Real Time Information

There are many ways in which information is presented through the world of media. Real time information is information that is delivered immediately after being collected. Real time information is most frequently used for navigation or tracking.

Many transactional online sites offer order tracking, sites like Apple, Amazon and Play.com let you log on to your account and see what part of the delivery process your ordered product is at. Domino’s Pizza offer a service which allows you to order a pizza over the internet and track which part of the cooking process it is in, it then tells you when it is being delivered, this picture shows the service:

Some people have hobbies like plane spotting, and with modern technology they can achieve their hobbies by using real time data on websites such as www.flightradar24.com, this site allows people to search for a specific flight and it refreshes the stream automatically to give the most accurate location of the plane.

                There are also sites such as www.earthcam.com that offer webcams to specific places for people to look at and maybe use for purposes such as weather. People also use these websites to look at a place of interest, maybe because they go on holiday to this place, sometimes they do this to see what the place looks like during a different time of the year, as they possibly never see it during this time.

Another example of real time data would be the notice boards at train and bus stations, they have a system where they show the train and bus number and when the train is expected to arrive. This is a good use of real time data as it allows passengers to know exactly when their train is coming. This board also would show if the train/bus has any delays or is expected to arrive early giving the passenger increased information on the train/bus.

Some transactional websites use real time data, when somebody selects a product to buy; he or she has to choose a size of the product they want, on http://shop.tottenhamhotspur.com the layout of the size choices is in a colour code system letting the customer see how many units of a particular product are a left, like this:

This is a basic method of using real time data, but still gives more information to the user, or in this case the customer, over the internet.

There are many more ways in which people use real time information including things such as the basic weather forecast, people can type into a search engine ‘weather forecast’ and it will give them a list of websites that can show them a real time forecast. On Google if you type in ‘Weather forecast’ followed by a postcode of the area, Google itself will give you a basic real time weather forecast on the search results page, this is good but very basic and doesn’t give that much information, there are other sites such as the BBC Weather’s page and the Met Office’s page that give a much clearer and detailed weather forecast of the day, they show the weather hour by hour to give a clearer outlook of the day for people to understand it much easier. The advantages of this are that it gives you a quick and clear weather forecast, but the disadvantages are that the forecast could be wrong, but then that applies for weather forecasts in general because whichever way you receive the information, it could still be wrong.

Another key feature of real time information is news feeds, news feeds are feeds that update as soon as someone posts something new up for people to view, whether it be, videos, photos or text. News feeds are also known as 'Really Simple Syndication', most commonly known as RSS. News feeds are used on the Internet for news mainly, and users are able to pick subjects that they are most interested in to feature in their own personal news feed more prominently than other subjects. An example of a popular news feed site is BBC NEWS. Advantages to news feeds are that people can find out news that they want to know all in one place, it also gives them the ability to look at only one subject of news if that is what they wish to do, so they do not have to look at the news that they may consider boring or uninteresting. The disadvantages to news feeds are that the news that is put out is read by many nearly instantly so if the sources to the news are wrong or the news is wrongly worded, there is very little time to correct the mistake before people read it so people maybe lead to the wrong message being sent out.

Social networking sites such as FACEBOOK and TWITTER have feeds, which are much like news feeds but instead of it being global news, it is news, in the case of FACEBOOK, from your friends that you are connected to through the site, or in the case of TWITTER, from celebrities and friends you are connected to through the site. All the updates, whether they are new photos, a 'status', a location, or a video, are put onto one page called the 'Homepage', recently FACEBOOK have added a feature where users can choose who they have featuring on their homepage, and also choose whom they do not want on their homepage. An advantage to this is that users have advanced options to make their time on the Internet much easier and better for them.

Online Communications

Ways of communicating on the Internet are gradually becoming more important in the world we live in today, with the amount of ways you can communicate online increasing everyday. In this post I am going to talk about all the ways of communicating online, how they are used and the advantages and disadvantages of selected ways. I’m also going to talk about a few very popular social networking sites and how they have a huge impact.

Email

One of the main ways in which communication is used in today’s world is email. Email is the most common as it is very easy to use and is very efficient. There are three main email servers that are used, they are: Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, together these three have over 800 million users that use the service regularly with Hotmail standing at the top of that list with 355 million active users.

I personally am a user of both Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail and use them both all the time, for me I use Yahoo! Mail more than Hotmail as when I was younger I only had my Hotmail account and signed up for lots of junk mail to be sent to that email address, I know have many unread emails on that account as I never normally use that account anymore, I now use my Yahoo! Mail account more often as it isn’t as packed with junk mail as my other account.

The advantages of email are obviously that it is very simple to use and sends an email within seconds to the recipient, but the disadvantages would be than an email can fail and not send if you incorrectly spell an email address wrong or the server is down, but this rarely happens.

Instant Messaging

Another way of communicating online is instant messaging, many web servers offer instant messaging but the main way would be through Windows Live Messenger, this uses the email server Hotmail, it has over 330 million users and is the leading instant messaging service. It allows users to talk to a friend or relative through the Internet and users can send a voice message, picture or video through the service, it also allows users to draw pictures or actually write messages using a virtual pen, so it actually looks that the user has hand written the comment.

It recently has added a feature where as an online user can send a message to an offline user so that when the offline user comes online they will receive the message straight away.

I personally, don’t really use instant messaging services as much as I used to as some social networking sites offer a service that allows you to chat instantly to another online user.

Instant messaging has its own language as well, words that get abbreviated to either resemble another world, like ‘brb’ (meaning: be right back) or ‘lol’ (meaning: laugh out loud), or letters that if spoken out loud sound the same as an actual word, like ‘ru’ (meaning: are you) or ‘ne’ (meaning: any), that in the real world would sound really silly is spoken out loud, here is a video to show this: 

Social Networking

A social network is a network of people joined by a relationship, such as friendship, they can then communicate through the site as long as they have a profile, different sites offer different things, like fans can now ‘follow’ their favourite celebrity through a social network. Social networking is becoming such a big thing that the average Facebook user spends 1.2 days a month on the site.

Many sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace and Tumblr have thousands of active users. The more popular sites, Facebook and Twitter, have 950 million active users between them with Facebook dominating with 750 million alone. Different sites offer different things; on Facebook you can ‘Like’ a status from another user, send private mail, ‘Poke’ another user, you can now also play interactive games where you play along with friends, examples of this are Farmville or Cityville. Another site, in Twitter allows users to ‘follow’ their favourite celebrities through the site, letting users to view celebrity’s ‘Tweets’ on their homepage as soon as they are posted. I personally am a member of both Facebook and Twitter and use them both quite frequently, if I were being honest I haven’t really got into using Twitter as much as I use Facebook as I personally find looking and waiting for celebrities to post what they are doing or their thoughts pretty boring, where as on Facebook, I find myself on it longer than I would want to be and then think that I haven’t really done anything for the amount of time I might of spent on there. There are ‘Groups’ and ‘Pages’ on Facebook that agree with me, like this one:

Internet Forums

Internet forums are another example that IT is becoming more prominent in the world as they are a key to getting information quickly if you cant find it anywhere else on the web. You can create an account on the majority of Internet forums for free, once you are on there you can leave a comment asking a question about something you want to know about and, depending on the popularity of the forum, have a reply within seconds of posting. You can also help out other users of the site by answering questions that they may have already asked.

As well as instant messaging, forums have their own lingo, which is used on forums, words such a ‘thread’ that means a single conversation, ‘post’ that means user-submitted message, although ‘post’ is used on other sites such as social networking sites, it still is used on forums.

I use forums quite frequently and sometimes I use forums to get information on something without having to ask a question as it has already been asked, I can type a question into a search engine like Google, and it will have a result from a forum that I can use to find the answer.

Online Conferencing

Online conferencing has become a very important tool in most businesses in the modern world, although it used within households between families and friends, it was firstly set up for businesses. It allows people to chat face to face over the Internet and have a proper conversation if they cannot be together for whatever reason.

It also allows businesses to have a conference meeting over the Internet, with the members of the conference being where ever they like, as long as they have an Internet connection, in times of need, when a worker cannot get into work for any reason they can still have the conference but rather than in the physical sense, the virtual sense.

Earlier in this blog, I spoke about the instant messaging site Skype, Skype also allows registered users to make ‘video calls’ for free, but this only allows users to make a ‘video call’ to one person at a time, whereas on other sites such as WebEx, they charge a small fee for the privilege of talking to more than one person.

Online conferencing does have its disadvantages as well though, if the network goes down a conference could not happen, if the network signal is not very strong it can cause an amount of ‘lag’ causing the conference to take longer than needed and possibly making it too hard to put together a speech as some parts of it may not be heard or seen over the web cam or microphone.

Blogs and Blogging

I enjoy blogging as it makes uploading things to the Internet very easy, it offers services to upload videos, photos, text and sound clips which makes it very helpful to present information. I use a blog to upload all my work for my A-Level ICT course which makes everything easier for my teachers to check my work rather than sending documents over an email and having to save it and use up memory on the hard drive of a computer.

Many people all over the world use blogs to write about all sorts of topics, and get their opinion across about many things.

Chat Rooms

There are many online chat rooms that you can use over the Internet without having an account, and some require that a user have an account. There are many uses of a chat room but one the main uses of a chat room would be the share information with other users, the difference between online chat rooms and instant messaging is that chat rooms are designed to chat to multiple people in the same conversation, whereas instant messaging sites and software is predominantly made for one on one chat.

I have used chat rooms before but I generally do not use them, as I prefer to use instant messaging services like Windows Live Messenger as I can then talk to people I know. There are obviously advantages to online services but then disadvantages that come with it like the fact that in most case you do not really know who you are talking to as anyone can join in a chat whereas on instant messaging services you generally know who you are talking to as you know them personally.

Introduction

Welcome to my blog.

ICT has a big impact on today’s world; it is used in everyday life and used by nearly everybody in most jobs. In the upcoming months, I am going to blog about everything to do with ICT and how it is used.

 ICT is used in nearly every business in the world, in 2010, the amount of people that had access to the internet and used it rose by 30% from 2000, the amount of people that had mobile cellular telephone subscriptions rose by 78% from 2000, this is a great example of how ICT has a big impact on the world today.

The aspects of ICT that people use the most is email. The three most popular email servers are Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail with approximately 818 million accounts over the three servers, with Hotmail being the most popular of the three with 355 million alone. Some organisations have their own private email server that is just used for the employees; this is one of the things that prove that ICT is having a big impact. I am a user of email and use both Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail and both are very easy to use and allows you to chat instantly to people who are also online at that time.

Social networking is one of the major ICT uses, with over 60 million Bebo users, 200 million Twitter users and 500 million active users on Facebook.

Physical shopping is becoming a thing of the past; nearly every retail shop now has an online shop that is gradually becoming more prominent. You can now do your weekly shopping on the internet and get it delivered direct to your door without moving a muscle. You can buy a whole new outfit on the internet, sometimes for a discounted price, and get it delivered the next day. £26billion worth of clothes were sold online, representing 13% of the domestic market.

Businesses now use ICT in everyday work, for staff lists, wage slips, business contacts, nearly everything that would have been stored in file cabinets 10 years ago is now stored on a computer hard drive. ICT is also great for calculating things like wage slips, keeping a profit/loss document and making a website for their company.

There are also websites such as Youtube!, that allows users to upload videos and share with the rest of the Youtube! community, sites such as Flixr that allows users to upload photos to share with the rest of the Flixr community.