eGovernment

In this blog I will be looking into the concept of eGovernment. I will then try and give an answer to the question, is eGovernment useful?

What is eGovernment?
eGovernment is the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve the activities of public sector organisations.





There are three areas that eGovernment focuses on are:

eAdministration
The purpose of eAdministration is to improve the internal workings of the public sector. For example these are things such as, managing process performance and cutting process costs. The government does things to strengthen productivity.

eCitizens and eServices
These initiatives deal particularly with the relationship between government and citizens. To do this the government listens to citizens on topics such as improving public services. The government will then try to go about resolving any issues.

eSociety
Such initiatives deal particularly with the relationship between public agencies and other institutions - other public agencies, private sector companies, non-profit and community organisations. The government will try to build partnerships with organisational groupings to achieve economic and social objectives. The public sector is almost always one of the partners, though occasionally it acts only as a facilitator for others.




So is eGovernment useful?
I believe that eGovernment is useful because it is convenient and cost-effective for businesses, and the public benefits by getting easy access to the most current information available without having to spend time, energy and money to get it. The future of eGovernment looks to be positive

Blog Spamming and Link Farming

The topic of this week’s blog is blog spamming and link farming. In this blog I will be exploring an answer to the question what is the effect of blog spamming and link farming having on the internet?



Blog spamming is creating non-value comments on somebody blogs to refer to their own site. The reason for this is to give the creators own site higher ratings in search engines. This is similar to "Link Farming " because it is the process of exchanging links with Web sites in order to increase search engine optimization.





Blog spamming shows how the internet can be controlled and manipulated by individuals interested in personal gain. Issues such as blog spamming and link farming enable people to give themselves higher ratings in search engine and I feel that this has a negative effect on the internet. This is because the internet becomes full of information that is not important or relevant to what the user has searched for. It also means that the search engines such as Google become less reliable because they are filled with people who are only interested in having their website number one in Google’s search engine. The concept of net neutrality proposes that there should be no restrictions on content, communications allowed or attachments on internet sites. However I don’t believe that this can be possible when some internet users continue to create fake blogs and exchanging links with other websites just to give themselves higher ratings in search engines.

There are ways to stop blog spamming for example disallowing multiple consecutive submissions. It is rare on a site that a user would reply to their own comment, yet spammers typically will do. Checking that the user's IP address is not replying to a user of the same IP address will significantly reduce flooding. This however proves problematic in the fairly rare instance when multiple users, behind the same proxy, wish to comment on the same entry.

With this is mind I feel that it is important that search engines such as Google cut out as much blog spamming and link farming to enable users to have more accurate internet searches.

Tagging

In this week’s blog I will be looking into the concept of tagging and discussing whether it is useful or not.
Tagging is a term assigned to a piece of information, for example an internet bookmark or digital image. This is a form of metadata. Metadata provides information about a certain item's content. For example, an image may include metadata that describes how large the picture is, the colour depth and when the image was created. A text document's metadata may contain information about how long the document is, who the author is and when the document was written. Tagging is also used as a way to describe data or content therefore acting as a way to locate it via search engines. This is effectively adding a new hierarchy to the way information is organized.




Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system.
Tagging has become increasingly popular as a result of social networking sites, such as Facebook, Digg.com and Flickr. This is because more and more people are putting their own content online.



Websites that include tags often display collections of tags as tag clouds. A user's tags are useful both to them and to the larger community of the website's users.

I believe that tagging is a useful concept because it enables people to navigate themselves round a website quickly. For example with websites such as Facebook you can easily find your friends because they may have been tagged in a picture. It also benefits the internet and internet users because it makes links to other websites easily accessible.

Hackers

This week’s blog will be looking into whether hackers have a positive effect on open source software.
Open source is free access to the source code of a program and extensive free redistribution rights for this software, for example Linux. This type of software appeals to hackers as they can look at how the software is made and add things to it or create their own versions. Linux is an operating system, it is the software on a computer that enables applications and the computer operator to access the devices on the computer to perform desired functions. This makes it very similar to other operating systems, such as Windows. However Steve Ballmer CEO Microsoft says that “Linux is a cancer.”




So do hackers have a positive effect on open source?
It could be argued that without hackers the internet and technology would never develop. As Mitch Kapor, says in an interview with The Guardian, “Without the internet and the web, no open source – without open source, no internet or web.” Therefore without open source and hackers the internet and other forms of technology wouldn’t develop. The Hacker values say “All information should be free.”
In my opinion hackers can have a positive effect on open source as long as what they are doing is changing things for the advantage of other users.