It can be found by following the link on the right hand side of the page.

Also it can be found by following this link http://monorailcat.wordpress.com/presentation/

It can be found on the right side of the page, under the pages section.

Or by following this link monorailcat.wordpress.com/essay

Basically people can subscribe to their favourite sites (let’s take BBC news website as an example) and instead of having to manually check for breaking news headlines, they can instead look at the RSS feed and it’ll have the most recent news from the site on there. It might not be the full content, or it might actually be the full story, but either way people can get the news where ever they are.

RSS does not just have to be news sites though, it can be blogs, or anything in which the RSS symbol is (the symbol is this big orange sign, although it is a lot smaller on sites..)

To get these RSS updates you will need an RSS reader. One such RSS reader is called ‘Feed Demon’ which can be downloaded for free, then you subscribe and get your updates on this.
You can also get RSS updates on phones. The phone I currently have came with a built in RSS reader, and so I could access my RSS feeds on the go if I wanted to.
Also iGoogle makes use of RSS feeds in some of its applications, such as the football and BBC news ones on my iGoogle (shown below in the link)
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/4411/igooiq2.jpg

Now I can see how RSS would be useful for those people in industry, but for me I’m not really interested at the moment. Although it is good to see headlines on my google page, I just end up going onto the site anyway so I would go there myself. And I only ever used the RSS on my phone to check it out, just because I was curious. And I did download feed demon, but I didn’t find it any help, and I much prefer to look things up myself that have things like that sent, because you might not be able to rely on it all of the time, and when I go on a web site I like to have a good look around, so although the RSS could be handy, I currently have no real use for it.

But saying that I can see that RSS has a big future, and a big place in industry.

Although the mainstream popular items will sell, people are always after those items that are less well known, and though they will sell less of one item, they will sell loads of different items.

This is the long tail. The lenght is from the amount of different niches there is, and it is thin like a tail as there is not many of a particular niche sold.

This is one tail that certainly does not wag..

In the above picture the blue section would be the popular market, with high sales in few catergories. And the yellow section (the ‘tail’) is the less popular market, but with so many niches available it goes on and on.

The two sections can roughly equate to be equal to one another, showing that if the niche market has plenty of attention payed to it like the mainstream does, then there is a big margin for profit making.

The above image is a gif from last.fm from my profile, which shows the top ten artists I have listened to on my iTunes on my laptop.

I downloaded a program which takes the information from iTunes and passes it onto last.fm so they can create the list that is above.

But it doesn’t take into account other programs used so it is not 100% accurate, but it is for the music I have listened to on iTunes .

The above image is one of the many features of last.fm. You can do similar sort of things with recently listened to tracks, what tracks you have listened to the most, and what albums you have listened to the most.

Last.fm also will recommend music to you, by taking the artist and genres of music you listen to, and give you information on bands of the same type, and who other people who listen to similar bands listen to.

You can also download some free full length tracks, and listen to music with the radio station feature.

It can greatly enhance your musical experience by widening you listening range. I found the site quite helpful in finding me new bands. And also by using the banner to show people what you are listening to, they might also be able to recommend music to you.

The current battle for yahoo is all up in the air at the moment, with several interested parties interested and several different figures all up in the air.

At first it seemed simple, with Microsoft launching a bid, it seemed that a figure needed to be agreed and that would be that. But Yahoo rejected the movement and then there was interest from Google, and if they owned Yahoo then they would own virtually all the market in online searching and advertising. And that is the reason Microsoft wanted in on Yahoo, to compete with Google.

Now Rupert Murdoch, the multi-billionaire and the major shareholder, chairman and the managing director of News Corporation (News Corp), has showed interest, making Microsoft think about things.

If News Corp was to move for Yahoo, then Microsoft may move for other web 2.0 companies. As News Corp currently has MySpace down as one of its assets, and with Microsoft recently buying a stake in a rival of MySpace, Facebook, it may leave Yahoo and concentrate on being the king of another area of the Internet, and leave search and advertising to Google and the possible News Corp owned Yahoo. 

There has also been talk of merging myspace and yahoo to create a force, but the problem is that myspace is in a contract with Google, signed by Rupert Murdoch.

There are many possible endings to how it could all turn out, with no way to know how it’ll end.

But one thing is for certain, whatever does happen may change the shift of the power in the virtual world 

Or are you?

In this post I’m going to quickly review several of these applications, to see if they are worthwhile adding to your profile, and what they actually do. But before that I’ll put my view of the applications as a whole across.

I hate them. Every time I log onto my facebook account I look on the right hand side of the screen to see I have several new applications. I click on them to see what they are, and they seem like pointless things, so I ignore the vast majority of them and only add ones which could interest me, like quizzes or something along those lines. The rest are dismissed, and that should be the end of it, but no, some people send you the application again.. How can they not take the hint, if I didn’t add it the first time why would I add it the second time? Leave me alone with your rubbish applications!

Anyway back to the quizzes..

So I add a quiz I like the look of, and take the quiz, and click to get my result, to see how kinky, insane or which comic book character I am (or whatever else quiz I am taking) and then instead of giving me the result, it askes me to invite about 20 friends to see my result (which I think is why I get loads of invites to do quizzes..) and I know this is clever, as most people would get so far and think “oh i want to know my result, i’ll add all these people to it” but I’m not one of those people, the result of that quiz wuld not change my life in anyway, I’m not hanging off their every word of the quiz, I’m just bored and want a laugh.. But the stupid creator is trying to spread their work.. I wouldn’t mind as long as they asked to add friends at the beginning, because then we stop wasting peoples time with your stupid application.And most the applications you use once then you wonder why it’s even there.. I mean I only joined facebook so I could play poker against one of my friends, I didn’t even join to communicate with people, thats just a side effect of me joining.

/rant (sorry about that..) 

 These sort of images are the usual for facebook users..

The first application I will be reviewing is the “More Cowbell” application.Now this application is completely and utterly useless. But I love it.It’s based on a sketch from the American show ‘Saturday Night Live’ where the actors (including hollywood starw Will Ferrell and Christopher Walken) are in a recording studio, where a band are recording a track, and one of the members is annoying the rest of the band with his cowbell playing skills. But to the dismay of the band the record producer loves it, and requests ‘more cowbell’. The application is basically a button asking people to click it to give the person ‘more cowbell’ and when clicked it plays a sound clip from the sketch.

Completely useless, but as a fan of the sketch I love it, but it’s not for anyone who doesn’t know the show or sketch.

The next application I will review is one called Likeness. Likeness (and another version, Likeness Unrated) is an application which has several quizzes on, which you take, then it matches your score to that for your friends. You select a topic such as “Best ways to spend a friday night” and it gives you about ten answers, and you have to click them and put them in order from best to worst. It then calculates your score, and matches you against friends who have already taken that quiz.

There is no real point to this application (well, I haven’t found an application yet that has any real use in life..) but its a bit of fun, it doesnt require you to add people, its quick, simple, and the unrated version is probably better than the normal one, just for the questions and answers you get. Plenty of interaction and matching in this application. 

The next application is Hatching Eggs. Basically you give one of your friends an egg, and after several days it will hatch.. Erm thanks.. but puppys dont actually come out of eggs do they..?

This application is pretty pointless, theres no interaction and it just takes up space on your page..

The next application is What superhero are you? (Mainly because I’m a comic book geek..) This is just a simple quiz, with limited answers, using radio buttons for selecting answers, then it calculates who you are..

You are

“Spiderman”!

You are a crossbreed of hero and nerd. Although a fine superhero, this is not the line of work you are really interested in. You want to be an artist and lover. But to be fair, if you really didn’t want to be a superhero, you probably shouldn’t have let yourself get bitten by that radioactive spider. 

Thats the answer I got from answering the quiz.. and thats all you get.. well a picture too, but no comparing or anything.Again pretty useless, but fun (for me) and I suppose you could always send it to your friends if they liked comic books too..Now my little reviews are pretty bias, because if you don’t like quizzes, cowbells or comics, but love eggs, then you’d probably disagree, but this is just my opinion..I hate facebooks applications.. 

Well about 95% of them anyway

But now all of the big four music companies (Sony BMG, Universal, EMI and Warner) have all taken a stand and teamed up with Amazons new download service to take on the might of iTunes..

But is it too little too late..?

 The iTunes store will of been open for 5 years this coming april, and in January it reached a total of 4 billion songs that had been bought and downloaded off of it. This is over 70% of the legal music download market. Basically in just under 5 years the iTunes store has took virtually a complete control of the market.

The history of the store ironically starts with the big four major music labels (or five back before Sony music entertainment and BMG merged) when a deal was signed with apple to create the store to distribute the music through the store, with apple keeping a cut of the money from each song sold.

The problem began when some of the companies started to think the deal was not good enough, as apple was making too much money from the project.

As the relations began to break down the Big Four were called upon to act against iTunes to gain some control over the music industry, the plan was to sell music online without any DRM, this would hopefully sway people to buy off the companies, as iTunes store sells its music with a form of DRM called FairPlay, which has several restrictions on the music and how the users can use and move this music.

EMI made the first move by annoucing they would release DRM free music through iTunes, although this was not an exclusive deal.

EMI then made another deal, this time with Amazon.com, who had started to try and take the might of iTunes on by starting it’s own online digital media store, hoping that Amazons already popular fan base would help it grow. But another incentive to buying off Amazon is that the whole libary of media is totally DRM free, unlike iTunes which has both DRM and DRM free songs.

The songs from the Amazon site are all in MP3 format, so they can be played on such a wide and varied range of devices, unlike the songs from iTunes which where AAC or MPEG4, which did not tend to work on many devices.

While the idea of DRM free music does seem like a good idea, and may look attractive, it would be easy for the music to be moved around too freely and could be shared illegally.  But at the same time it would very annoying as a user to not do what you want with a song you have downloaded from iTunes.

It would take a big name such as Amazon with something as attractive as DRM free music to even consider taking on the might and grip with iTunes, and with the big four music labels wanting more money and success, more than they have with iTunes already, they might all have to join up with amazon and release DRM free music to give themselves and Amazon a chance against the increasingly popular iTunes.

It was the mascot of web 1.0, a revolution in using the web, and interacted with others. Netscapes main point was the web browser (Neyscape Navigator) as it was new, fresh and took everywhere by storm.

 The company was a success, the business took off, and though initally the browser was just a trail and was to be paid for eventually. Although eventually dropped, so the browser was free. The e-mail was originally free, but when the demand became so high after a couple of years there was a charge to use the service.

 The thing that was so special about netscape was the “on-the-fly” display of webpages, this is where the text and graphics of the website appeared on the screen as the web page downloaded. This feature is very common now, when you load web pages up they always load bit by bit and you see a little bit first, and it builds up. Before netscape did this users would stare at a blank white screen until the page was 100% loaded. Which could be fairly tedious and annoying, and made browsers less user friendly.

To keep on top of competetion netscpae continued to improve the browser, eventually including new features such as Important new features included cookies, frames, and JavaScript.

On thing that went against netscape was the fact they were more concerned with adding new features and constantly improving it to what they wanted, that they did not take the time to iron out the bugs, so the products, although fancy, sometimes did not work very well.

Eventually a combonation of netscapes own arrogance and microsoft feeling threatened, netscape became less reliable and lost the vast majority of its market.

Google is not a web browser, its not a software program, it is just a website. Or it was..

Google is mainly known for its search engine, but it has many more features. Another thing google is big in is online advertising. This is where google makes most of its money.

But to see google as a web 2.0 trendsetter, you would have to look at all the applications and extras it has.

Google maps is a very well know side part of google, with online maps available to look at and search. The map is in the middle of a webpage and anywhere in the world can be looked at, with roads, trains and other transport shown, along with road names and travel directions.

Google earth is an amazing program, where you can view a virtual 3D form of the earth, zooming in and out, rotating the global, and looking anywhere you want, with satelite images on the globe, it truely is an amazing technology.

Another thing google offers is its gmail account, which is a free email service, which has a massive space for saving messages, and groups together emails as convosations. It really is advanced e-mail.

The chance to change the browser to iGoggle is also a relativaly new technology. You can put any application you come across on there, as long as it is compatible. This gives the user a new control over the web, allowing them to view and use the content they want, not what they given.

I have used both google and netscape in the past.

Well actually I didn’t “use” netscape, i bought a CD years and years ago which has bonus content on it, which I really wanted to view and use, but you need to install netscape (which came with the CD I think) but it wouldn’t work and kept crashing and i never got to use the bonus content. Since then I’ve had a really bad view of netscape, and i’ve never gave it the chance (and now it looks like i will never have the chance.. not that i’d want to).

Google is my homepage, and it always has been as far as i remember, i have a gmail account, i have iGoogle, i’ve used googlemaps, google earth, google videos.. I can see google going even further, exploiting the web to its full potential, as the web is still growing..

Bring on web 3.0..

While reading the article, it got me thinking about all of the points raised, and whether they were valid or not.

The argument, put in simple terms, is that the writers want money for each of their ideas/shows that appear on the Internet, like they do with TV/DVD appearances of their ideas. While on the other hand the studios are not willing to pay writers for Internet appearances, as they see the Internet more as a promotion of the product, trying to entice people to view the show on TV, or buy a DVD.

Now a reason the studios would not pay, would be the fact that there is so much content currently available on the Internet that it would end up costing them more money than it would be worth.

Also studios may not post whole episodes, they might post 20 second teasers on-line, and they do not really want to pay someone for such a short clip.

They might also discredit the Internet as an actual source of viewing, as it is not the primary purpose, and its free to watch clips on youtube or daily motion.

The writers on the other hand, would want money for their work. They get money for their work when it is on TV or on a DVD, so why not the Internet too? If the content is being watched, then surely it does not matter what it is being viewed on.

Also if they are not paid upfront for the idea, in a one off first time payment, then they want to squeeze as much money out of the idea as they can.

With both sides having fairly valid points, and neither one backing down, it will be a long time before this is settled and done with.