ldsWebguy

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:

• The Web will become a platform.
• The Web will harness collective intelligence—not just the data in a system, but also the input from the users, including demographics, buying habits, etc.
• End of the software release cycle. No need to download software (in releases); it is used from the servers over the Web.
• Richer user experiences.

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:

• The trend toward Widespread broadband connectivity. (Although this is a trend, today half the users of Church Web sites in the USA access by high speed and the other half by dial-up. Outside the USA, high-speed users are more like 1-25%.)
• Open standards will make connectivity between services more reliable and simpler to build.
• Lightweight development environments will make development easier and less expensive. Movement from complex languages like J2EE and .NET to easier environments such as AJAX, HTML, CSS, RSS, and blogs. Businesses and users demand simpler tools and lower costs.
• Lower investment costs. Open standards and lightweight development environments mean lower costs.
• Wider innovation opportunities. The lower-skill requirements and reduced costs open the door to innovation as more people can be involved. This puts development and publishing in the hands of lower-skilled people.
• Change in emphasis. Web 1.0 focused on research and academics. Web 2.0 will continue to focus on business and improving quality of life.
• Better browsers. Support for new formats, such as RSS, and faster graphics processors will enrich the user experience.
• Device proliferation. Convergence of the capabilities of mobile phones and PDAs.
• Greater awareness of challenges. Realization of the need for redundancy and resilience.
• Lessons from history. The maturity of the developing commercial Web has refined content and services.

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:

• Tuesday: The Official Prophet Joseph Smith Web Site
• Wednesday: Tips and Tools for Using LDS.org for Teaching and Learning
• Thursday: Hard-to-Find Treasures on LDS.org and Mormon.org
• Friday: The Future and Vision of the Church on the Internet

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.