Blogging with WordPress

WordPress, official successor of b2\cafelog, is an open source blog publishing application. It has become one of the most popular CMS’s right now, as well as Movable Type. The main reasons for its success are its enormous growth, its GPL license, and its simplicity.

WordPress Icon

The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck, a friend of lead developer Matt Mullenweg. And continuing with the curiosities, we have to remark that each WordPress version launched has been called like famous jazz musicians (Mingus, Strayhorn…).

Saving time with RSS

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works such as blog entries, news headlines and so on, in a standardized format. An RSS document includes a brief summary of the original text, and also metadata such as publishing dates and authorship.

RSS Logo

And, you all might be thinking of who benefits from the use of this type of formats. Let’s see. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically; they, too, benefit readers who want to subscribe to websites that are regularly updated.

Third debate in the Moodle forum

A markup language is an artificial language that uses a set of annotations to text that give information about the structure of the text or how it must be displayed. There are more than one markup language but, probably, the most popular ones are the HTML and the XML because of their massive use in the World Wide Web. Both of them have its origin in the SGML but after analysing them we can find some differences:

Web content, in depth

When we talk about content we are referring to a piece of information that, for any reason, is valuable for users and that could be delivered by different media such as the Internet, books, television, audio CD’s, or even live events like conferences, presentations or expositions.

Content architecture representation

 Today, however, we are going to focus and put the stress on the accurate analysis of the Web content and its development. First of all, let’s define what we should understand by Web content development. We call Web content development to the process of researching, gathering and editing information for publication on Web sites. Web site content may consist of texts, graphics, pictures, movies… distributed by a hypertext protocol server, and viewed by a Web browser. Surprisingly, Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, two important information architecture researchers, also include in the Web content the future applications of the Web that do not exist right now.

Markup languages, from printer to the Web

A markup language is an artificial language that uses a set of annotations to text that give information about the structure of the text or how it must be displayed. The term ‘markup’ comes from the traditional publishing practice of ‘marking up’ a manuscript, what involves adding symbolic printer’s instructions in the margins. For centuries, this task was done by skilled typographers known as ‘markup men’ who took down these symbols in the texts to indicate what typeface, style, and size should be applied to each part. Markup languages have been applied by editors, proofreaders, and graphic designers, and recently have been used in computer typestting and word-processing systems too.

A specialized markup language based on SGML is used in the digital version of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The first idea about a markup language in this computer science world that we are studying appeared in 1967 thanks to William W. Tunnicliffe, who led the development of a standard called GenCode for the publishing industry and later was a chair of the International Organization for Standardization committee. However, the IBM researcher Charles Goldfarb is considered the ‘father’ of markup languages because of his work at the SGML committee, the first widely used descriptive markup language.

Second debate in the Moodle forum

Human communication has suffered a constant evolution along the millenniums. When we study this process, the first idea that we should remark is the oral transmission of information. This ability is one of the most important characteristics of human race, allowing us to difference ourselves from animals and share knowledge in order to evolve.

According to Walter J. Ong we could distinguish two types of orality; the primary orality, which makes reference to the verbal expression among members of a society without written literature; and secondary orality, which referes to the oral transmission in societies with written literature and printing knowledge.

Hypermedia, what are we talking about?

The term hypermedia was used for the first time in the book No More Teacher’s Dirty Looks by Ted Nelson in the year 1965. We call hypermedia to the procedures to design contents including texts, videos, audios, maps… that are able to interact with the user. That is the main and most important characteristic of the hypermedia. 

Aspen Movie Map

The first hypermedia work that we have a record of is the Aspen Movie Map, a tool developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by a team working with Andrew Lippman in 1978 and that allowed users to take a virtual tour through the city of Aspen, Colorado. But the most modern hypermedia have been delivered, mainly, via electronic pages, using a wide range of systems including Media players, web browsers and, of course, stand-alone applications. However, when we think of hypermedia works we are not exclusively referring to computer applications, a Dvd, for instance, is a good example of hypermedia.

Orality and writing, human communication step by step

Human communication has suffered a constant evolution along the millenniums. When we study this process, the first idea that we should remark is the oral transmission of information. This ability is one of the most important characteristics of human race, allowing us to difference ourselves from animals and share knowledge in order to evolve.

"Writing is inhuman" Socrates. Bust of Socrates (469 BC–399 BC) at the Louvre Museum in Paris

According to professor Walter J. Ong we could distinguish different types of orality; the ‘primary orality’, which refers to the verbal expression among members of a society without written literature; the ‘residual orality’, which refers to the verbal expression in cultures that have had a previous contact with writing and print, but have not completely ‘interiorized’ the use of these technologies in their daily lives, because, in the opinion of  Marshall McLuhan, another important communications theorist, as a culture interiorizes the tools of literacy, the ‘residual orality’ diminishes; finally, we find in the electronic age the ’secondary orality’, which displaces written words with audio/visual technologies.

First debate in the Moodle forum

Kevin Kelly, author that we have been studying in class and editor of Wired magazine, has recently talked about the first five thousand days of the Web in an informal meeting at the EG 2007 Conference, where he, also, shared with all of us through a revealing video his main thoughts about how he thinks the future of the Web will be. Summing up, we could say that Kelly announces three main changes in the evolution of the Web:

• An increasing contribution of users

• The ’semantic’ Web

• The AI of the Machine

Discovering Kevin Kelly

When we think of people that have revolutioned the field of computer science, one name that always crosses our minds in first place is Kevin Kelly. Mr. Kelly is a world wide recognized conservationist, photographer, writer and, above all, digital culture expert.

Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly has worked and published for extremely prestigious newspapers and magazines (New York Times, Esquire, The Economist, Life, Time…), but one of the many remarkable points in his literary career is, probably, being the founding executive editor of Wired, the succesful computer related magazine.