Information technology is one of the major components for globalisation, by reducing the global market place which can provides goods and services not to just local consumers but consumers from all over the world.  I can see that the distribution networks.  The future of the internet with the continued growing use could see globalisation expand beyond existing trading countries. Users of the internet are able to purchase over the internet from different locations around the world, however with barriers in place such as taxes on imports the prices still may not be competitive compared to purchasing items locally, such as books and DVDs.  The expansion of the internet purchases could see the barriers reduced or removed completely via free trade agreements where governments can identify that the competition from overseas suppliers is healthy for local businesses but moreso consumers purchasing cheaper products.

Already the workplace has seen PDFs emailed to customers instead of faxing documents, and the vision of the paperless office may one day be a reality, but probably not for another twenty to thirty years.  The reason that its not an absolute reality from my perspective is that asides from microfiche, there is not any hardware available that is non-destructible.  For example, cds and DVDs can still be scratched beyond reading and tapes can still be demagnetised.  The future of the paperless office relies significantly on reliable record keeping.  This is not part of internet communication directly, but indirectly it is a technological advancement that is a consequence of internet communication with stakeholders of a business.

With PlanetLab and Internet2 using great minds of universities and businesses, testing products around the world it is difficult to imagine anything that is not possible.  Maybe one day the transporter will be invented, where instead of communicating to family and friends, as well as conduct business meetings, will be in person and not via tele-link or voip.  That would be awesome!

When the TV show of your choice has been downloaded you can watch it using Azereus Vuze.  I haven’t accessed this site for a while since the high ratings season finished in the US therefore nothing decent to watch, such as Supernatural, Star Gate Atlantis or 30 Rock.  Since this was a site that I used regularly I selected it from my list of “favourites” and the site is gone!  I searched in Google and located a site which I could select a link, see below:

Unfortunately the hyper link above also failed.  I am now very curious to discover why this site no longer exists.  I searched in Google Boolean “tvRSS AND site AND shut down” and I received 2,810 results.  The first link was the following blog:

Source:  3 Alternatives to TVRSS.net’s RSS feeds, (June, 2009). OzSoapbox, http://ozsoapbox.com/personal/3-alternatives-to-tvrssnets-rss-feeds/, viewed August 26, 2009.

The site shut down for repairs about three months ago.  However, after a promise of being back in a week the fans, such as myself, are devastated and left hanging.  The blog OzSoapbox offers three alternative sites for fans of tvRSS.  This site shut down is significant for me, but the positive aspect is that I can devote more time to study rather than watching TV shows earlier than when they are scheduled to play on free to air TV.

I have since located another blog that discusses the site of tvRSS or EZTV as it is referred to by Haven Video, an online video community.  The following is an explanation of what has happened to EZTV.

“It therefore came as a surprise to many that the site went blank this June. At first rumors surfaced that the site was shut down through legal action, but in reality EZTV was busy transferring the servers to a new location, and working on implementing several new features while they were at it.  (Penna, Haven Video, August 4, 2009)

EZTV’s Novaking told TorrentFreak that downtime was initially caused by hardware problems, but they decided to take advantage of the situation and relocate all hardware to a new datacenter while implementing several new features.

“It was hard to work on the new features while the site was operational, as I don’t get enough hours in the day to maintain and code a new one,” Novaking told TorrentFreak, explaining why the downtime took longer than expected.”

I am pleased to have researched into why the shut down occurred, especially considering the possibility of anti-piracy laws putting sites like these at risk.

The article Peer-to-Peer for Academia by Andy Oram (2001) was an eye opener as my only experience with P2P as mentioned above has been tvRSS.  Using P2P for academia would have many benefits to researchers, as long as the articles available are monitored for academic credibility.  Copyright and plagiarism are always issues but whether this is available via P2P or university libraries if a user wants to exploit information they will generally find a way.  P2P is an excellent way to communicate information quickly as long as its popular.

References:

3 Alternatives to TVRSS.net’s RSS feeds, (June, 2009). OzSoapbox, http://ozsoapbox.com/personal/3-alternatives-to-tvrssnets-rss-feeds/, viewed August 26, 2009.

Penna, (August 2009).  Haven Video – Online Video Community, http://www.havenvideo.com/viewtopic.php?f=100&t=44777&start=0, viewed August 27, 2009.

Pesce, M., (January 22, 2007). Piracy is Good? Part One, http://lms.curtin.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_id=_2_1&url=%2fwebapps%2fblackboard%2fexecute%2flauncher%3ftype%3dCourse%26id%3d_18825_1%26url%3d, viewed August 26,  2009.

Source: The Free Dictionary

The metaphor “information ecology” raises an awareness that the internet is now part of everyday life for users in the developed world.  Losing connection to the internet is like losing an arm or a leg in the working world, using telephones or writing letters rather than emailing or chatting is becoming a rare event.  The metaphor does lead me to consider that we are taking the internet for granted.   Considering that ecologies are living relationships, this could refer to the internet being alive with users communications such as thoughts and data.  If we continue to take the internet for granted we could end up in a world where there is too much information, even for the internet and kapowee … just like a partner taken for granted … gone.

I have studied geography in the past so when I started reading about ecology I thought of rocks and sand, flora and fauna but then wondered about the application of this scientific term to the internet and communication.

The internet establishes a relationship between users in disseminating information.  It is a tool that is part of the information ecology and significantly a tool used in social interaction with users of the internet.

Communication is the act of passing information through linguistics and hardware/software.  The greater the communication skills the more readily available information is to the audience.  The connection and social relationships that are part of the information technology have several roles, such as the user who inputs the information and reader who disseminates the information and the internet is the tool for which the data is circulated.  A analogy could be passing a bowl of food around a group of people, the food and the consumers are part of the biological ecology of the human species and the food chain, however the bowl is just the tool.

Reference:

The Free Dictionary, (n.d.). http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ecology, viewed 20 August 2009.

http://www.um.dk/NR/rdonlyres/DEB070F5-664B-48E3-9174-AAA4A3325F1C/0/Rapport.pdf

I am aware that in choosing this source that it is not relevant to this unit.  I have completed the Conceptual Project and I had already chosen the sources in the previous Blogs because of a report I was doing a report on the subject matter of the EU and a specific country, and my choice was Denmark. 

The purpose of the website is the discussion of the competitive and comparative advantages local businesses or multi-national enterprises in Denmark will encounter with the enlargement of the European Union.  Therefore this is a reference / information guide to businesses in Denmark.

The author of the website is the Danish Trading Council, Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The content is informative and discusses the expansion of the European Union beyond developed member-states of the EU but to include former members of the Soviet Union.  The report presents a positive spin on the expansion and how it will benefit Denmark.  It could be argued that this document is biased towards the enlargement of the EU as there is rarely a negative aspect on this subject.  The content uses scenarios of sucessful marketing and exporting from Denmark to the EU, but little mention of failures in the past. 

When I typed in “Related: http://www.um.dk/NR/rdonlyres/DEB070F5-664B-48E3-9174-AAA4A3325F1C/0/Rapport.pdf” there were only 2 results, the original document and my Blog.  There is no coverage of this document when using Google.

The document dates back to 2002 which is not current, however historically trade discussions are not rapidly moving.  However, the global financial crisis has obviously been omitted, thus being a weakness of the document.

Recognition could be the telephone numbers on the Google result as well as the web address for the Danish Trading Council, Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as seen below:

There are no links to the URL http://www.um.dk/NR/rdonlyres/DEB070F5-664B-48E3-9174-AAA4A3325F1C/0/Rapport.pdf.  And I assume that since there are no links, it is very unlikely that the will be bookmarks to this page since it is an out of date government document about a European country that usually doesn’t present documents in English.  And finally using Google Scholar, there were no peer previews or citations on this document.

This document was primarily written to optomistically educate the local and multi-national businesses of Denmark in the enlargement of the EU and how this country will reap the rewards.  In a report about the impact of being a member of the EU and the advantages and disadvantages, this document will provide thoughtful insight into the advantages from the government’s perspective.

In reflection of the previous task and this task, I have realised that this document has significant relevance to the report that I am preparing for International Business.  My annotation above provides me with some discussion on the government’s encouragement and optimism of the membership with the EU when the Danish population are cynical of the Trading Bloc (this is another discussion altogether which I have used in my report).

Reference:

Trade Council of Denmark, (May 2002). The Challenge of the EU Environment, http://www.um.dk/NR/rdonlyres/DEB070F5-664B-48E3-9174-AAA4A3325F1C/0/Rapport.pdf, viewed August 27, 2009.

The URL is http://ec.europa.eu/research/agriculture/scar/pdf/cwg/ict_en.pdf.

The author of the research is:

and finally for the blurb, I have taken a snap shot again using !Quick Screen Capture of the rationale for this study.

The above research will assist in argument that Denmark needs to be a member-state of the EU to remain competitive with other member-states in agriculture and technology.  The research also discusses the benefits of technology to member-states in improving their competitive advantage in agriculture whilst maintaining efficiency and safety.

The second result from my Google Boolean search that I have selected is “The Challenge of the EU Environment”, http://www.um.dk/NR/rdonlyres/DEB070F5-664B-48E3-9174-AAA4A3325F1C/0/Rapport.pdf. 

The cover of the PDF is a snapshot taken using !Quick Screen Capture.  I love this software!

The author of the research is the Trade Council of Denmark, therefore a government document, and below is a Forward by the Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Per Stig Moller.

The third source I could use for my report is the Open Europe – Press Summary Advice, specifically the press summary “Northern Rock faces huge job losses to comply with EU competition rules” at http://www.openeurope.org.uk/media-centre/summary.aspx?id=552 which has a link to the Sunday Times, the Times and the Guardian newspapers’ websites.  This site is a media centre for the United Kingdom.

Below is the press summary snapshot taken by !Quick Screen Shot:

The press summary is an argument against being a member-state of the EU with the cost-cutting of Northern Rock and that the Danish banks have reported Northern Rock to the EU for non-competitive behaviour.  The European Commission are the regulators of the EU and monitor and control statutory and competitive behaviour of businesses within the EU.  Thus Denmark has lost its national sovereignty to deal with the problems.

I used !Quick Screen Shot because it was able to take almost full page snap shots of the screens.

I would like to finish this post off by telling you that when I did my latest Google Boolean search for “Danish AND Competitive Advantage AND European Union”, my Blog came up in the first page.  I also noted quite a few Blogs that were anti-membership with the EU, with one Blog having a subject in the URL of complaints.

References:

Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Agricultural Engineering, (May 2009).  Danish proposal for a SCAR Collaborative Working Group on “ICT and robot technology in agriculture and related industries”.  http://ec.europa.eu/research/agriculture/scar/pdf/cwg/ict_en.pdf, viewed August 27, 2009.

Northern Rock faces huge job losses to comply with the EU, (March, 2008). Open Europe – Press Summary Advice, http://www.openeurope.org.uk/media-centre/summary.aspx?id=552, viewed August 27, 2009.

Trade Council of Denmark, (May 2002). The Challenge of the EU Environment, http://www.um.dk/NR/rdonlyres/DEB070F5-664B-48E3-9174-AAA4A3325F1C/0/Rapport.pdf, viewed August 27, 2009.

The words that I will use to start a search in Google will be “Danish Competitive Advantage European Union”, I have chosen these words in unison with a report that I am finalising for International Business.  The results are:

I received 40,200 hits from this search and the first result is the following:

[PDF]Address by Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation …

 Using Copernic I have commenced a search for “Danish Competitive Advantage European Union” with 14 engines enabled.  I got 42 hits from this search.  The first result was the following:

 

 Danish Unix User Group Files Complaint With EU Commission Against …

 And below are the first five hits from the Copernic search:

Boolean Search

Using “Danish Competitive Advantage European Union” in a Boolean search, I suspect the most number of hits will come from using the OR logic operator.  OR will provide many results because it will hit for sites that contact Danish OR Competitive Advantage OR European Union.  However, the search I need is Danish AND Competitive Advantage AND European Union for the assignment I am currently undertaking in International Business.  The following snapshot shows the first result from the Google Boolean research:

The first hit represents scholarly articles rather than the Minister’s speech in the previous generic search using Google. The articles listed in the above result, will be useful to completing my International Business report on the advantages and disadvantages  Denmark will encounter as a member of the Trading Bloc the European Union.

In most instances when I am using a search engine for university I do not use Google or Yahoo, I use Business Source Premier or ProQuest because the sources are reliable and generally coordinators and lecturers prefer a minimum number of academic references in essays or reports.

Adobe’s PDF Reader:

The program Adobe’s PDF (portable document format) reader is software that I use both at home and at work on Windows XP (work) and Vista (home).  In fact it is difficult to imagine not having Adobe available.  In the workplace the common term when being asked to send a document via email, is to “PDF” it.  Adobe created in 1993 is now used as commonly as Microsoft Word and Excel. 

The following information from the Adobe website http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/adobepdf.html emphasises the advantages of using Adobe and PDFs, such as being available on multiple platforms. 

“Liberating information and the flow of ideas

Now an open standard— PDF is now a formal open standard known as ISO 32000. Maintained by the International Organization for Standardization, ISO 32000 will continue to be developed with the objective of protecting the integrity and longevity of PDF, providing an open standard for the more than one billion PDF files in existence today.

Multiplatform— PDF files are viewable and printable on virtually any platform — Mac OS, Microsoft® Windows®, UNIX®, and many mobile platforms.

Extensible— More than 1,800 vendors worldwide offer PDF-based solutions including creation, plug-in, consulting, training, and support tools.

Trusted and reliable— More than 250 million PDF documents on the web today, along with countless PDF files in governments and businesses around the world, serve as evidence of the number of organizations that rely on PDF to capture information.

Rich in file integrity — PDF files look like original documents and preserve source file information — text, drawings, video, 3D, maps, full-color graphics, photos, and even business logic — regardless of the application used to create them.

More secure— Digitally sign or password-protect PDF documents created with Adobe® Acrobat® or Adobe LiveCycle® software.

Searchable— Leverage text-search features in documents and metadata.

Accessible— PDF documents work with assistive technology to help make information accessible to people with disabilities.” (Adobe, n.d.)

Technology used in the workplace such as photocopiers, or more common multi-function devices use Adobe in the scanning function.  The PDF documents created using Adobe scanning have moved beyond black and white to colour which presents professional documents for professional businesses.  It could be argued that the availability of PDFs has added value to the workplace because dodgy faxes have been replaced with clear documents which improves service to customers.  Also when researching journals from University libraries sites such as Business Source Premier and ProQuest , PDFs are available in most instances as well as HTML downloads.

Flash/Shockwave Players:

Upon testing whether my computer had flash player available, I selected the link on the Module it seems that I didn’t have this software.  I do have it at work but not at home.  After downloading the software I found in the “Customer Showcase Finder” at the following webpage http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/showcase/index.cfm?event=finder&productid=342063&loc=en_us that many businesses use flash player such as CCTV used Adobe Flash Player for the Beijing Olympics and Holden show casing its Holden Cruze.

Reference:  Customer Showcase Finder, (n.d.) http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/showcase/index.cfm?event=finder&productid=342063&loc=en_us, viewed August 23, 2009.

I already have Windows Media Player, Real One and Apple Quicktime downloaded on all machines, and I use all three software in different scenarios.  Listening to music at work I use Windows Media Player, Real One gives me twice daily updates of music and videos that I might be interested in and Apple Quicktime for iTunes.

Search Manager / Combiners

I downloaded Copernic Meta for PC at work and found the software intrusive.  There were a few times when I did need to use the search manager and there was limited success in my searches, in fact one successful search however I believe the reason why might be the server at work is old as well as my terminal is about four years old.  Copernic was slow generally on my machine, but I did find it useful to locate a file that had been lost on my computer.

Since the above entry I have downloaded Copernic Agency Basic as advised by one of the NET11 students on the discussion board.  I tested it yesterday at work and it failed to work at all – I searched my work’s name “Heathley Limited” and got nil hits.  I discovered that if you run this software via a server then you need the correct proxy address.  It works now.

I decided to do a search using Copernic and Google for my work name again “Heathley Limited” and got only 41 hits using Copernic but 126 hits using Google with the Boolean parameter “AND”.   I appreciate the most relevant percentage bar as being useful and I like the slogan of “be free, stay connected” where you can stay connected to the internet search engines and choose as many engines as you like and not be restricted to searching using one at a time.

I could foresee using this in the future for study.

Bookmark Manager

I have downloaded the Bookmark Buddy for Windows and I can see this is a nice little application that I will use often, where I don’t have to open the internet to find a favourite or necessary website.  An issue I have when I need to access sites for work, my home page is www.smh.com.au(Sydney Morning Herald) and I sometimes can get distracted reading news articles rather than going to the bank websites for latest balances, or ASIC as well as ATO websites for statutory information.  This software is going to assist my working efficiency with both my job and university studies with less distractions.

Offline Browser / Copier (log continued Monday 17 August 2009):

I was unable to download either Pagesucker or Webcopier at home.  My laptop stopped downloading any of the required software after the installation of Bookmark Buddy.

I have now downloaded Webcopier Pro 5.1 and decided to use download the website www.news.com.au.  After 3 minutes I realised this was an ambitious download and now I’m a little concerned regarding memory capacity on my machine at work.  The download has so far taken up 11.8 MB, which worried me because of the size, plus it was taking a lot of time compared to the amount of time it takes for me to usually read this webpage.

For future uses I don’t know if this will be relevant, maybe with university studies because information is rarely updated on a daily basis in research.  However, for work purposes this is not up-to-date information that I require in my work.  My other point about the irrelevance of the Webcopier is “why bother?”.  Accessing the internet at work and home is conducted via contracts with AAPT and Telstra respectively.  The download capacity built into these contracts is in excess of what I use and that includes the staff at work.  Personally I do not see the use of copying a web page and reading it offline unless an internet user has a ceiling of download use, and if this user is an advanced internet user one would assume that this person would have a larger download capacity compared to the average user. 

Addendum:  since the above entry I have had a discussion with an employee of Epic Private Journeys, a boutique travel agency that rents an office from my work.  The travel agent Kirsty Walia often needs access to websites whilst travelling overseas but this can often be required in locations that do not have broadband readily available, such as Africa and off-the-beaten-track destinations.  Kirsty designs the brochures for Epic and is unable to spend additional time on this whilst taking tours.  I advised her on the benefits of Webcopier and Pagesucker for her line of work.  Kirsty is now going to research these products which could add significant value to her work.

There was a discussion on the NET11 Discussion Board about the copyright implications of using Pagesucker and Webcopier and I believe it was Matthew Zecks who commented that there are copyright issues to begin with no matter where you go or what you do on the internet.  Similar to the Napster case, it could be that Webcopier or Pagesucker have a responsibility to know what their users are doing with the pages, however once it’s offline, does it then become the sole responsibility of the user who downloaded the page?  Well if I read the Napster judgment correctly, it is both the provider and the user who are responsible.  However, if you really wanted a screen shot or a page from the internet, you could always copy and paste, or use quick screen capture.I can see that Webcopier may be useful when researching in Business Source Premier which can be very slow.  But I wanted some icons to use such as weather icons and maps of Australia, this is the program I would use.  See below for an example. 

 source: www.news.com.au

Reference:  Adobe and PDF, (n.d.). http://www.adobe.com/products/
acrobat/adobepdf.html, viewed August 23, 2009.

In reading about blogs I was surprised to discover that the term “troll” was not a middle-earth creature from Lord of the Rings (am I meant to trademark here?) but referred to readers of blogs that lurk in the background of blogs, and when they do make comments they are destructive to the writer and the community.  Blogs are a public domain where readers and writers have freedom to peruse whatever they choose however negative comments do not create a welcoming environment.  It is difficult to comprehend the purpose of a troll, ie what is their reasoning for their comments.

In my search for blogs I googled “blog” and found many hits as you could imagine.  I found the “Top 100 Australian Blogs Index”  http://blogpond.com.au/top-100-australian-blogs-index/ where the index is titled “Dipping Into The Blogpond”.  It is slightly outdated, the last update was on 13 April 2009.  The blogs range from information for bloggers to favourite television shows, as well as car blogs.  I also found the following blog http://quityourdayjob.com.au which is called “Quit Your Day Job”.  I liked this blog, it was creative and my partner was even reading over my shoulder – the animation cells in the blog were based on comics but the bloggers’ interpretations of the cartoons.  There were also discussions on science fiction and some reality shows.

The first blog in the top 100 index was “Problogger” which discussed the decline of blogging traffic in recent times (as at April 2009). Read the article here.  The article provides many reasons on why blogs may have declining traffic to current topical interests to seasonal traffic – the blogger also offers some advice on how to increase your blog traffic such an analysing what readers are looking for in blogs. 

Blogs record personal thoughts on current topics to providing advice on how to fix your car, or cook dinner.  Since I have a passion for cult television and movies, plus Hollywood gossip my favourite blogs centre around these issues.  TMZ.com has been a regular blog for me since 2005.  I enjoy reading blogs as long as the views are not racist or misogynistic, which with the freedom given to bloggers can and does occur.

Setting up this blog, my first blog, has made me appreciate using Word or Excel.  I am still learning how to adjust fonts without going into the HTML tab to code the font I would like to use.

I haven’t written a personal journal or diary in over 20 years, so I do find this an excellent opportunity to write what is on my mind, but I am not sure readers will find it that interesting.

Below are the rules that I think are very important as a user of the Internet:

1.  Hypertext links still connect – one of my pet peeves is when I click a link and the server is redirected to a page advising that the link to the page I actually wanted no longer exists.

2.  Don’t fill up the page with big ads and graphics – limit the amount of advertising on a web page because the graphics uploading take a tremendous amount of time and can end up crashing.  This happens to me all the time with pages such as www.news.com.au and www.smh.com.au.

3.  Poor grammar – there is no excuse for poor grammar or using the text messaging or chat abbreviations in a web page.  You might think it looks cool and modern but you will probably look like a pretentious “wannabe” to the reader.

4.  “Back” works – when I hit “back” or press the backspace button I expect to return to the previous web page.

5.  Intellectual Property – copyright, trademarks etc.  Make sure that when you establish your web page that you are using IP owned by another entity, because if you are you are to be infringing either copyright or trademark laws.  If you have no other choice, then seek from the owner to use the IP.

I believe that also knowing the audience of the Internet and how the audience reads web pages will help exponentially designers who create web pages that will be fun or useful to visit and theu be successful.

I am proud, I must say … it was tedious hard work, but I do feel pleased that I managed to do this.  Not just the creation of my first web page, but also working out how to upload the images into this Blog.  That was a feat in itself.  Thank you for Scott Dimitri in NET11 making the suggestion to download a free program called iQuick Screen Capture, it worked a treat.  Now back to task questions ….

I am extremelyy overwhelmed at how tedious web page design is considering that there seems to be lots of talk of Internet usage becoming easier and easier every day but the design behind it is quite difficult.  Maybe difficult is not the correct word to use, but it was so easy to make a mistake and tracing it back to the syntax error was not simple.

Blogging is simpler since someone else has written the program behind the choices I make in formatting, plus dealing in Notebook is not like working with word.  It reminded me of working on an old fashioned type writer when carriage returns where used.  I had to hit enter so I could read what I had written in my very small web page.

I was excited to write my first web page, but I don’t know if I will ever have the time  to sit down and write a formal web page on a topic of choice unless asked by work or uni.  In other words I do feel a sense of achievement, it is the first time I have done this, it is like programming but I do not know if I will revisit creating a web page.  However, never say never.