Real Time Information

Real time information is a key area within the Information Age that has been introduced fairly recently but, never the less, has proved to be a major help for everyone everywhere. Some of the most important features of real time information are to do with tracking airplane flights and weather. Real time information is a feature of the Information Age where only a select group of people use it very regularly; such as a business woman or man who travels alot from meeting to meeting, perhaps either by trians or buses. To try and give an idea of what real time information does, I have acquired an example of airplane tracking and weather which are two good examples of real time information.

Flightradar24.com:

Flight tracking is one very important feature of real time information. This allows you to keep a track of any particular air-line plane, ranging from all sorts such as Thomas Cook to Easy Jet. You are able to keep a tab of a certain plane and from there you can see its departure port and landing port, altitude, speed and even the registration of the plane. An example of a site that does this is Flightrader24.com. Here we can see a particular plane from an airline named Pakistan International, which has come from Heathrow in London. From the map and information boxes we can say that as the plane was just about to come over Tunbridge Wells it is at an altitude of 15575 feet, 4747 metres. And then, after a minute of the plane continuing its process of taking off, as it leaves the vicinity of Tunbridge Wells and flies past we can see that the altitude has changed to 17150 feet, 5227 metres.

Before Tunbridge Well
(Taken from Flightradar24.com)








After Tunbridge Wells
(Taken from Flightradar24.com)

You may use this area of real time information to keep an eye on a plane that may have a family member on, or to see when and where you are on the plane. This site does use real time information, but it is not being streamed or updated every single second; there is a tiny delay in when you can see a change from what you previously saw, even if this delay is as short as ten seconds, which is the time-lapse that occurs for Flightradar24.com. However, this is not the case for the website Earthcam.com.

Earthcam.com

Earthcam.com is a site in which the user may choose a particular place in the world that is offered on the site and then they can look in real time at what is going on. This allows for the user to check the weather in said part of the world; as the camera link allows for a full panoramic view of the area it is in. Not only does the picture that is being streamed show the weather, but there is a drop down box which also tells you the precise temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius. Here we can see an example of one of the drop down boxes that features on Earthcam.  For instance, it is telling us that in Times Square, New York, the current temperature is 10 Celsius, 50 Fahrenheit, at precisely 2:00 p.m. Unlike Flightradar, this site does not have any sort of time-lapse, meaning that the picture you see is streamed constantly without delay; this too goes for the weather update. Weather checking is a very important use of real time information, especially if you don’t want to catch the bad side of the weather on a day out.

Taken from Earthcam.com

Taken from Earthcam.com

Advajtages of Real Time Information:

-It gives people information that is reliable and on time and is usually very accurate.
-People on the move are able to plan out their routes effectivley and get to where they need to be quickly.
-Real time information can be used to track parcells and packages that have come from over seas and they will tell you how long it will take to get to you.

Disadvantages of Real Time Information;

-Information needs to be updated regularly for it to be remotley usefull which may be very time consuming.
-Information that is out of date is completely useless since most real time information that is used on a daily buisness are train time tables, bus times etc.

My Experience:

I have never used real time information, apart from if instant communication can be seen as real time information; which in some peoples eyes it is but in others that is not the case. Ive never needed to check train or bus time tables as most of the times Ive needed are on a sheet already. In the future I may need to go onto the websites of some of the companys and check the times if I need to go to particular places around the country but as of right now, I have never used real time information.

Communication

Communication is by far the biggest use of the internet to date, and will almost certainly be staying that way for generations to come. Anyone using the internet has realised by now that social networking is something that we all use to communicate with on a daily basis. It’s an ever growing fashion and, even more so, an ever growing way of life. A way of life that is perhaps more important for most than first though. 93% of marketers use social media for business purposes. Without the kind of advertisement that comes from social media those businesses may never have existed at all.  With so many social networking sites, forums and instant messaging sites all over the internet, it is practically impossible to keep away from them. Let’s take Facebook for example.

 Facebook is a social networking site that started up in the February of 2004. It is recorded that as of July, 2011, Facebook has more than 750 million active users, with more users joining every single day. Facebook was founded by a man named Mark Zuckerberg along with some of his college friends: Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. To start off with the site was only ever made to be used by adults, but slowly and surely, the teenage generation came into the equation. Facebook’s ‘terms and conditions’ state that only people over the age of 13 may use the site, but according to ConsumerReports.org on May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under the age of 13 with a Facebook account. In fact, it is such a well-known and widespread site that there are even babies in Egypt with the name ‘Facebook’. Not only that, if Facebook was a country it would be the 3^rd largest country in the world in terms of its population count; topping countries such as Brazil and the U.S, and being beaten by India at 2^nd and China being 1^st.

However, despite communication being such a vastly used product among the internet, it cannot undergo such success and fame without a couple of fundamental errors. No one person can use social media without having the possibility to be subject to hackers and viruses. With the evolution of social media, so has the means to hack into these widely used systems, and cause major corruption by injecting viruses. Hackers can use a multitude of software to gain access to what would originally be inaccessible by the average user. Once you have been hacked, the hacker may have access to all your personal information including bank credentials and address, and may even ‘leak’ said information to the web. This is usually the case for many celebs and iconic figures that get hacked, and are sadly unaware of the process.

Advantages of Communication:


-Signing up to social networking sites, or any form of online communication, is usually very easy and quick to do, as you only need to ever provide your email and name most of the time.
-Changing your security allows you to block and ignore particular people from talking and communicating with you.
-It makes talking to a number of people separately easy to do; you can also sort people into groups for even more ease of use.
-If someone you want to talk to is not online you are able to send offline messages to them, so when they come back online the message will be there waiting to be read.
-Finding people you know using search bars is very easy, and becomes easier if there is a suggested friends list that gives you examples of people you are most likely to know through others.


Disadvantages of Communication:


-The most obvious disadvantage is that if someone finds out your password that you use to access your means of communication they can act as being yourself, and since you can not the real person behind the screen, this leads to fraud and identity theft.
-Going through the various levels of security in most social networks are very long and tedious to do and it becomes easy to get lost in their policy's and security stages.
-Nowadays many people, especially the younger teenage generation, are becoming increasingly addicted to social networking, and are losing the people-skills that are needed for their future.


My Experience:


My experience with communication online is all to do with social networking. I have used many various forms of social networking, such as Skype and more commonly MSN messenger and Facebook. There was a point when Facebook was a completely new concept to the younger generation and so everyone started to flood into its servers, and so I would be on Facebook for a long amount of time in the evenings. Now I very rarely go onto Facebook to talk to people, only for status updating and catching up with people I havnt seen recently. Apart from social networking sites such as the ones I have just listed, i've never been a part of any of the other fairly well known ones like Myspace or Bebo.

An Introduction to the Information Age

 Living in the 21st century, we see technology all around us; televisions, computers, mobile phones, almost every aspect of our lives includes some form of technology; and it is something that we have learned to grasp and improve. In my blog I will be explaining about 5 different key areas that have developed drastically due to something known as the "Information Age”. These key areas are;                                           

- Communication; including services such as texting, emailing and chat rooms.

Communication is by far the biggest push through the internet since it began. With everyone, young and old, using it every single day it is almost impossible to over take with regards to its status on the internet. A feature of communication that has come into the picture fairly quickly and with great response is video calls, where a person can see someone else on the screen of their computer or laptop; such feature is on sites like Skype and even now on Facebook; with the help of their technology partners, Skype.

- Entertainment; to do with online-gaming, radio players, sports and books.
Entertainment at some point in our lives has been a nice little get away from the real world or just a good time waster. Entertainment on the internet has gained such a wide number of systems, with games being the number one source. Whether this be playing multiplaer games, which is playing with other people around the world at the same time as you, or single player gaming, by playing on your own (but doesnt mean its not as fun as multiplayer!).

- Education; with features like VLE’s, online learning, school websites, school league tables, online revision and simulations.
Education has benefited greatly from the internet. Many students, and even many teachers, have all at some point needed the internet for some reason or another. There are many types of educational sites that can be used to contribute towards learning, such as BBC Bitesize for an all round group of lessons or sites that specialise in on particular area, such as Atantot which is purely for languages.

- E-Commerce; which focus on online shopping, banking and auctions, some typical sites being eBay and Amazon which are used by millions of people.
Without the internet there for retailers there is a very high chance that most of the smaller less known shops would not survive the heavy industry world and get pushed down by the bigger brands and eventually shut down. But with the help of the internet, so that they can have a website to help push them along, they are able to compete in todays world.

- Downloading Services; which offers a variety of things such as music, games, upgradable software and films.

Downloading services has caused quite a stir over the internet, due to the reputation its acquired from people using the services illegally or a virus from a bad download site. But when used for the purposes listed above, that is when downloading services becomes much more of a benefit for everyone; especially if you want to get something that would otherwise be much more expensive or take too long to find else where.