Lesson 4. The collectives of cyberspace

I. Read the text and find websites for the following tasks.

To search for information on the web

To buy books and DVDs

To participate in political campaigns

To view and exchange video clips

To manage and share personal photos using tags

To buy and sell personal items in online auctions

To download music and movies, sometimes illegally

 

The Internet isn’t just about email or the Web anymore. Increasingly, people online are taking the power of the Internet back into their own hands. They’re posting opinions on online journals — weblogs, or blogs; they’re organizing political rallies on MoveOn.org; they’re trading songs on illegal file-sharing networks; they’re volunteering articles for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia; and they’re collaborating with other programmers around the world. Thanks to new technologies such as blog software, peer-to-peer networks, open-source software, and wikis, people are getting together to take collective actions like never before.

eBay, for instance, wouldn’t exist without the 61 million active members who list, sell, and buy millions of items a week. But less obvious is that the whole marketplace runs on the trust created by eBay’s unique feedback system, by which buyers and sellers rate each other on how well they carried out their half of each transaction.

Pioneer e-tailer Amason encourages all kinds of customer participation in the site — including books, CDs, DVDs and electronic goods. MySpace and Facebook are phenomena in social networking, attracting millions of unique visitors. Many are music fans, who can blog, email friends, upload photos, etc. There’s even a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents, called Second Life, where real companies have opened shops, and pop stars such as U2 have performed concerts.

Some sites are much more specialized, such as the photo-sharing site Flickr. There, people not only share photos but also take the time to attach tags to their pictures, which help everyone else find photos of, for example, Florence, Italy. Another successful site based on user-generated content is YouTube, which allows users to upload, view and share movie clips and music videos, as well as amateur videoblogs. Another example is the Google search engine. Its mathematical formulas surf the combined judgments of millions of people whose websites link to other sites.

Skype looks like software that lets you make free phone calls over the Internet — which it does. But the way it works is extremely clever. By using Skype, you’re automatically contributing some of your PC’s computing power and Internet connection to route other people’s calls.

It’s an extension of the peer-to-peer network software such as BitTorrent that allow you to swap songs — at your own risk if those songs are under copyright. BitTorrent is a protocol for transferring music, films, games and podcasts.

A podcast is an audio recording posted online. Podcasting derives from the words iPod and broadcasting. You can find podcasts about almost any topic —sports, music, politics, etc. They are distributed through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds which allow you to receive up-to-date information without having to check the site for updates. BitTorrent breaks the files into small pieces, known as chunks, and distributes them among a large number of users; when you download a torrent, you are also uploading it to another user.

Adapted from Business Week online

 


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