Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
users in March 2013. Another well-known social network is LinkedIn, which serves
people looking for professional contacts.
In 2012 the Dutch airline KLM launched a program that allows ticketed pas-
sengers who have uploaded information from their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles
to select seatmates based on the profiles provided by other passengers [16].
3.
We contribute content.
Popular apps allow people to upload videos, photos, podcasts, or other digital
content. Instagram, with more than 100 million subscribers, allows its users to
upload photos and videos and share them on social networking services, such as
Facebook.
A
wiki
is a Web site that allows multiple people to contribute and edit its con-
tent. The most famous wiki is
Wikipedia
, an online encyclopedia. Relying on the
submissions of hundreds of thousands of volunteers,
Wikipedia
has become by far
the largest encyclopedia in the world. More than forty languages are represented by
at least 100,000 articles, but by far the most popular language is English, with more
than 4.2 million articles written as of 2013. However, critics wonder about the qual-
ity of a reference work that allows anyone with a Web browser to contribute [17].
4.
We blog.
A
blog
(short for “Web log”) is a personal journal or diary kept on the Web. Used
as a verb, the word blog means to maintain such a journal. Blogs may contain plain
text, images, audio clips, or video clips [18].
Some commentators use the term
Web 2.0
to refer to a change in the way people
use the Web. Social networking services, wikis, Flickr, Reddit, and blogs illustrate
that many people are now using the Web not simply to download content but to
build communities and upload and share content they have created.
5.
We help each other avoid traffic jams.
People who load the Waze app onto their smartphones and allow this app to run
while they are driving automatically send their car's GPS coordinates to Waze, which
can compute the vehicle speeds and then send information about traffic congestion
back to Waze users [19]. Waze's app to collect information from commuters is an
example of
crowdsourcing
: an online method of getting information or ideas from
a large group of people.
6.
We learn.
In 2001 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched its OpenCourseWare
initiative. Since then, the quantity and quality of freely available classes posted
online has increased steadily. The potential for
Massive Open Online Courses
(MOOCs)
provided by edX, Coursera, and Udacity to disrupt traditional university
education is being widely debated [20].
7.
We explore our roots.
In the past, genealogists interested in accessing American immigration and census
records had the choice between mailing in their requests and waiting for them to be
processed or visiting the National Archives and examining the documents by hand.
