Monday, April 24, 2006

eLCOP at Intel

The last 2 days were exciting. I learned a lot of new technology such as Web 2.0 - Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, Web Feeds, and Aggregates. I also learned more about Knowledgement and the LMS Moodles...

For those of you who would like to know the difference between these terminologies,
here they are:

Blogs -A blog is a website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Most blogs are primarily textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media. **You are reading this text from my blog.

Wiki -A wiki is a type of website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring. The term wiki can also refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a website, or to certain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (an original wiki), WikiWikiWeb, and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.

Podcasts - A podcast is a multimedia file distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds, for playback on mobile devices and personal computers. The term, as originally coined by Ben Hammersley in an article in the Guardian on February 12, 2004 [1], was meant as a portmanteau of "broadcasting" and "iPod".[2] Like 'radio', it can mean both the content and the method of delivery; the latter may also be termed podcasting. The host or author of a podcast is often called a podcaster.

Though podcasters' web sites may also offer direct download or streaming of their content, a podcast is distinguished from other digital audio formats by its ability to be downloaded automatically using software capable of reading feed formats such as RSS or Atom.

RSS - RSS is a family of web feed formats. The initialism "RSS" is variously used to refer to the following standards:

Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)
RSS formats are specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats). RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an "RSS feed", "webfeed", "RSS stream", or "RSS channel".

Web Feeds - A web feed is a data format used for serving users frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation.

In the typical scenario of using web feeds, a content provider publishes a feed link on their site which end users can register with an aggregator program (also called a feed reader or a news reader) running on their own machines; doing this is usually as simple as dragging the link from the web browser to the aggregator. When instructed, the aggregator asks all the servers in its feed list if they have new content; if so, the aggregator either makes a note of the new content or downloads it. Aggregators can be scheduled to check for new content periodically.

The kinds of content delivered by a web feed are typically HTML (webpage content) or links to webpages and other kinds of digital media. Often when websites provide web feeds to notify users of content updates, they only include summaries in the web feed rather than the full content itself.

Aggregator - An aggregator or news aggregator or feed reader is client software that uses a web feed to retrieve syndicated web content such as weblogs, podcasts, vlogs, and mainstream mass media websites, or in the case of a search aggregator, a customized set of search results.

Descriptions are from "http://www.wikipedia.com"