Blog: Technology

When it comes to techonology, one of the most relevant sectors to students about to enter into the corporate world is social media. This umbrella term encompasses everything from social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook to sites like YouTube and Flickr. Another lesser know tool that people in all discipline can use is social bookmarking.

What is social bookmarking?

Technically speaking, social bookmarking is a user-defined taxonomy ( or “folksonomy” as its sometimes referred to in certain techie circles) of Web sites that have been bookmarked by internet users, with the help of metadata, so they can store, organize, search and share URLs.

Now for all those people who don’t spend all their free time reading CNET, social bookmarking is really just tool to put all your favorite Web pages in one place so you can tell your friends and professional colleagues what they should be looking at when they’re online. For example, say you are a student studying public relations like me. You can use a social bookmarking system to put all of your favorite blog posts about your future profession in one place so your parents know they’re not wasting their money on tuition.

How does social bookmarking work?

A social bookmarking system allows internet users to save their favorite links they want to remember or share with others. These links can then be organized by “tagging” them, which forms collections of bookmarks divided into categories so other people can find them. Imagine, again as a public relations student, you are doing research on the latest trends in PR practice, but you happen to also be a bit ADD. You can put all the sites you find about “blogging” in one place with the tag as something like “blogging” (mind-blowing, I know) and all the other  ones about “celebrity gossip” tagged as “guilty pleasure” in another place.

Most social bookmarking sites also enable browsing other bookmarks with similar tags so you can see what other people like you found while they were aimlessly surfing the ‘net.  However, if you don’t want people to know you were reading about Paris Hilton’s latest scandal or Madge’s workout regimen but still don’t want to forget that juicy site’s URL, social bookmarking systems also lets you mark some bookmarks as private.

When did all this “tagging” and “bookmarking” begin?

The first true social bookmarking site was started in April 1996 (think back to the good ole days of the Spice Girls and the Macarena) with the launch of itList. Within the next three years, a whole batch of SM sites cropped up including BackFlip, Blink, Clip2, Click Marks, and HotLinks. However, these sites died  a sudden under the “dot-com bubble burst” due to a lack of revenue-generating opportunities. (This was clearly before the days of Google’s Adwords…)

So, what can SB do for me?

There are many advantages to using a social bookmarking site. For one, SBs searches find sites that have been classified by living, breathing humans, not just webcrawlers like most search engines. This means that the stuff you find under a certain tag actually relates to what you’re searching for, instead of just searching for the number of times a word or phrase is mentioned on a certain Web site. Think about what happens when you Google “guilty pleasure” without the safe search mode turned on... things could get very naked, very quickly.

And, social bookmarking systems can also rank sites based on the number of times other people have bookmarked it. Meaning: like-minded people saving sites that can actually help you find the info you want instead of a search engine ranking sites based on their interconnectivity.

Professors and even corporate big-wigs have started using SB to tell the little people like students and middle management what they should be thinking and talking about.

Ok, it can’t be all that great or else I would have heard about it sooner…

There are some downsides that the minds behind SB can’t really fix. First of all, because of the variety of different terminologies and vocabulary of the English language (and not to mention new slang terms that are created by the thousands everyday), there is no standard set of keywords. A hip-hop artist fan could tag an article about managing your finances  “cheddar,” and a suburban father could tag the same article “fiscal responsibility.” The SB system wouldn’t be able to relate the two to people who don’t what either tag means (i.e. me).  You say “potato,” and I say “what is cheddar?!?”

Also, there are a lot of dummies out there who can use a SB site but can’t spell to save their life and end up tagging an article about killer strawberry daiquiris as “daccury recipe.”

Recently, due to the intense internet competition, SB sites have become the latest battleground for spammers and unethical corporations who try to up their site’s traffic for search engine optimization. The more a site is submitted or bookmarked, the better chance it has of being found. So for that company who sells male enhancement pills over the internet, SB provides just another way for them to annoy us.

What are some SB sites I could try? (a.k.a. the easiest ones to use)

Probably the most popular social bookmarking site available today is delicious (formally known as del.icio.us). According to their website, delicious is ‘da bomb because:

 “With an emphasis on the power of the community, delicious greatly improves how

people discover, remember, manage and share on the internet. “

The many features of delicious are what attract it to so many people. These include:

1.       A simple interface that is easy to use

2.       A human-readable URL scheme

3.       The cutesy domain name (I know I want to click on something called Delicious)

4.       RSS feeds that provided syndication

5.       The fact that it’s FREE.

Another popular site for SB newbies is StumbleUpon. This service lets users bookmark Web sites, photo and videos as they are viewing them with a special downloadable toolbar. When you find a site that you like (such as that one about ScarJo’s secret wedding), you just click on the “Stumble!” button and the service adds it to your personal profile. You can then give it a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” depending on your opinion of the quality of the gossip….er…information. Also, you can search for sites that other “stumblers” have found and the service only shows you the ones they have given a “thumbs up.” StumbleUpon, therefore, forms a collaborative opinion on website quality by logging each user’s “thumb” rating. It’s like Robert Ebert’s guide to the internet.

For more information on how cool social bookmarking is, you can visit the sites below. Maybe  you can even add them to your own list of bookmarks!

7 Things You Should Know About: Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Social Bookmarking: Tools for Collaboration and Interaction

Social Media Survey

Links that are Worth Building

Internet Explorer better watch out: there’s a new browser in town and it’s ready to leave you in the dust.

 Just one week after Microsoft’s release of a test version of the latest Internet Explorer 8, Google announced Monday they were launching the beta version of their free browser.  The browser will be available to Windows Users (Mac and Linux versions are still in the works) in 100 countries around the world.

 The browser, coolly going by the name of Chrome, is being heralded by Google as “streamlined and simple” as well as “clean and fast.” It’s the sports car of browsers.

 This announcement follows a premature release of a cartoon comic book meant to promote Chrome, and underlines the competitive rivalry between Google and Microsoft. Google, who’s search engine handles over two thirds of all web searches, is looking to take a bite out of Microsoft’s piece of the internet pie. A pie piece that in actuality could be considered a binge: Internet Explorer is the browser of choice for 75% of web users.

And although Google has been backing Mozilla Firefox, the free open-source browser that has a 10% market share of the browser market, Google hopes to thwart Microsoft’s dominance. Google has motive as well, citing some of the new tweaks to the default settings on Internet Explorer in Version 8 will reduce the traffic to Google’s search engine, which has major ramifications on the ad-network Google has created.

 Ah well, all’s fair in love and browsers.

The problem?

You've seen it before, and you probably hate it as much as I do. You know... when the URL of the site you're  visiting becomes so long it doesn't even fit into the viewable space of the URL bar. Okay, you may not hate it as much as me, or maybe you never even noticed it at all. But I'll bet you'll notice it from now on.

The culprit?

Query strings. In English, that means everything after the "?" character in the URL. They originate from the previous page, telling the current page which actions to take, how to take them, and provide data values relevant to the current page. The most common example would be seeing all of the values you typed into an HTML form show up on the form's target page.

The answer?

Apache has a module called mod_rewrite that comes with most base installations of the web server. This wonderful little gem of a module lets you transform URLs anyway you'd like behind the scenes. For instance, you can take all query variables and turn them into folders, so

/index.php?page=article&article_id=1

would turn into something like:

/article/1

Rather than just being more aesthetically pleasing, the latter is much easier for your visitors to remember.

How?

Plop this into a .htaccess file in your site root (you'll need to tell Apache to AllowOverride for that directory). The result will be that all request variables (this example only does the first 4) will be sent into an array residing inside the $_REQUEST array. So on the PHP side, you would access the request variables by using $_REQUEST['args'][0], etc.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
	Options +FollowSymLinks
	RewriteEngine On
	# RewriteBase /

	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d [OR]
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l
	RewriteRule ^(.+) - [PT,L]
	RewriteRule ^.*(includes.*)$ $1 [PT,L]
 
	RewriteRule ^([^/]*)$ index.php?args[]=$1 [L,QSA]
	RewriteRule ^([^/]*)/([^/]*)/([^/]*)/([^/]*) index.php?args[]=$1&args[]=$2&args[]=$3&args[]=$4 [L,QSA]
	RewriteRule ^([^/]*)/([^/]*)/([^/]*) index.php?args[]=$1&args[]=$2&args[]=$3 [L,QSA]
	RewriteRule ^([^/]*)/([^/]*) index.php?args[]=$1&args[]=$2 [L,QSA]
</IfModule>

Mark Spencer is taking the telecom market by storm, one phone call at a time.

The 29-year old Auburn grad is the inventor of the market-shaking software program called Asterisk which allows people to make calls over the internet without going through the traditional phone switch. The program also has voice mail, caller ID, and teleconferencing capabilities. It was while he was in college that he got the idea for an open-source phone switch.

(Now, about the Auburn thing, he was kind of forced into it: both of his parents teach there, so we won't hold it against him!)

Open-source Asterisk lends itself to the recent trend of people not owning a land line in today's world of high-speed internet and low-cost, convenient cell phones.

Basically, it's pretty awesome.

Asterisk, named for the symbol in Unix that means "everything," poses quite a threat to traditional providers by cutting equipment costs by an %80 for businesses that use office switches.

According to Spencer, the company is seeking to get a hand in all areas of telecom equipment, not just personal use. "We have to figure out ways to get into everything: Carriers, businesses, equipment companies," says Spencer.

Corporations like Cisco should be quite worried: since its release in 1999, Asterisk has been downloaded 500,000 times and is being used by companies and even cities. Manchester, Conn., will begin using Asterisk to implement a 911 alert system, a move that will cost less than half of what it would have taken using traditional phone equipment.

Programs like Asterisk are just one step in the journey to a completely open network, which, in turn will force large corporations that are used to being the only option to improve their services and cut their prices in order to compete. Mark Spencer is just one among many trying to level the playing field for consumers and democratizing the technology industry.

Who would have thought an Auburn grad would make it possible to fight the proverbial man in such a big way?

Babies need their rest. Everyone knows that. Frankly, napping is really the only thing that newborns are somewhat decent at. Well, that and being incredibly cute. But what happens when their precious sleep is disturbed? They cry. And cry. And cry. For babies born premature, however, not getting enough quality sleep can lead to more than just a parent’s headache. It can actually slow their development.

This is a growing concern in neonatal intensive care units where there can often be too much noise and light for the infant to get real sleep.

A new monitoring system that measures audio and light levels in NCIUs called Sonicu is now being used in several hospitals in Indiana.

The latest version of this device streams sound and light data to a base computer which is connected to cone-shaped lights. When the room gets too loud, the lights go from green (quiet) to yellow (a bit noisy) to red (loud), to let parents and doctors know that they need to keep it down. It’s kind of like an electronic librarian, only just for babies.

Keeping it quiet is extremely important when it comes to letting the little ones sleep.

"The sounds ... come from all different directions and all different sources, and they're often associated with unpleasant sensations for the baby," Dr. Bob White, a neonatologist at South Bend's Memorial Hospital in Indianapolis said.

For preemies and even sick babies, noise just louder than a normal conversation can cause heart beats that are either too fast or too slow. Because they were born too soon, their ears are not developed enough to filter sound without the protection of the mother’s womb.

Sonicu’s inventor Chris Smith was inspired to make this device after watching how his own premature son was affected by harsh lighting and sounds.

"There's no good way for the nurses or doctors to walk up to a parent, tap them on the shoulder and say, 'You're being too loud,'" Smith said. "That's confrontational."

One thing is for sure, this new monitoring system is one way to keep the annoying adults-talking-as-babies thing down to a minimum. Or at least down to a decibel that is bearable for the rest of the world.