1. Internet 2
By kenneth Ayebazibwe
256774185458 / 256702555890

2. Multimedia on the Web
• Today's Web presents a diversified
multimedia experience. In fact, the Web has
become a broadcast medium, offering live TV
and radio, pre-recorded video, photos,
images, and animations. Expect to encounter
multimedia just about anywhere on the Web.
This tutorial presents a brief overview.
• Plugins, media players, and multimedia types

3. • plugins and media players are software programs that
allow you to experience multimedia on the Web. These
terms are sometimes used interchangeably. File
formats requiring this software are known as MIME
types. MIME stands for Multimedia Internet Mail
Extension, and was originally developed to help e-mail
software handle a variety of binary (non-textual) file
attachments such as photos. The use of MIME has
expanded to the Web. For example, the basic MIME
type handled by Web browsers is text/html associated
with the file extention .html. MIME types area also
used to process multimedia on the Web. A few
examples:

4. – Jpeg photo: image/jpeg
– MPEG video: video/mpeg
– Quicktime movie: video/quicktime
– MP3 audio: audio/x-mpeg-3
– Flash presentation: application/x-shockwave-flash
• Nowadays, many personal computers come pre-loaded
with plugins and media players. This is an
acknowledgement of the importance of the Web
multimedia experience. If your computer doesn't have a
particular piece of software, it can be easily obtained from
the website of the company that created it. Downloading is
easy and instructions are usually provided.

5. • plugins are software programs that work with your Web browser to
display multimedia. When your browser encounters a multimedia
file, it hands off the data to the plugin to play or display the file.
Working in conjunction with plugins, browsers can offer a seamless
multimedia experience. The plugins needed to experience Web
multimedia are available for free.
• A common plugin used on the Web is the Adobe Reader. This
software allows you to view documents created in Adobe's Portable
Document Format (PDF). These documents are the MIME type
"application/pdf" and are associated with the file extension .pdf. A
PDF is a type of image file. When the Adobe Reader has been
downloaded to your computer, the software will open and display
the file when you click on its link on a Web page.

6. • media players are software programs that can play audio
and video files, both on and off the Web. The concept of
streaming media is important to understanding how media
can be delivered on the Web. With streaming technology,
audio or video files are played as they are downloading, or
streaming, into your computer. Sometimes a small wait,
called buffering, is necessary before the file begins to play.
Extensive pre-recorded files such as interviews, lectures,
televised video clips, podcasts, and music work very well
with these players. They can also be used for real-time
radio and TV, including Web-only TV. Popular media
players include the Windows Media Player, RealPlayer,
QuickTime Player, and Flash Player.

7. • Audio
• Audio files, including music, are an important part of the Web
experience. Listening to music on the Web is a popular pastime.
Audio files of many types are supported by the Web with the
appropriate players. The MP3 file format probably the most
popular option for audio files.
• MP3 files are also the source of podcasts. These are audio files
distributed through RSS feeds, though the term is sometimes also
used to describe video programming (or vodcast). You can
subscribe to a podcast's RSS feed, and listen to the podcast series,
with a special type of player called a podcatcher. A podcatcher can
be either available on the Web or downloaded to your computer
like any other plugin. iTunes can serve as a podcatcher. Keep in
mind that you can often listen to a podcast on the originating site.
For an example, visit NYTimes.com Podcasts.

8. • Video
• Streaming video is the backbone of live and pre-
recorded broadcasting on the Web. YouTube is one of
the most popular sites on the Web for pre-recorded
video. Real-time professional or personal broadcasts
are also very popular.
• The Web is a medium for exchanging information
among professionals. A live professional broadcast
from a conference, company, or institution is
sometimes referred to as a webcast. A variation on this
is a webinar, a seminar broadcast on the Web.

9. • o watch video discussions by experts in their fields, take a
look at:
• Academic Earth, a collection of free video lectures by top
scholars
• BigThink, where experts discuss current events
• Bloggingheads.tv, where academics, journalists, and others
have two-way conversations, or diavlogs, on substantive
topics
• Hulu, a site offering TV broadcasts and movies
• iTunes U, which offers free lectures from a handful of
universities
• WebMedia: Special Events at Princeton University, offering
archived speeches and conferences

10. • live cams and live tv are a part of the real-time video experience available
on the Web. Live cams are video cameras that send their data in real time
to a Web server. These cams may appear in all kinds of locations, both
serious and whimsical: an office, on top of a building, a scenic locale, a
special event, a fish tank, and so on. Live cams are stationary and only
broadcast what is in their line of sight. Moving video takes live
broadcasting to the next level: TV on the Web. Some people wear
portable cameras and allow the public to observe their lives - an intense
form of reality TV. Justin.tv was a pioneer in this type of live broadcasting.
Other people broadcast their involvement in specific topics, such as
cooking or technology. Check out Blip.tv and Ustream for examples.
• Live TV broadcasts abound on the Web. As with radio stations mentioned
above, use a search engine to locate a station's website and follow the
links to the live broadcast. There are also plenty of pre-recorded network
TV shows available on the Web. Check out Hulu for an example of a site
that hosts this type of content.

11. • Photos
• Photos may seem like old hat, but the Web has found
interesting ways of presenting them. Most major search
engines have an option for searching for photos. This is
usually combined with a search for non-photographic
images along with photos, and is therefore called an image
search. Google Image Search is a good example. There are
also search engines dedicated to image searching, for
example Picsearch.
• The social Web has come up with innovative ideas for
photo sharing. Check out Flickr and Pinterest for examples
of different ways in which you can use the social Web to
display and share your photos - and also to view, share and
comment on the photos of others.

12. The Web and You: A Guide to
Participation
• In 2006, Time magazine named You as the Person of the
Year with the comment: "Yes, you. You control the
Information Age. Welcome to your world."
• This tutorial will explain how you - yes, you - can participate
in and therefore control your experience of the Web. The
Web allows anyone with an Internet connection to join in.
(Unfortunately, some of this capability is blocked in certain
countries.) With the proper tools, you can create content
either alone or collaboratively, share your content, and
comment on the content of others. There are various terms
used to describe this phenomenon, including web 2.0, the
social web, the read-write web. The topic is huge. This
tutorial is intended as a brief introduction to the lay of the
land.

13. • It's interesting to watch as the content of the social Web is entering the
mainstream of the Web experience. For example, blog posts can be found
in search engine results. The search engine Bing indexes Twitter content
in order to provide up-to-the-minute results, and Facebook status updates
are in the works. This brings up the importance of the social Web to the
real-time web. It is becoming increasingly important to the development
of the Web to present real-time, or near real-time, content.
• A large factor in interacting with the Web is having access to the Web at
any time and any place. The Web and its functionalities are becoming
increasingly mobile. While laptop computers have been around for years,
the focus now is on cell phones, tablet computers and other portable
devices connected to the Web. The iPhone is just one example of a device
that allows people to take the Web with them wherever they go to access
websites, social networks, search engines, and location-based
information. Mobile devices can keep us connected to the networked
world with ever-expanding capabilities.

14. Social networking sites
• social networking sites are online communities in which members interact. In fact,
everything covered in this tutorial involves social networking of some sort. A site
that specializes in social networking is focused on making connections among its
users. The activities may be limited to one activity or interest, such as sharing
videos, to multiple activities such as creating a personal profile, posting your
current activity or state of mind, making "friends", engaging in discussions, joining
groups, sending messages, sharing photos, and so on. Social networking can
involve individuals or institutions, and can be used for recreational, informational,
academic, and professional purposes.
• Examples: Facebook, Google +, LinkedIn, MySpace, FriendFeed, LibraryThing, Digg
• It is becoming easier to share content from around the Web. Let's say you have
read an article that you want to share on your Facebook account. websites,
especially blog and news sites, sometimes offer an easy way to post this content
to the social networking site of which you are a member. Here is an example of
the many sharing options featured on a technology blog. If you have an account
on any of these services, you can share the posting there with just a few clicks.

15. RSS Basics
• RSS is a feed format that is used to distribute frequently-published content. The
feed format is a standardized subset up the mark-up language known as XML. The
resulting feeds can be pushed to RSS readers and Web pages.
• The initials RSS can stand for different things, including Rich Site Summary or
Really Simple Syndication. RSS content is often referred to as syndicated content
because of its wide distribution. Users can subscribe to the RSS feeds of their
choice, and then have access to the updated information as it comes in.
• The presence of an RSS feed is often signaled by an orange icon of some type. Two
examples are shown here.
• RSS is an important part of the participatory web. Wherever content is frequently
added, you will probably find an RSS feed. This is because many sites on the social
Web automatically create RSS feeds and add to the feed as you add content. Blogs
create RSS feeds, and so does Twitter. Tags assigned to photos on the photo
sharing site Flickr can be followed with an RSS feed. If you want to keep up with
the latest contributions by people on the social Web, reading RSS feeds is a useful
way to do it.

16. Reading RSS feeds
• To experience RSS, you first need to subscribe to the feed
using an rss reader, or aggregator. This is software that
displays new items posted to your feed subscriptions and
stores the old updates. It is similar to e-mail software,
except that the incoming items are derived from RSS feeds.
• There are all kinds of RSS readers. Popular Web browsers
offer integrated RSS readers. You can also download a
reader to your computer or mobile device. Or, you can use
an RSS reader on the Web, for example the Google Reader.
The advantage here is that you can access your RSS feeds
from any computer that is connected to the Web.
• Subscribing to an RSS feed is as simple as adding its address
to your reader's subscription list. Below is an example from
the Google Reader.

18. SEARCH TOOLS
General Search Engines
• Alexa Web Search - analyzes site traffic including ranking, global users, pages
linking to the site, and links to related pages of interest
• Ask.com - general search engine enhanced by a number of specialty searches
including images, news and video; search results show related searches and
popular questions and answers
• Bing - Microsoft engine that displays excerpts from sites retrieved by your search
and offers related search suggestions; multimedia and other deep Web results are
also displayed. Also check out Bing Maps.
• Blekko - retrieves results from trustworthy sites and offers filtered searching with
the use of slash tags, e.g., global warming /climate; can sort results by relevance or
date; allows searchers to integrate their Facebook "likes" into search results
• ChaCha - offers live human guides to help answer queries; accepts queries from
mobile devices
• DuckDuckGo - offers results from content-rich sites, displays "zero-click" answers
at the top of the search result page, and features numerous search options and
site settings; offers unusual search privacy

19. • Exalead - offers thumbnail images of retrieved sites,
and organization of results by type of site, file type,
language and country
• Factbites - searches for full topic matches and returns
meaningful, full sentence excerpts from sites in its
results list; offers related searches
• Yahoo! - portal with a general Web search and many
other content services; the search feature uses the
Bing index and offers the Axis app for visual results
Zanran - searches for data and statistics found in
graphs, tables and charts; hover your mouse over the
item icon for a preview

20. • Google - Web's most popular search engine. Also check out
EcoSmartSearch.com, a Google-powered search engine with a black
background display that saves energy.
• Google offers a number of Services that are worth exploring,
including: Google Blog Search, for searching blog entries Google
Book Search, for searching the full text of books from most
publishers in the U.S. Google Scholar, offers the full text, abstracts,
and/or citations to scholarly materials including books, journal
articles, documents in academic repositories and the free Web. This
link will allow you to access the full text of articles in journals to
which the Libraries subscribe when you are off campus. Google U.S.
Government Search, a searchable database of U.S. government
Web sites (.gov and .mil) ranked by link popularity

21. Subject Directories & Encyclopedias
• Academic Info - gateway to college and research level Internet resources
maintained by former librarian Mike Madin and a volunteer group of
subject specialists
• BUBL Link - UK funded project of selective resources from the Centre for
Digital Library Research of Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland
(ceased updating in April 2011)
• INFOMINE - large collection of scholarly Internet resources collectively
maintained by several libraries, including those from the University of
California
• ipl2 - large, selective collection maintained by students and professionals
in library and information science; the collection is the result of a merger
of the Internet Public Library (IPL) and the Librarians' Internet Index (LII).
• Research Guides - extensive collection of subject pages from the
University of Delaware Library
• The WWW Virtual Library - guides to many disciplines sponsored by the
W3 Consortium

22. Encyclopedias
• Mashpedia - real-time, social encyclopedia
that combines Wikipedia articles with the
latest news, videos, images, Twitter messages
and relevant links
• Wikipedia - wiki-based major encyclopedia,
available in many languages, that anyone can
edit