Please describe the three drawbacks of email.
- First, it is not as formal as a printed letter, so some tasks for which it is inappropriate (like firing someone)
- Second, email is not as private as a letter in an envelope. Your message may travel through several computers where others might have access to it.
- Third, email comes with the ever-present nuisance called spam. Spam, the cyber equivalent of junk mail.
- ??Fourth, there is the problem of info overload. In businesses, memos that used to go to small group of ppl are now sent to everybody.
Please describe the term WiMax.
WiMax, a technology that will bring wireless Internet access to entire metropolitan areas. Works a lot like WiFi, but instead of a short range (200ft or so), WiMax permits access across a range of approx. 10 miles.
Please describe two examples of click fraud.
Click fraud, “pay per click”. Click fraud can work in two way
• The simplest is for a person to generate a lot of false clicks on a competitor’s link.
o Ex. Bob & Barb sells toothbrushes. Barb pays Google $1 every time someone clicks her sponsored links on a Google search. Bob buys a cheap online robot program that repeatedly clicks on Barb’s link, costing her $1 each time. Pretty soon, Barb is paying a big chunk of her budget for fraudulent clicks. (Bob destroys Barb)
• Second way, more complicated, less dishonest
o Ex. Suppose Barb hires Google to place a sponsored link to her toothbrush site on relevant sites throughout the Web. She pays google $1 for every click. Google passes 50cents of this fee on to the Web page publisher (the one hosting Barb’s link). Now suppose Bob starts a bogus Web site, and Google places Barb’s sponsored link on Bob’s blog. Bob next uses his online ‘bot program to generate thousands of clicks on Barb’s link on his Web site, thus defrauding Barb out of a lot of money.
Please list and describe the three ways to make profit over the Internet.
• First, create a site with content so compelling that people will pay to see it (i.e Wall Street Journal, New York Times, etc. pay subscription fee, “pay for content material”)
• Second, sell merchandise or services online.
• Third, the site can sell advertising.
o Three advertising categories
Paid search ads
Display ads
Classified ads
Please describe the legitimate (white hat) and illegitimate (black hat) ways that websites can help improve their rankings on engines.
SEOs (search engine optimizers)- know search engines algorithms. The number of times search terms turn up in the content of the site, whether the search terms match the key words that describe the site, number of links to the site, and the “credibility” of those linking sites.
Armed with this knowledge, SEOs redesign the site using “white hat” or legitimate methods.
• Making everything on a page visible to the search engine
o Ex. making product listings moved from unsearched database to the site itself.
• Another technique is participating in a Web ring with other high-quality sites, thus increasing the number of links to the site.
• Third, making sure that each page has plenty of text that includes relevant terms
“Black-hat” techniques, unethical methods
• Might include “cloaking”, creating two versions of a site, one that people see and a bogus site that is only visible only to search engines that includes popular search terms, such as “sex”.
• Another is using text containing popular search terms, such as “sex”, that users can’t see (background and foreground colors the same) but that are visible to spider bots.
• Another is “link farming” using software that automatically generates a huge number of pages with links back to the original site.
• There are even illegal software programs that can forcibly inject links into sites that search engines score as more credible.
Please list and describe the four effects of social media.
- First, traditional media have incorportated social media into their efforts to attract and hold an audience.
- Second, social media have changed the way we think about entertainment. Many ppl see social media sites to be a form of entertainment.
- Third, in addition to entertainment, social media have become an indispensible part of news gathering.
- Social media have become commercialized. Every big marketing campaign now has some social media component.
Please list and describe the three implications of the lack of ‘gatekeeper’ on the Internet.
Traditional mass media have a number of gatekeepers. Internet, none.
• First, the risk of overloading the system with unwanted, trivial, worthless, or inconsequential messages is increased. (do we really need 130 million blogs?)
• Second, gatekeepers also function as evaluators of information. Gatekeepers are not infallible. Info comes without guarantee. At your own risk.
• Having no gatekeepers means having no censorship.
What are the two justifications that advertisers provide when queried about collecting user data over the Internet?
- First, they argue that advertising is critical to keeping the Web vibrant. “The great majority of….provide consumers free of charge”
- Second, argue the collection of user data helps advertisers better serve consumers.
How many days need to pass before law enforcement no longer needs a warrant to search through your email. Please provide an explanation for this rule. (pg. 130)
Under Title II of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, if an unopened email has been in storage for 180 days or less, the government must obtain a search warrant to access it.
What are the four broad principles outlined in the Federal Trade Commission’s self-regulatory standards. (pg. 134)
- Transparency and control: companies should provide “meaningful disclosures” about the practice and choice about whether to allow it.
- Security and data retention: companies should provide reasonable data security measures and should retain data “only as long as necessary for legitimate business or law enforcement needs”
- Material changes: before a co. uses data in a manner that is “materially different” from promises made when the company collected the data, it should obtain “affirmative express consent” from the consumer
- Sensitive data: before using data about children, health or finances, companies should obtain affirmative express content.
What is peer production? How are the concepts centralization/decentralization related to peer production?
Peer production characterizes a subset of commons-based production practices. It refers to production systems that depend on individual action that is self-selected and decentralized, rather than hierarchically assigned.
“Centralization” is a particular response to the problem of how to make the behavior of many individual agents cohere into an effective pattern or achieve an effective result. Its primary attribute is the separation of the locus of opportunities for action from the authority to choose the action that the agent will undertake.
The most pervasive mode of “decentralization,” however, is the ideal market. Each individual agent acts according to his or her will. Coherence and efficacy emerge because individuals Signal their wishes, and plan their behavior not in cooperation with others, but by coordinating, understanding the will of others and expressing their own through the price system.
What are the three functions involved in the process of information production and exchange in an instance of peer production?
- First, there is an initial utterance of a humanely meaningful statement
- There is a separate function of mapping the initial utterances on a knowledge map. In particular, an utterance must be understood as “relevant” in some sense and “credible”.
- There is the function of distribution, or how one takes an utterance produced by one person and distributes it to other people who find it credible and relevant.
What are the three core characteristics that Wikipedia combine? (pg.5)
- First, it uses a collaborative authorship tool, Wiki. This platform enables anyone, including anonymous passerby, to edit almost any page in the entire project. Stores all versions, makes changes easily visible, and enables anyone to revert a document to any prior version as well as to add changes, small and large.
- It is a self-conscious effort at creating an encyclopedia—governed first and formost by a collective informal undertaking to strive for a neutral point of view, within the limits of substantial self-awareness as to the difficulties of such an enterprise.
- All the content generated by this collaboration is released under the GNU Free Documentation License.
What did a study find about the content of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica?
The journal Nature compared 42 science articles from Wiki to the gold standard of the Encyclopedia Britannica and concluded that the difference in accuracy was not particularly great. McHenry (an author at Encyclopedia Britannica) criticized Wiki as “The Faith-Based Encyclopedia”. Wiki made corrections, and McHenry found himself blessing Wiki in the long term, a robust model of reasonable reliable info.
How often do system operators and server hosts of Wikipedia use their power to block users who are systematically disrupting the website? What is the reason given for their behavior?
Wales — the system operators and server host — have the practical power to block users who are systematically disruption, this power seems to be used rarely. The project relies instead on social norms to secure the dedication of project participants to objective writing.
Wiki participants commonly follow, and enforace, a few basic policies that seem essential to keeping the project running smoothly and productively.
• Because huge variety of particpants, Wiki is committed to making its articles as unbiased as possible.
• Aim in not to write articles from a single objective point of view, to fairly and sympathetically present all views on an issue.
