Clase, 7. de Marzo

Servicios de valor añadido Multimedia (A. Fumero, J. Salvachua)

This lecture was the finale on the area of web 2.0 applications and services before a nearly month-long period of vacations. Mr Fumero began the session with an overview of a subject that I find quite interesting, that of identities. His part also included virtual worlds, mainly covering second life. Salvachúa on his part held a lecture about much more technical subjects starting from mobile web 2.0 services and reaching some of the current important protocols conserning internet multimedia services.

Identities are a very interesting subject in the development of web- and other types of electronic services because they provide for means to increase usability by personalizing services. I believe that most of today's identification schemes are still built mainly on the theme of user access in contrast to personalization and that much untapped potential could be reached. The technical scheme under today's identities/profiles offer for an interesting study-subject from the usability engineering point of view. Second life was also covered as an example of today's more advanced virtual world applications. It was thus interesting to see what type of technical/conseptual infrastructure lies under such services. I, myself once was meaning to try out second life out of interest to the overall phenomenon but as the "game" was lagging quite a lot and I even managed to get myself stuck in a way in the very beginning of the introductory area, that experiment remained short lived... for now at least.

The second part by mr. Salvachúa was a very different type of lecture as the subject covered namely some of the more important protocols that have been introduced over IP as to better facilitate the growingly demanding and diverse type of messaging and data-transfer that are used over internet and WWW. The technologies that were covered were as follows.

• RTP / Real-time Transfer Protocol (works over UDP)
  
• SIP / Session Initiation Protocol (analogy with HTTP)
  
• XMPP / eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (also known as Jabber, evolution of SIP with xml)

Also the importance of Flash in today's multimedia web 2.0 apps was mentioned. It is however notable that Flash, itself is a relatively problematic solution. Ajax (Asynchronous Java script and XML) is also notable as a group of web-development technologies that has achieved wide use.

Clase, 3. de Marzo

Comunidades online y redes sociales. Web semantica y
Folksonomías (J. Salvachúa, A. Fumero)

This lecture'a first part was about an interesting and very
essential part of the web 2.0 phenomenon.  The social networks
and online communities are what the general public see and relate
to conserning the development of WWW.

The development of web technologies is a very small part of web
2.0 as the more interesting aspect is surely that of the sociological
influences around how we utilize WWW nowadays. Antonio Fumero
introduced us to a wide range of different social networks thus
offering a comprehensive overview of the area as a whole.

An important aspect of the area is also the division of different
social networks by their purpose of use and the notion of how
these uses are slowly merging. I, for example only use Facebook
very actively, but as the developed platform offers many additional
applications and posibilities I may use it for a wider range of needs.

The second part of the lecture was about the semantic web. As
mentioned before, this is a quite familiar subject for me. I even
have my name on a paper from the research about Semantic Web
Services. If interested, you can read on the subject from:
http://www.cs.hut.fi/u/sto/B158.pdf.

I won't go further into the subject. The basic things were covered:
some history, RDF, ontologies etc.

Clase, 29 de febrero

Fundamentos Arquitectónicos de la Web 2.0
(J. Quemada, J. Salvachua)

This lecture was about the technical architecture of the Web.
The Web was originally based on the following three main
technological components

• URI (Universal Resource Indicator)
  
• HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol)
• HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language)

In today's world of Web 2.0, the last one has evolved into a range of different ways of describing the resources, mainly based on XML (Extensible Markup Language). Basically this improves the flexibility and possibilities of Web as a platform for a more colorful range of content. Where as HTML mainly works for describing web-pages for navigators, with xml nearly anything can be described which allows for a range of applications to be able to access the content found on the web.

HTTP in its part is also in its part evolving although maintaining its base functionality relatively untouched. Some of the different methods were discussed including get and post. The interface of HTTP is generally called CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete). One of the most advanced features of today in HTTP 1.1 is the pipelined transaccions -feature. The authentification in HTTP was also covered and SHTTP as a drastic improvement in security as for its use of sockets.

Finally we entered the area of web application architectures and especifically Roy Fielding's REST (REpresetentational State Transfer), which is presented as the superior architecture of today for generating advanced web applications. REST is introduced as being scalable and interoperable with many (all?) of today's key-elements including AJAX.

Clase, 25. de febrero

Creación de contenido y derechos de autor (A. Fumero)
Wikis and Wikipedia, C. Barcenilla)

The web 2.0 services and applications theme continued by the
lectures about content creation. The first part mainly 
grasped the concept of social software and the importance of 
knowledge over technology. An interesting aspect on the 
social content creation is how different types of social 
middleware affect the actual knowledge that is being created 
over the application. As a general rule the application will 
have a web platform that offers the clients a specified 
environment for delivering information/content.

An other interesting theme on the first part was the briefly 
visited subject copyright, specifically in this context of 
social software. What different types of rights on content 
and different combinations was introduced.

Also the subject of Semantic web was touched. This is a 
subject that I'm very familiar with as I've done my 
candidate's thesis partly on the subject and also spent 
one summer wroking on a research on Semantic web services. 
I will however not cover this subject on this blog other 
than by agreeing with the professor in saying that the 
Semantic web will probably see the light of day in its 
originally intended content. Still the research on it has 
and will continue influencing the development of the future 
of web and web applications in its own way.

The second part of the lecture on Wikis and the Wikipedia 
did not offer much new information for me personally. It is 
true that the different wikis in the world and especifically 
the Wikipedia are a powerful and interesting pehnomena in 
today's world of web. I myself tend to turn to wikipedia in 
every possible question of my life and I've also used wikis 
as part of some courses in my studies in Finland, including 
the last summer's research on Semantic web services.

Clase 22. de febrero

The first part of the class by Juan Quemada was on the subject of Web 2.0. As an introduction, a brief overview on the evolution of the use of internet was presented including some history, basic technologies of web, governement and topology. After the introduction Juan presented the consept of the Scale free network and the idea of the Long tail and how it applies, not only to social networks but also to the WWW and various other examples.

We continued to the determination of Web 2.0 and analysing its nature as not only a technological platform for new types of services but also as a manifestation of social networking and the significance of information. This led to everybody's favourite subject and biggest potential conserning the Web 2.0 - the collective intelligence or "Wisdom of Crowds" (the book by James Surowiecki, 2005).

The weblogs or Blogosphere was represented as an important part of the Web 2.0 after which we returned to the subject of the long tail. The long tail is a very essential consept conserning the services delivered in the world of web 2.0 and is based on the power of the so called long tail, the low-demand needs of the users. One could ask himself what the point is with the neverending streams of junkmail in the world. Does anyone really need this much "potential"?, Who buys this stuff?". Even if only one in ten thousand consumers really would buy viagra from a shadowy web distributor, it's enough to make the seller rich. The power lies in the extremely easy, although annoying distribution of the junkmail. Nowadays you can really find pretty much anything from the internet. Most of the services may not have but a handfull of users, but together they make up the very long and potent long tail.

Finally Wikis were introduced as an extremely interesting phenomenon and an occurrence of the aforementioned collective intelligence - User generated content.

The second part of the lecture by Joaquín Salvachúa continued on the subject of web 2.0 and focusing on its architecural. The basic technological elements were presented briefly alongside the client-server consept.

An important point in the architecture of today's web 2.0 in its random nature. As a whole it seems to be a hectic bazar of different technologies, tools and particularly services. Still it succeeds in offering a functional composite of services capable of satisfying virtually any sort of a need that a user might have. Salvachúa presents the comparison of an architecturally built cathedral as opposed to an organic corall reef where new elements are randomly born and sometimes grow to cover older parts. This is a remarkably similar charasteristic to the development of the web 2.0 environment where newer more developed services sometimes succeed to eat away the clients of older services that might have been relatively popular at their time. To maintain success as a popular web-service or application, the service has to grow and upgrade its content, sometimes even delivering change only to keep up the interest of the clients.

An other interesting notion is that a charasteristic trait of the new web 2.0 services is its absence of traditional client-server based architecture as specifically in collaborative services some of the clients take on different roles including that of content provider.

Introduction

This blog is about my studies during the second half of my exchange year in Valencia, more specifically on the course by the name the Next Generation Internet, which is a fifth year course held in collaboration with the two other technology universities from Madrid and Catalunya. The lectures are held via videoconference by professors from the different schools using the Isabel application.

This blog is used for two targets. First, after each lecture I am to write a short summary and my thoughts on the presented subjects and secondly there will be a course assignment that will be done in groups of three and for which the information is shared using this blog and the course's wiki. With proper approval, I shall write the lecture summaries in english and see about the matter conserning the group assignment depending on the appointed group. Writing spanish is not a problem as such, but english is usually still for me a lot less clumsy.

As for my tardy discovery of the need for the lecture summaries, I've begun writing this blog as four of the lectures have already passed (not including the first lecture which was merely an introduction to the course and the methods and tools that are used with it). The summaries for the earlier lectures will be written in retrospect when I have time.

The scope of this course as of now strikes as being quite diverse due to the sheer number of lecturers and subjects. While I generally do fancy the refreshing novelty of videoconference-shared sessions and especially the use of such promising tools as wikis, the varying scope does pose some question about the consistency of the course's subjects.

I have personally found the use of a wiki to be a very potent solution for research done in teams, but I don't really see the need for making seperate blogs using other services as it would be fairly easy to maintain a blog-like diary or such inside the wiki itself.