Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Google.com is very widely and extensively used for fi nding things on the
Internet. There is a saying that if Google cannot fi nd something most likely it
does not exist on the Internet. In addition to Google for search, there is
another social computing tool very widely adopted and extensively used on
the World Wide Web.
Weblogs, commonly referred to as “blogs,” are burgeoning across the
Internet as a means to improve social interactions, according to META Group
( www.metagroup.com ) articles published in recent years. “ Blogging ” became
a pervasive means for improved information/expertise sharing, collaboration,
and community building. Focusing on the connections of people to teams,
communities, process, and information in evolving workplaces became a vital
discipline for adaptive organizations trying to improve operational effective-
ness and effi ciency not only to reduce the cost for higher profi t but also to
drive competitive advantage.
Organizations have launched various corporate initiatives under the name
“business transformation” to fully assess the implications of the Web and to
capitalize on the value of the World Wide Web and the Internet. Many orga-
nizations are investing heavily on development of Web portals to provide a
consolidated access point for data and tools and the backend content manage-
ment for improved quality and integrity of corporate data as an attempt to
establish a technology foundation for “social computing,” a frequently cited
buzz word these days in addition to SOA, or service-oriented architecture.
For years, organizations have deployed other tools such as e-mail, instant
messaging, and discussion forums under various names such as blogs and wikis.
Those tools are being integrated along with advanced search and cognitive
user interfaces as the enablers of social computing. Blogs in particular have
become incredibly popular in areas of social discourse and community build-
ing as well as many Internet portal, news, sports, entertainment, and technol-
ogy sites as a means of disseminating information, generating commentary,
and engaging a self-selecting audience. Blogs are used to post a diary or journal
metaphor on the Web to convey information in conversational dialog. A
simpler form of blogs, called twitter, is gaining its penetration. In twitter short
messages are used for the same purpose, while narrative sentences are used
in blogs.
As Google has become a new word for fi nding information on the Internet,
blog has become a new word for exchanging information over the Internet.
The act of posting ideas, opinions, or news on the Web is referred to as “blog-
ging.” While people can read blogs just as they do pages found on other web-
sites, one capability that makes them different is that they can be subscribed
to via a syndication technology called RSS, which stands for really simple
syndication or rich site summary [5].
Blogs enable us to improve information sharing, community building, and
collaboration and thus is helping us to socialize in a “virtual space”, that is,
over the network, although the quality of information in terms of currency,
accuracy, and reliability is in serious question because anyone can blog any-
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