ICT Issues Social Networking

Social Networking Social networking: the interaction between a group of people who have a common interest, eg. music. Popular networking sites are Facebook, MySpace, dating, photo-sharing sites, etc. Benefits of social networking sites: – Connecting to existing friends & family members – Building professional relationships – Publicising issues and causes – Finding new friends with common interests – Sharing ideas and information – Enhancing your social life, eg. dating

Social Networking Benefits continued: – Communicating easily in different formats – Publicising and advertising yourself – Influencing people and events – Communicating at almost any time and in any place – Educating yourself about people, places & issues – Collaboration between, eg. educators, students, etc.

Social – networking technology Social networking technologies are Web 2.0 applications; applications that allow for collaborative interaction between users. Web 2.0 applications are networks which users share and filter content, collaborate, seek information and interact socially. Egs. of 2.0 applications include: social- networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, RSS feeds, blogs, mashups and folksonomies.

Social – networking technology Web 2.0 applications: – Wiki, a website allowing the easy creation and editing of webpages via a web browser. – Blog, part of a website and entries are written by the person who runs the blog; egs. of entries are commentaries, descriptions of events; readers are permitted to leave comments about the blogs – Mashup, a web application or webpage that is a combination of separate parts brought together by the inclusion of a special code that enables links to content supplied by others to be displayed on the page. The external site supplies the content and the application to display the content.

Social – networking technology Web 2.0 applications: – Folksonomies, allow users to interact with other users by tagging and categorising content, especially photographs; also called social tagging – Del.icio.us, Digg & Stumble Upon, sites to share, organise, search and manage bookmarks

Features of technology used in Web 2.0 Applications 1.Technologies used in developing Web 2.0 applications are JavaScript, AJAX and Adobe Flash. These are called client-side technologies. 2.On the server side languages used are, PHP, Ruby, ColdFusion, Perl, Python & ASP. Used by developers to dynamically access data from files and databases and to send it to the client side to be displayed. 3.To share its data with other websites, websites must be able to generate output in common machine- readable formats, eg. XML & RSS, so that others can easily use it.

Features of technology used in Web 2.0 Applications PHP, hypertext preprocessor, a scripting language for constructing dynamic webpages. RSS, Really Simple Syndication, a website that wants to allow other sites to use some of its content creates an RSS document. The site from which users can link to and read the RSS content is called an RSS feed; the application is called an RSS reader; content is regularly updated with latest information, such as news, events, headlines, etc. The feed icon used in several browsers Filename extension.rss,.xml Internet media type application/rss+xml (registration not finished) [1] Type of format Web syndication Extended from XMLfeed icon Filename extensionInternet media type [1]Web syndicationXML

Features of technology used in Web 2.0 Applications XML, extensible markup language used for encoding documents in a digital format; xml files are then stored on a computer and used eg. by microsoft office.

Issues with the use of social- networking sites 1.Privacy – Internet growth means information can be transmitted quickly and further than ever before – Central to all ideas of 'privacy' is keeping your own actions, conversations, information and movements free from public knowledge and attention. – Basic rule is not to put online pictures or comments that you don’t want people to read – Provisions of The Information Privacy Act, 2001 State government organisations, local councils and private sector organisations acting as contracted service providers to the Victorian government are all bound to protect the privacy of people’s personal information. “Personal information” means recorded information which can identify someone.

Issues with the use of social- networking sites 2 Cyberbullying – Bullying through , chat rooms, inline social networking, etc. – Counter it by not responding, telling trustworthy person/s and contacting authorities 3Copyright issues – Copyright is a legal right which prohibits someone from reproducing a copyrighted work without the permission of the owner. 4Security of information – Data in social-networking sites stored in databases and there is a risk that the data could be used by the site for purposes that you do not like, eg. selling the information to others for their use. 5Addiction – Issues aroung computer games, social networking sites, chat rooms, etc are a major concern 6Predators – Use of chat rooms by people to stalk and entrap young people with false promises

Avoiding problems with Social- networking sites 1.Be sceptical 2.Be careful of the information you provide 3.Report suspicious behaviour 4.Communicate with vulnerable others 5.Watch your privacy settings 6.Be aware of copyright 7.Use an alias