recently downloaded a video podcast.
To put that in perspective, the figures put the podcasting audience on a par with US Internet users who publish blogs (4.8%), and online daters, (3.9% of the adult online population).
Internet users between the ages of 18 and 24 are almost twice as likely as the average user to download audio podcasts, followed by users in the 25-34 and 35-44 age groups. Video podcast downloading, however, trended slightly older, with 25-34 year olds indexing the highest.
For more information, see eMarketer.
According to the latest figures from comScore Media Metrix, blogs are not merely becoming mainstream, they are turning into a flood of information. Or, as iMedia Connection put it, “blogs are now as ubiquitous to the web as reality shows are to television.”
Traffic to blogs continues to grow, up 56% over the past year to 58.7 million visitors, and that represents 34% of the total Internet audience.
Read more at http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1004072
BYU Education Week always has great classes. This year, there will be a class on “Internet Safety: Learn and Teach Others to Be Safe” by Ron Schwendiman in the Varsity Theater, Wilkinson Student Center (WSC) Monday, August 21 from 2:00-5:00pm.
In Web 1.0, standards allowed information to describe how it could be presented, exchanged, and repurposed. This created a world of shared information. However, as the Web grows in size and scope, it becomes harder to find what we want, to identify like-minded people and communities, and to have applications work together smoothly.
Web 2.0 will become more useful by creating a meaningful semantic Web. Researchers are working on the standards, taxonomies, and other ontologies needed to create a semantic Web. These standards will enable information to describe its own origin, scope, purpose, and even meaning. This will create a world of more intelligent services and content, both for human-machine interchange and machine-machine synchronization.
The semantic Web will add meaning to our current simplistic matching of mere strings of characters against buckets of words. This is a complex issue, because meaning is organic, determined by use, and a moving and context-dependent target.
The current debate: should meaning on the Web be (1) evolutionary, driven organically through the bottom-up human assignment of tags or (2) does it need to be carefully crafted and managed by a higher authority, using structured representations with defined semantics? Evolutionally (bottom-up) tagging is helpful with shared, formalized vocabularies (top-down) for interoperability and machine support.
Interesting sites: Flickr.com, del.icio.us, Upcoming.org
There are at least two semantic Webs:
1. A Web of data (exposed databases of data). Tagging may not be helpful here.
2. Enrichment of the human-readable Web. Tags will be a powerful way to improve meaning.
We want you to succeed. From time to time, we will provide you information on this blog to keep your sites up to date as we make changes to LDS.org and other Church Web sites. We recommend you sign up for the What’s New on LDS.org list service and also check this blog from time to time or subscribe to this blog.
It’s worth your time to read The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. Yes, I know we’re all busy, but you can always get the CD (like I did) and listen to it while commuting. This is the guy who wrote Lexus and the Olive Tree.
What Friedman means by “flat” is “connected globally.” The digital revolution makes it possible to do business instantaneously with anyone on the planet. He talks about many ideas that will really make you think, like China, India, global supply chain, and bottom-up creation of culture, knowledge, and innovation through blogging, podcasts, and open-source software.
Be sure to get the “Updated and Expanded” version that came out a year after the book was first published.
The Worldwide Web was invented in 1989. In barely a decade, it had reinvented centuries old businesses, inspired the creation of new ones, and penetrated our homes to become an integrated part of our lives. It has revolutionized the way we work, live, learn, and communicate. Yet, the Web is still in its infancy, and is already being transformed by a new generation of entrepreneurs with new technologies and fresh ideas.
This blog contains some of my notes from the 15th International World Wide Web Conference in Scotland (May 22-26, 2006).
In the near future, Web 2.0 will evolve to the following:
Sites such as MySpace, Flickr, and Facebook demonstrate a remarkable shift in how people seek entertainment, collaborate, and communicate. One big change from first-generation Web sites is that users contribute content to the sites as they consume content, increasing the value of the site and drawing more participants.
Key differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0:
A class titled “LDS.org: Resources for Teaching and Learning on the Internet” will be offered at BYU Education Week this year by Ron Schwendiman Tuesday-Friday, August 22-25, 2006 from 1:50-2:45pm in 115 MCKB.
Topics each day are as follows:
Phil Windley’s Technometria blog is a great read for technology issues. Had a great discussion over dinner with him and Ron Schwendiman at the 15th International World Wide Web Conference in Scotland in May 2006 about ways BYU students, faculty, and others can colaborate to create uplifting content and services on the Web.
We have released the new LDS.org as a beta test site at http://www.beta.lds.org/. [Note: This beta site is no longer functional. See the new site at LDS.org.]
This major project to improve Church Web sites has been in process for the past few years to (1) upgrade the software and infrastructure to allow us to build Church Web sites more efficiently and with greater flexibility and (2) provide a redesigned, user-friendly look with navigation and content in languages and the ability to search across all Church Web sites.
The new LDS.org has the following new features:
We invite your feedback about this test site. The old LDS.org is still available to use. However, sometime in the summer of 2006, we expect to replace it with this new release.
Next week, we will release an enhanced Gospel Library with more content, more formats, and better search capabilities.
Later in 2006, we will translate LDS.org into nine languages: Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. We will continue to build the Gospel Library in these and more languages. In the meantime, you can use beta.lds.org in English or refer to LDS.org to see the existing language materials.
In 2007, we will redesign other Church sites to be similar to the new LDS.org.
For the latest plans, see the What’s New with LDS.org? document.
Notes from the 15th International World Wide Web Conference in Scotland (May 22-26, 2006):
The article at http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/11/17/HN$100laptop_1.html explains the One Laptop Per Child initiative, which aims to produce a $100 laptop computer for distribution to children in developing countries. It features a hand crank that generates the two watts of power the machine needs to operate, it uses a Wi-Fi mesh to connect to the Internet, and runs open-source software. The machine can be folded in different ways to serve as a computer, electronic book or media player. All of the components are chosen for low power usage and low cost to make the portable computers as inexpensive as possible.
If this laptop project gets off the ground, it has interesting possibilities for the Church. Remember President Kimball’s 1974 talk to the Regional Representatives (“When the World Will Be Converted,” Ensign, Apr. 1984, p. 3) where he talked about the enormous potential of the transistor radio and how the Church should use it to broadcast the gospel message? This is light years ahead of the possibilities of the transistor radio. Have we, as a Church, even tapped the potential use of the transistor radio, let alone the possibility of rich media delivered over a $100 laptop?
In 2005, more people in Japan accessed the Web with cell phones than with a computer.
Learn more on InfoWorld.