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Young World
Communicate safely on the web
MINI ULANAT
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The web is an integral part of our lives but we must use it safely.
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Photo: A. Muralitharan
Computers are fun: Socialising on the net.
Children and youth, who often face criticism from elders for not keeping in touch with friends and classmates, are taking to it like never before.Social networking is a communication and meeting platform for communities and friends - the biggest online phenomenon we have seen so far. It is a technological revolution facilitating collaboration and sharing among users, with the web as a platform.
Slowly, it became dynamic and many sites started delivering web pages created on the fly. There is a transition of the web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platforms. Adding new technologies like blog, wiki, social bookmarking and tagging, the web has become more interactive, with users picking content from a site and also contributing to it. The evolving services and technologies encourage ordinary users to make their knowledge explicit and help develop a collective intelligence.
In the past, a website was just a collection of static web pages.
User is king
Users contribute their own text, pictures and video content, making it participatory in nature. Wikipedia - the anyone-can-edit online encyclopaedia; Google’s top video sharing site YouTube, which is used for uploading videos for others to watch and Flickr, a popular photo editing site owned by Yahoo are typical examples. Besides these, other popular social-networking sites include MySpace, Facebook and the photo-sharing site Photobucket. Part of the fun in social networking is finding people we already know, with whom no contact was maintained for a long time. Listal is a social network based around entertainment and media collections, able to list, recommend and share your thoughts, as well as to rate and review them. Anything about cars? For car enthusiasts, a one-point resource - Boompa is for you. While blogs and wikis allow communities to generate textual content, podcasting allows users to distribute audio content.
Social-networking platforms give non-profits a forum for meeting like-mindedo rganisations and potential supporters beyond their community.
The online presence is definitely a matter of concern on privacy. Networking systems like Orkut, Friendster and Linkedln require acknowledgement by the recipient to establish a connection. There are mischief-makers coming up with new ways to misuse the system for profit. There are others with evil intention, trying to mislead vulnerable youth. Elders must make sure that kids and youngsters are not exposed to content that may adversely affect their outlook in the most defining years of their lives.
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