Wiki
A wiki is a website which allows its users to add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser usually using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor. Wikis are powered by wiki software. Most are created collaboratively.
Wikis serve many different purposes, such as knowledge management and notetaking. Wikis can be community websites and intranets, for example. Some permit control over different functions (levels of access). For example, editing rights may permit changing, adding or removing material. Others may permit access without enforcing access control. Other rules may also be imposed for organizing content.
Ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work."[4] "Wiki" (pronounced [ˈwiti] or [ˈviti]) is a Hawaiian word meaning "fast" or "quick".
Characteristics
Most wikis have a backlink feature, which displays all pages that link to a given page.
It is typical in a wiki to create links to pages that do not yet exist, as a way to invite others to share what they know about a subject new to the wiki.
Blogs
A blog (a portmanteau of the term web log) is a discussion or information site published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries ("posts") typically displayed in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first. Until 2009 blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often were themed on a single subject. More recently "multi-author blogs" (MABs) have developed, with posts written by large numbers of authors and professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, interest groups and similar institutions account for an increasing proportion of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into societal newstreams. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users. (Previously, a knowledge of such technologies as HTML and FTP had been required to publish content on the Web.)
Although not a must, most good quality blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via GUI widgets on the blogs, and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. In that sense, blogging can be seen as a form of social networking. Indeed, bloggers do not only produce content to post on their blogs but also build social relations with their readers and other bloggers.
Many blogs provide commentary on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries; yet still others function more as online brand advertising of a particular individual or company. In education blogs can be used as instructional resources. These blogs are referred to as an Edublog. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (art blogs), photographs (photoblogs), videos (video blogs or "vlogs"), music (MP3 blogs), and audio (podcasts). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.
Instant messaging
Instant messaging (IM) is a form of communication over the Internet, that offers an instantaneous transmission of text-based messages from sender to receiver. In push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients, instant messaging basically offers real-time direct written language-based online chat. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet. It may address point-to-point communications as well as multicast communications from one sender to many receivers. More advanced instant messaging allows enhanced modes of communication, such as live voice or video calling, video chat and inclusion of hyperlinks to media.
Definition
Instant messaging falls under the umbrella term online chat, since it is also text-based, bi-directionally exchanged, and happens in real-time. IM is distinct from chat in that IM is based on clients that facilitate connections between specified known users (often using a contact list, buddy list, or friend list). Online 'chat' includes web-based applications that allow communication between (often directly addressed, but anonymous) users in a multi-user environment.
Collaborative office
The individualized high-walled office is gradually morphing into something more open, personal, and less intimidating than the beige maze-like people warrens of the past 40 or so years. And, it's even starting to happen in Buffalo, albeit at a slower pace than on both coasts.
Collaboration
The corporate buzzword is "collaborative," as in a realization that people in an office work together as a team and that the sum is greater than its parts. People working together instead of standing on tiptoe to see if colleagues showed up today might improve productivity and creativity.
People in the office design and furnishing business hereabouts admit the cubicle walls are getting lower or are disappearing, designs are becoming more open, and the atmosphere more interactive and flexible. Simultaneously, for many their total work area is being downsized.
"The walls are getting lower to facilitate communications between various people in the office. It goes hand-in-hand with looking at an office in a holistic way and seeing how it all works together. Employers are looking at teams of employees, not just people functioning in individualized roles," says Paul Murrett, sales manager at Prentice Office Equipment in Buffalo. "They view the workplace as a tool to enhance productivity," not just as a place to work, he adds.
Open design
"There's been a change in the industry. Instead of private offices with high outside walls, employers want their employees to have more natural light and better HVAC (heating, ventilating and air conditioning) circulation, and made cubicles more open and airy," adds James Spano, owner of Buffalo Office Interiors.
So, what's happened is they've been lowering or removing partitions, adding some frosted glass here and there for privacy and making the whole place more flexible, to encourage collaboration between employees. And, they've come to realize that the inflexibility of the old partitions was a hindrance to such things as reconfigurations to accommodate new work technology stemming from electronic communication.
Economic concerns
Despite all the talk about collaboration, mobility, and brushing elbows with co-workers, there are some very pragmatic and economic reasons for abandoning the pre-Vietnam cubicles. In that the office furniture industry exercises a very vested interest � a desire to sell more office furniture.
The economics of square-foot rental space is one motivator for change. "With what's going on in the economy companies are asking if they really need 8-by-10-foot work spaces with guest chairs for everyone," Spano points out. Some find 6-by-8 works all right, at least for some employees.
"Everything's on casters, so you can move things out to an area for conference space. And, they want acoustical panels they can move around. That makes it easier when there's a need to install new telecommunications or data lines.
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is a process that involves outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people. This process can occur both online and offline. The difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific body, such as paid employees.
Crowdsourcing is related to, but not the same as, human-based computation, which refers to the ways in which humans and computers can work together to solve problems. These two methods can be used together to accomplish tasks.
Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. In the classic use of the term, problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users—also known as the crowd—submit solutions. Solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place—the crowdsourcer. The contributor of the solution is, in some cases, compensated either monetarily, with prizes, or with recognition. In other cases, the only rewards may be kudos or intellectual satisfaction. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts or small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization.
Those
who use crowdsourcing services, also known as crowdsourcing, are
motivated by the benefits of crowdsourcing, which are that they can
gather large numbers of solutions or information and that it is
relatively inexpensive to obtain this work. Users are motivated to
contribute to crowdsourced tasks by both intrinsic motivations, such as
social contact and passing the time, and by extrinsic motivations, such
as financial gain.
Due to the blurred limits of crowdsourcing, many collaborative activities, online or not, are being considered crowdsourcing when they are not. Another consequence of this situation is the proliferation of definitions in the scientific literature. Different authors give different definitions of crowdsourcing according to their specialities, losing in this way the global picture of the term.
A wiki is a website which allows its users to add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser usually using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor. Wikis are powered by wiki software. Most are created collaboratively.
Wikis serve many different purposes, such as knowledge management and notetaking. Wikis can be community websites and intranets, for example. Some permit control over different functions (levels of access). For example, editing rights may permit changing, adding or removing material. Others may permit access without enforcing access control. Other rules may also be imposed for organizing content.
Ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work."[4] "Wiki" (pronounced [ˈwiti] or [ˈviti]) is a Hawaiian word meaning "fast" or "quick".
Characteristics
- Editing wiki pages
- Navigation
Most wikis have a backlink feature, which displays all pages that link to a given page.
It is typical in a wiki to create links to pages that do not yet exist, as a way to invite others to share what they know about a subject new to the wiki.
- Linking and creating pages
- Searching
Blogs
A blog (a portmanteau of the term web log) is a discussion or information site published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries ("posts") typically displayed in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first. Until 2009 blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often were themed on a single subject. More recently "multi-author blogs" (MABs) have developed, with posts written by large numbers of authors and professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, interest groups and similar institutions account for an increasing proportion of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into societal newstreams. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users. (Previously, a knowledge of such technologies as HTML and FTP had been required to publish content on the Web.)
Although not a must, most good quality blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via GUI widgets on the blogs, and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. In that sense, blogging can be seen as a form of social networking. Indeed, bloggers do not only produce content to post on their blogs but also build social relations with their readers and other bloggers.
Many blogs provide commentary on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries; yet still others function more as online brand advertising of a particular individual or company. In education blogs can be used as instructional resources. These blogs are referred to as an Edublog. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (art blogs), photographs (photoblogs), videos (video blogs or "vlogs"), music (MP3 blogs), and audio (podcasts). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.
Instant messaging
Instant messaging (IM) is a form of communication over the Internet, that offers an instantaneous transmission of text-based messages from sender to receiver. In push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients, instant messaging basically offers real-time direct written language-based online chat. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet. It may address point-to-point communications as well as multicast communications from one sender to many receivers. More advanced instant messaging allows enhanced modes of communication, such as live voice or video calling, video chat and inclusion of hyperlinks to media.
Definition
Instant messaging falls under the umbrella term online chat, since it is also text-based, bi-directionally exchanged, and happens in real-time. IM is distinct from chat in that IM is based on clients that facilitate connections between specified known users (often using a contact list, buddy list, or friend list). Online 'chat' includes web-based applications that allow communication between (often directly addressed, but anonymous) users in a multi-user environment.
The individualized high-walled office is gradually morphing into something more open, personal, and less intimidating than the beige maze-like people warrens of the past 40 or so years. And, it's even starting to happen in Buffalo, albeit at a slower pace than on both coasts.
Collaboration
The corporate buzzword is "collaborative," as in a realization that people in an office work together as a team and that the sum is greater than its parts. People working together instead of standing on tiptoe to see if colleagues showed up today might improve productivity and creativity.
People in the office design and furnishing business hereabouts admit the cubicle walls are getting lower or are disappearing, designs are becoming more open, and the atmosphere more interactive and flexible. Simultaneously, for many their total work area is being downsized.
"The walls are getting lower to facilitate communications between various people in the office. It goes hand-in-hand with looking at an office in a holistic way and seeing how it all works together. Employers are looking at teams of employees, not just people functioning in individualized roles," says Paul Murrett, sales manager at Prentice Office Equipment in Buffalo. "They view the workplace as a tool to enhance productivity," not just as a place to work, he adds.
Open design
"There's been a change in the industry. Instead of private offices with high outside walls, employers want their employees to have more natural light and better HVAC (heating, ventilating and air conditioning) circulation, and made cubicles more open and airy," adds James Spano, owner of Buffalo Office Interiors.
So, what's happened is they've been lowering or removing partitions, adding some frosted glass here and there for privacy and making the whole place more flexible, to encourage collaboration between employees. And, they've come to realize that the inflexibility of the old partitions was a hindrance to such things as reconfigurations to accommodate new work technology stemming from electronic communication.
Economic concerns
Despite all the talk about collaboration, mobility, and brushing elbows with co-workers, there are some very pragmatic and economic reasons for abandoning the pre-Vietnam cubicles. In that the office furniture industry exercises a very vested interest � a desire to sell more office furniture.
The economics of square-foot rental space is one motivator for change. "With what's going on in the economy companies are asking if they really need 8-by-10-foot work spaces with guest chairs for everyone," Spano points out. Some find 6-by-8 works all right, at least for some employees.
"Everything's on casters, so you can move things out to an area for conference space. And, they want acoustical panels they can move around. That makes it easier when there's a need to install new telecommunications or data lines.
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is a process that involves outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people. This process can occur both online and offline. The difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific body, such as paid employees.
Crowdsourcing is related to, but not the same as, human-based computation, which refers to the ways in which humans and computers can work together to solve problems. These two methods can be used together to accomplish tasks.
Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. In the classic use of the term, problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users—also known as the crowd—submit solutions. Solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place—the crowdsourcer. The contributor of the solution is, in some cases, compensated either monetarily, with prizes, or with recognition. In other cases, the only rewards may be kudos or intellectual satisfaction. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts or small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization.
Due to the blurred limits of crowdsourcing, many collaborative activities, online or not, are being considered crowdsourcing when they are not. Another consequence of this situation is the proliferation of definitions in the scientific literature. Different authors give different definitions of crowdsourcing according to their specialities, losing in this way the global picture of the term.
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