STAYING IN TOUCH

Online Trading

2008-11-08T12:53:00.000-08:00

A general reader might be forgiven for thinking that apart from
online shopping and corporate Web sites, the Internet is just a
teenager’s paradise. This is not true, though—the get-rich-quick
brigade has found that the Internet is a very nifty tool to dabble around in the stock market.

Sites such as 5paisaonline.com and ICICIDirect.com let you sell and buy shares online. All you need to do is open a trading account with them. The Internet also allows you to buy and sell shares live as the market moves without the help of the broker. All you have to do is install software from a broking house such as Sharekhan, and lo and behold, you have a trading terminal. You can now go and make those much-desired millions or lose all your money to the vagaries of the stock market.

Trading live is possible as both the major exchanges in India,
the BSE and the NSE conduct their entire business online. Most
broking houses that set up trading terminals on your home PC
also help you understand the software. While you make your
quick buck, remember to get out once you’ve achieved it!

sitemap

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Blogging

2008-06-24T04:14:00.000-07:00

‘Blog’ is Internet lingo for a ‘Web log’. As the name suggests, it’s
for logging your activities on the Net, something like your personal
Web diary. To put it more elaborately, a blog is a Web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (usually in reverse chronological order). Although most early Web logs were manually updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of somesort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of‘blogging’.

Blogs cover a wide range of topics, from individual diaries to
political campaigns, media programs, and even audio updates like a
radio station. A blog may be authored by a single individual or by a
collaboration of a large community of writers.

Sites such as Gizmodo.com are essentially blogs. Many blogs
enable visitors to leave public comments, which can lead to a community of readers centred on the blog. Like any technological community, the bloggers’ community, too, has developed a language of
its own. The totality of Web logs or blog-related Web sites is often
called the blogosphere.

When a large amount of activity, information and opinion
erupts around a particular subject or controversy in the blogosphere,it is sometimes called a blogstorm or blog swarm. So who
were the precursors of these phenomena? Electronic communities
existed before internetworking. For example, the Associated
Press newswire was, in effect, similar to a large chat room where
there were ‘wire fights’ and electronic conversations.

Another pre-digital electronic community—amateur (or
‘ham’) radio—allowed individuals who set up their own broadcast
equipment to communicate with others directly. Ham radio
also had logs called ‘glogs’, which were personal diaries made
using wearable computers in the early 1980s.

Before blogging became popular, digital communities took
many forms, including Usenet, e-mail lists and bulletin boards. In
the 1990s, Internet forum software such as WebX created running
conversations with threads. Many of the terms from Web logging
were created in these earlier media. The term ‘Weblog’ was coined
by Jorn Barger in 1997. The shorter version, ‘blog’, was coined by
Peter Merholz. One of the most popular blogging tools, Blogger,
was developed at around this time by Pyra Labs. Google purchased
this sometime in 2003 and launched blogspot.com, one of the
world’s most extensively used blog sites.

Blogging rose to major prominence during the aftermath of
the tsunami that struck South-east Asia in December 2004. A number
of relief operations were co-ordinated using blogs. This led to
blogs gaining prominent media status. The idea of distributed
journalism also caught on because of this.

Blogging today is something as common as using e-mail.
Moreover, a number of news sources are looking at tapping the ever-increasing number of journalists who use their blogs as
points for dispensing information.

Online Trading

2008-06-24T04:05:00.000-07:00

Sites such as 5paisaonline.com and ICICIDirect.com let you sell
and buy shares online. All you need to do is open a trading account
with them. The Internet also allows you to buy and sell shares live
as the market moves without the help of the broker. All you have
to do is install software from a broking house such as Sharekhan,
and lo and behold, you have a trading terminal. You can now go
and make those much-desired millions or lose all your money to
the vagaries of the stock market.

Gaming

2008-06-24T03:59:00.000-07:00

Gaming

Ask any teenager or college-goer about the biggest advantage of
having a computer at home, and in all probability, he’ll say it’s gaming. The gaming industry today stands at over $20 billion
(Rs 87,000 crore) in annual revenue. So just mate the Internet, which is a behemoth of unaccountable proportions, with the gaming industry,and what you get is an unimaginable giant.

Gaming on the Internet, as of today, is restricted largely to
Flash-based games or simple arcade games of the ‘80s. Sites such as
Addictinggames.com and Liquidgeneration.com give a wide variety
of games to choose from. Most of these games, at best, are
stress relievers or two-minute shootouts.

The idea of making a game to promote a movie or a product
has caught on in India only recently, with sites such as
Hungama.com and C2W.com creating these customised games.
Most of these can be played online. Sites such as Indiagames.com
and Mauj.com, too, are exclusive gaming sites from where you
can download games both onto your computer as well as your
mobile phone.

Gamer communities also populate the Net, most of them giving
out cheat codes and walkthroughs for the games available in
the market. You will also get CD cracks for almost all games
around, and even though it’s illegal, everyone has searched for
those at some point or the other.

Multi Player Online Gaming—and by online, we mean the
Internet, not a LAN—is yet to take off in India, and no prizes for
guessing the reason: no broadband. Massively Multiplayer Online
Gaming sites such as Ogaming.com are aimed at giving the hardcore
gamer, armed with broadband and a powerhouse PC, a
chance to pit his skills against some of the best from around the
globe. We guess we’ll have to wait for our turn.

Entertainment

2008-06-24T03:48:00.000-07:00

Imagine the Internet being just a scientific tool. No bells and whistles,
no movies and music. No games and no interesting software
to download. Just scientific network. Well, that’s what it started
off as, and if it hadn’t
been for all the music and movies and gamesavailable on it, the Net
would have lived out its entire life in relative obscurity.We all know that sharing music illegally has been clamped down on hard; we’ve all seen Napster being hauled into court and then destroyed. We’ve also caught on to the lure of applications such as BitTorrent that lets us share our files with peers. Most of the
shared files are music, movies or videos.

It’s a forgone conclusion that entertainment is a must for any
medium to survive. A television that aired only documentaries
and news would not catch on to the general population.
The Internet today has become this vast database of most
things under the sun. Movies, video clips, sound bytes, music. You
name it, and the Net will have scores of sites offering these, some
of them legally for a price, some illegally.

Entertainment: The Cornerstone Of The Internet

Online radio stations by portals such as Yahoo! with their
Launchcast service, too, are attracting customers. These services
are free if you subscribe for a basic version—you can always pay for
the more advanced, customisable ones.
New technologies such as Apple’s iTunes music download service,
and Podcasting, too, give you your daily dose of entertainment
off the Net. However, entertainment on the Internet, a la television,is yet to kick off due to bandwidth and revenue model issues.

Who would want to catch their daily soap on the Net where it
would get chopped halfway due to a bad connection?
The gaming industry, too, is waiting for ISPs to resolve the
issues concerning supplying the user with static broadband. Once
that is taken care of, you can be assured of a shoot fest, a movie,
and the news all streaming into your home PC.

Conduct Business And Shop Online

2008-06-24T03:36:00.000-07:00

Conduct Business And Shop Online

E-commerce was touted as the next big economic miracle that
would make instant millionaires. Anyone who had a half-baked
idea jumped onto the e-commerce bandwagon. What it did was
turn out a lot of wise young men and faulty business models. All those who burnt their fingers in the dot-com bust can now give a safe Internet practices lecture!

A few, however, have stuck it out and made those proverbial
pots of gold. Business plans and revenue models have been
tweaked and worked upon, and conducting business online is no
longer as risky as it once was. All it requires is planning and a systematic approach.

One type of online business that’s doing reasonably well is
online shopping, with sites such as Amazon.com raking in millions
dollars in revenue annually. Auction sites such as eBay and
Apple’s iTunes music download site have also shown that a business
model based entirely off the Internet is viable. Online shopping has also become safer thanks to better encryption techniques and payment methods such as PayPal. Surveys have also shown that people
around the world are increasingly opening up to the idea of buying
items off the Web.

Spurred on by these successes, many individuals are venturing
back into the once-forbidden dot-com business sector. A number of
collectives are also looking at the Internet to further their business interests. Content providers for the media, Web site developers and Flash programmers form a major chunk of Web professionals.Sites such as http://www.hungama.com/ and http://www.c2w.com/ conduct their entire business on the Internet.

With technology spreading into different spheres, it has
become easier for people to conduct business transactions on the
Internet. Will this actually kick off the e-commerce boom? Or will
we learn a few more lessons from the school of hard knocks? Our
guess is only as good as yours!

NETWORKING AND COLLABRATION

2008-06-23T05:20:00.000-07:00

NETWORKING AND COLLABRATION

A relatively new phenomenon, online networking and collaboration
has caught on fast because of its impact on small businesses
and professionals. Networking sites such as www.Ryze.com and
www.Orkut.com have developed into business networking sites from simple ‘get to meet more people’ sites. These sites let you browse through individual profiles separated into different categories.

There are also sites targeted at specific professions, such as
Writer.net which is aimed at writers and potential publishers.
Others, such as deviantart.com, concentrate on visual art.
There are other sites aimed at programmers and computer
professionals. Apart from networking and getting various
employment or work-related opportunities, these sites also
allow interaction within the community and lead to the birth
of new ideas.

Networking and collaboration tools have helped professionals no end
A related development on the Web is the birth of sites such as
twiki.org and jotspot.com, which act as online project management
sites. They act as the user’s own private intranet. The wiki in
these sites make them very easy to modify and customise as per
the user’s need. Twiki, for example, is an online enterprise collaborationsite. It is designed to run a project development space, a document management system, a knowledge base, or any other
groupware tool on an intranet or on the Internet.

The increasing use of technology in small business and projects
has lead to a large exchange of ideas, and has given birth to
collaborative efforts such as wikipedia.com and Wikinews. This
has also transcended the virtual world and has gone into mainstream
media. Daily newspapers such as Ohmynews of Korea are
testament to the fact that collaborative efforts from the Internet
can be carried forward into the real world.

DOWNLOADING DATA

2008-06-23T05:06:00.000-07:00

DOWNLOADING DATA

As we’ve seen in the earlier section, the Internet is a vast source of information. We can of course view all this data off the Web itself,
but at times it becomes necessary to store the information on our
personal computers, or at some place where it is easily retrievable.
Also, some data, such as video files, cannot be viewed as a streaming file if your Internet connection isn’t fast enough. Another major need is that of downloading applications or software onto your computer. All this brings us to the question—where is the one site that will give us all the data that we need?

The answer is, as of now, there is no site from where you can
download anything under the sun. That would be tantamount to
downloading the entire Internet. The Net has a number of sites
that cater to specific download needs. www.Softpedia.com and
www.Download.com are some of the more popular destinations. A large
number of sites also offer screensaver and wallpaper downloads.
Downloading music or movies without paying for them is illegal,
and is a copyright violation. The same holds for downloading
text or PDFs of books, whose copyrights are not in the public
domain. The download facility has been one of the largest reasons
for the proliferation of software, music and movie piracy. Some
downloaders available today are able to restrict illegal downloads.
A spin-off of the popularity of downloads has been P2P file
sharing networks.

Technically, these are similar to regular download techniques. In case of a download from a major Web site, you would be accessing their server and download manager. In a P2P network, you download data from a peer’s computer. With stricter implementations of IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) all over the world, the world of downloading anything for free might just end.

Searching For Information

2008-06-23T04:55:00.000-07:00

The Internet was developed as a tool to communicate and share
information. It also acts as a repository of information. This means
it has become your one-stop source of information for any kind.
Got a dissertation? Get your data off the Net. Need to research for a presentation? Well, the Internet is there. So much so, that a lot of colleges and universities are converting their books into online reference material. So the question is, what sort of information can we find on the Net?

To put this in perspective, there are 8 billion (800 crore) Web
pages that Google ‘crawls’. Of this, we can assume that around 70
per cent of the pages are giving out some sort of information.
Some of the most common and reliable methods of looking up
information in this humongous pile of information is to scour
through an online encyclopaedia like Wikipedia, or just search for
Chances are there is some reference to it on the Internet on just about everything on the InternetIV What You Can Do it on a search engine such as Google. Sites such as howstuffworks.
com and answers.com are special catalogue sites that dispense
information depending on the query. While howstuffworks.
com has a Q&A format, answers.com has a search enginetype
interface.

VoIP

2008-06-23T04:42:00.000-07:00

VoIP

Voice over IP, also called Internet Telephony, is the routing of voiceconversations over the Internet or any IP (Internet Protocol) network.VoIP can be used on any network connection, including ones
that do not have an Internet connection. VoIP has a number of
advantages and it is widely believed that this will replace the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network)—present telecom protocols.

Using VoIP, one can send and receive data files and messages
and have a conversation at the same time. VoIP also supports conferencefacilities. However, the biggest advantage that VoIP has is the low calling cost and its ability to work on your existing hardware setup. Also, the functionality is based on a software (protocol),so constant upgrading of your system is not essential.
But will VoIP be the next big killer app of the networked world?
Not until a few niggling issues are ironed out.

VoIP-based communication Voice over IP is being touted as the new revolution in telephony and is reliant on your computer, broadband modem and other hardware that needs a constant power supply to keep running. In case of a power outage, you’d be left with no communication service. Traditional phone lines do not rely on the electric grid. Moreover, the nature of VoIP makes it difficult to geographically locate a user. This makes emergency calls an impossibility as of now, though ideas to fix this are being thought up. Sound quality is also inferior as compared to the conventional
telephone lines due to the high compression techniques required
to conserve bandwidth. Some of the more commonly used VoIP
networks are Babble, BroadVoice and Skype. Skype is a free VoIP
network that uses an IM-type client and has grown in popularity
by leaps and bounds since its introduction.

The success of VoIP will depend on whether the issues regarding
accessibility and voice quality are addressed. Also, major telecom
companies have already pumped in billions of dollars into
mobile networks. This will make them reluctant to switch to a
new system. In fact, there is already a fight on to ensure that
VoIP dies as soon as possible.

INSTANT MESSENGER

2008-06-23T04:21:00.000-07:00

INSTANT MESSENGER

E-MAIL

2008-06-23T04:06:00.000-07:00

Electronic mail has all but replaced most forms of written communication.
When was the last time you received snail-mail from
someone? Banks don’t count!
Contrary to popular belief, e-mail was present before the Internet was created. In fact, the tools used for e-mail today were the building blocks of the Internet. E-mail moved from being just another application of a network to becoming the killer app of the ARPANET and later, the Internet. So how does email work? Well, it’s not rocket science, but a detailed explanation would require more than a chapter. In a nutshell, messages (mails) are exchanged between hosts using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) with software such as Sendmail. Users download their messages (received mails) from servers, usually

using either the POP or IMAP protocols.

With the increasing number of Internet users, e-mail services,
too, have undergone drastic changes. One of the most apparent
changes has been the explosion in storage space. With Google
entering the mail arena with its free Web mail service, GMail,
most providers are now in the race to provide more and more mail
storage space. Though the Internet has innumerable number of
mail service providers, Yahoo!, GMail and Hotmail remain the
most widely used.