Google
 

Papa Roach "I almost told you that I loved you"

multi-viewpoint movie of my jump

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Web 2.0 helps poor students

Since Web 2.0 doesn't have presice defenition, Most trend in Web world is called Web 2.0. , I think one of the great feature among them is that everything happens on "their" server, not on "our" server. For example, if you use Gmail, you don't have to install anything. You just have to create account on Google, type address, and enter. You don't have to care about security and use your memory to store all messages.

This trend helps me a lot. Before I came here I needed to buy my PC, but I didn't have much money, so I had to choose as cheap PC as possible (remember my presentation?). Therefore, my PC doesn't have much functions and software. However, I have almost no problem with my PC (its speed is a big problem, though). Think about what you really need in your PC. You can use Gmail or Yahoo mail for e-mail, and they can store more than GB. You can write paper by Google Docs, and also create spreadsheet. You can make slides for presentation by Web pages such as SlideShare. Also I heard Google Docs will be available for presentation slides from this summer. If you can use the Internet, you can do almost everything. And more importantly, they are all for free. If you have basic functions of PC, you don't need anything to be pre-installed.

Using tools on "their" server has some other advantages. Since you don't use tools on your server, you don't have to install and use your PC's memory. Moreover, you don't have to update those tools. If you used Microsoft Office and they published Microsoft Office 2007, you would have to purchase CD-ROM and update them in your PC. However, you don't have to purchase anything, they will update the system and you can automatically use updated version.


By the way, I found the interview of Tim O'Reilly, who created the word Web 2.0, and he seems to disagree that Web 3.0 is about Semantic Web. You can read it in here

5 comments:

Ich bin Berliner said...

Ryo, I think these new technologies are so cool. My computer's hard drive has failed so many damned times and I've lost a lot of school work [it seems like Thanksgiving ('04, '05 and '06!) is the best time for my hard drives to bite the dust]. Despite losing the documents, photos, etc., I've never lost my email--because I use Gmail and it's servers to store all 1062 MB of email!

In the pre-Google Docs days, I emailed school documents to myself (to store in Gmail) to allow myself portability and permanent storage. I can only imagine how easy life could be if all my computer stuff was online. (But it does raise scary privacy thoughts... back to the privacy vs. convenience debate.)

Ich bin Berliner said...

And thinking about your post title, I remember reading about future technologies where computer labs could be set up where the "computer" is only a monitor and input devices. These dummy terminals are networked to a powerful system that provides all the content to the user. These systems would work because most basic users only use web/email/word processing functions of computers--not processor intensive tasks. The unified computing (that might be the term for it) makes it cheaper for more users to compute since they can simply share one computer. Cool idea and seems especially practical in schools.

leibneritec said...

george i agree when you lose a computer it is so bad i lost my computer last year right after i finshed a paper and it was gone....RYO these new sites are great letting you store stuff for free to make sure it will never be lost..but then the downside is since thre on a server do you really have control over who is reading it or if it does get delted? whos fault is it then?

Yuriko said...

You guys are talking on an interesting topic. I thought I can say that the one computer shared by everyone, which George mentioned, is equal to the Internet itself. I mean, we can see the Internet as the one computer. We don’t need to buy high-grade computers if only the computers can connect to the Internet, because we can do almost anything online.
Just while ago I found the interesting video on You Tube, titled “The Maschine is Us/ing Us.”, which explains about Web 2.0. (You can see it on my blog) I really think the title is accurate to explain current situation.

Alex Y said...

interesting interpretation in stating how web 2.0...and i assume web 3.0 can/will save people especially college students money! Web applications and new software that is often open source or free is really the waive of the future and saves money. Once you make the move to purchase a computer and get high-speed internet connection...you can use the server in the sky (like gmail) to your advantage!