Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
book publisher, or a television or radio station. This has empowered people,
and is changing the relationship between commercial providers and consumers
as all such people can now be providers as well as consumers (Wikinomics:
Tapscott and Williams, 2006). A code word for this new use of the World Wide
Web is Web 2.0, which describes “this trend to enhance creativity, information
sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users” (http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Web_2.0, accessed on 6 May 2008). Of course, not all consumer-
generated content is accurate or worthwhile, but then neither is all commercial
content. The interactive web is in the process of significantly changing the
nature of several industries, among them news, music, television and politics.
These are all interesting areas for social science inquiry.
Most people today have some familiarity with website development, so we'll
be brief. There are many ways to go about it. From most basic to more
advanced, one can create the web documents by directly writing the HTML
(HyperText Markup Language) code with a text editor, and transferring the
document files to the web server document area. One can use web site editors
such as
Adobe Dreamweaver
or
Mozilla SeaMonkey
to create the web con-
tent in a graphical WYSIWYG fashion, meaning that
w
hat
y
ou
s
ee on the
screen
i
s
w
hat
y
ou
g
et when you print, and then transfer the file to the web
server. Or finally the web site can be set up with a Content Management
System (CMS), which is software on the web server that manages a whole web
site. Contributors to the web site log in to the system, and are given access to
some or all of the web site documents and, depending on permissions, are
allowed to create and or update documents on the server. Examples of Content
Management Systems are
Drupal
,
MediaWiki
and
Microsoft SharePoint
. All
the big social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are made possible
by some type of CMS. The essential pieces of a content management system
are an authentication system, a visual web document editor, and a storage
scheme, which hides the actual form and location of documents from the user,
and which is usually a relational database management system (RDBMS).
A relational database is of interest to a researcher when he or she wants
to retrieve content from a web site that he or she has access to. RDBMSs will
be described in more detail in Chapter 8.
Weblogs (blogs)
Aparticularformofuser-generatedwebsiteiscalledaweblogor,inshort,ablog.
Blogs are web sites where an author creates documents such as diaries or com-
mentary at (hopefully) regular intervals. Usually the author allows viewers of the
site to post comments about the document, or engage in some type of online dis-
cussion. Subjects range from politics (e.g. www.democratic-conversation.com or
