I have been involving in some open source community for years and honestly from them I learn a lot about how to respect other work. I live in a country where software piracy is a common thing and people can use the pirated software without feeling guilty. Joining open source communities really open my mind because it is really hard and difficult to make good software. It needs a lot of efforts and work hours to make a good one. Their hard work need to be honored and respected. The action that can be made is to buy software license in order to support their work and not violate the copyright. In open source world where virtually anything can be get or accessed for free, the ways that we can do to respect copyright are slightly different. We can make donations or contribute to their project. If we have to make some modification to the software we can still respecting the copyright by attaching the original source code to the modified one. Now I do aware about authorship and copyright. In my personal and professional field, I’m trying not to violate copyright by carefully choosing content from the internet, Try to use software legally or search the open source version of them J.
About open access, I do care and aware about this. One of my jobs in my office is being network administrator and sometimes my institution suffered information breaching and staff performance degradation due to the misuse of web 2.0 technology. Usually I blocked some sites but later I realized this effort is inefficient because staff may found other techniques to access the forbidden sites or use their own internet access (using mobile phone, etc). Based on the experience, later we made another approach by informing the staff about the dangers of web 2.0 when being used incorrectly and how the web 2.0 can be used to support the work and increase productivity. Web 2.0 can be used for brainstorming and collaborative effort. I do believe that effort to make people aware more effective than just forbid the staff to access the web 2.0 sites
I have just tried second life game and as predicted before, it was fun and pleasuring – if can’t say addicting. Different with other online games that needs relatively higher hardware requirements. Second life game can be played with low level pc hardware even my atom netbook can play it smoothly. Some lag happens but it is mostly caused by the quality of the internet network that was not relatively good in my country fortunetly this problem doesn’t disrupt the experience of playing this game.
Just like another online games, It also has both positive and negative aspect to its player. In positive way, It can help to release the stress, socialize with people, improve body coordination, make money, learn something, etc but it may cause addictive behavior as well , people may forget with their real life responsibility (social live, work, etc) because of the game. However, this game can also be used for education purposes. Second life can be used as a virtual laboratory that help us learn to live and learn from live. Second life also fit to people that want to studying foreign language and culture. The virtual environment that offered enables us to interact with foreign people, live in foreign place and try to adapt the culture without need to go to the that place directly.The conclusion is, Second life and other online games can provide a lot direct benefits when being used appropriately and wisely.
Based on Wikipedia, Technorati is a search engine tool just like Google or Yahoo with one difference, it is only gathering and collecting blog links from blogsphere.The founder of Technorati said that it was founded to help bloggers succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the global online conversation. I have read several pages on Technorati and concluded some important points into the following :
- Technorati only accept blogs as its member.
- Technorati only counts blogs that refer link to your blog. (this is the main difference of Technorati compare to other search engine)
- Authority is the number of blogs that have linked to a blog page during the last 6 months
- The higher the number of authorities, the higher the blog’s position in blog ranks
- If there is blog that made more than one links to your blog, Technorati only counts once.
- The best Technorati authority position is position #1. The smaller the value the better blog position.
I hope these points will help to understand how Technorati works and the last, the best advice that I can tell to raise your blog ranks is writing good and interesting articles to other bloggers so they don’t hesitate to link your blog. it’s all about content, content, and content.