How to Use LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a website used for access to people who can help with job searches. The object is to furnish a professional introduction online that will help you to put your best foot forward. LinkedIn is specifically designed for job searches and business connecting. It allows one to manage recommendations, an interactive résumé, and third-party connections.

It's actually fairly well-conceived. After being invited to join, one can accept and create a profile for oneself. The profile includes an online resume (you can select what is visible to whom); and a listing of your contacts. You can search for people you remember the names of, or you can look up the listings of members by employer, city, and industry. If they aren't already registered, you can invite them to join; actually editing their own page may occur much later.

LinkedIn follows a pattern that is becoming very standardized with sites such as YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook. Members have the option of carefully formatting their page and uploading content, but are under no obligation to do so. Registering allows one to access the content of invites or organize links to favorites (e.g., photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube). Amazon is moving towards full-fledged social networking, with the profile pages that link to friends or "interesting people" (meaning, you can link to them unilaterally). For years I've been posting reviews; now I can really go nuts with lists of books, and so on. I can also link to different social networking sites, including, naturally, this weblog.

Another fairly important feature of social web sites is that many can be linked together through iGoogle. The obvious example is the link between Digg and Facebook; when you Digg an article, a link to it appears in your Facebook minifeed (explained here).

Unfortunately, this doesn't really eliminate the business of contacting employers with customized cover letters that must arouse interest without aggravating. I find that sort of thing utterly dispiriting.
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ADDITIONAL READING & SOURCES:

Guy Kawasaki, "Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn" How to Change the World (Jan 2007). Kawasaki makes several unsupported claims, and I'm not interested in trying to defend them. He mentions that one can use LinkedIn to increase one's Google page rank. This is especially effective, he argues, because the page ranking of LinkedIn is itself quite high.

Another point he makes is that "People with more than twenty connections are thirty-four times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than five." This seems implausible to me; and there's no source for this claim. "Approached with a job opportunity" can include unwelcome spam to join an MLM, anyway.

Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer

Generally I've used either Netscape Navigator or Mozilla Firefox as my preferred browser. Both are free downloads; Navigator comes with a suite of other applications that have occasional usefulness, as, for example, Composer (HTML editor). Firefox is similar, but includes a number of interface improvements I hold in high esteem.

The Mozilla Foundation is an organization that promotes open-source software. Oddly, the non-profit organization owns the for-profit* corporation, Mozilla Corporation (since Aug '05), that actually develops the browser Firefox and the e-mail client Thunderbird. Firefox was released Nov '04 and has been downloaded 90 million times. Like Netscape's Communicator Suite, Mozilla's Suite includes an HTML editor. The source code for the editor, browser, email client, and news reader are all taken from Netscape's products, although Mozilla has substantially improved it. In fact, "Mozilla" was the original code name for Navigator, and was a contraction of "Mosaic Killer" (i.e., the original NCSA browser). The Mozilla staff are essentially the old crew of Netscape, which has been dissolved. Mozilla sourcecode is not only used in Firefox, but also Camino (for Macintosh).

Internet Explorer has stopped releasing new versions for some time; the main reason people like me have decided to abandon IE is its "Open X" component, which automatically installs programs when prompted by the webpage one happens to be visiting. Naturally, this exposes one to both obsolescence and viruses. Avant Force offers Avant, an interface layer on top of IE, which does stuff like support tabs; it is not a true browser. In addition, there are browsers based on the KDE Project's KHTML (Apple Safari) and on ODA (Opera Software Opera). Opera is designed to accommodate small screens, such as those on PDAs.

I was motivated to research these programs as a result of "Mozilla suffers growing pains" and "Firefox loses momentum" (The Register). The latter article has a totally misleading headline, IMO. It declares that Mozilla is running out of MS-IE "haters," but the text of the article explains that most of the competition is coming from Opera. The reason, in turn, that Opera is so successful is that Opera 8.0 (released April '05) was (a) targetted at the W-CDMA combatible cell phones being adopted en masse in the EU and NE Asia, this really requires the Opera browser. Moreover, beginning 20 Sep '05, Opera was availabe free without ads.

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*Actually, Mozilla Corp. is not for-profit, but taxable. This article at the American Bar Association's website is pretty helpful in explaining the distinction. Basically, the difference is that a non-profit may have certain revenue-generating activities that it will farm out to a conventional corporation. The conventional corporation, being wholly owned by the non-profit, cannot be characterized as a "for-profit" since it necessarily shares the non-profit's mission. But it is taxable.

What is IPTV?

Email alert from In-Stat:

IPTV in China will experience only moderate adoption before it takes off in 2008, reports In-Stat. With the emergence of salient applications and a maturing technology, the market is expected to get a boost from the 2008 Olympics hosted by Beijing, the high-tech market research firm says. This is expected to result in 4.5 million subscribers and US$231.3 million in set top box (STB) revenue in 2008.

Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is television whose content is delivered using internet protocols, regardless of the actual transmission medium. At this point in history, a very large share of internet users get online access via a coaxial cable, just like cable TV. Often I watch segments of the Daily Show online; it's via a TV cable that I use exclusively for transmitting digital signals, not the analog signals used on conventional TV broadcasting (or transmission of cable TV). The difference between the two is that IPTV employs a different format.

Television delivered through the internet is not necessarily IPTV, however. Internet television relies entirely on internet protocols (i.e., a conventional modem) to transmit programs. IPTV requires a set top box to handle the higher throughput of realtime transmission.

Technically, what the box does is run the signal through a set of microprocessors to obtain a more refined interpretation of the signal. One way of using a coaxial cable , or Ethernet, to transmit the far larger volumes of data required in real-time TV broadcasting is to have a computer subject the signal to far greater "scrutiny" (my word), allowing the service provider to embed more data into it.

The main provider of IPTV in Asia is presently now TV, based in Hong Kong.

Data Freeway

FTP stands for file transfer protocol. It's the standard for sharing files (of any format) between different operating systems. It allows a webmaster to communicate with the server hosting her homepage.

FTP clients are programs that allow a webmaster to upload or edit the files of a web page. Unlike "normal" files like your term paper (that you wrote in MS Word), the files that are incorporated in your webpage reside on another computer—an FTP server. FTP servers are also called hosts. You are only going to need an FTP client if you have a web page. Even then, you may not need one: this site can be maintained without an FTP client. Most personal web publishers, like Nucleus CMS, Movable Type, bBlog, WordPress, b2evolution, boastMachine, Radio, and Drupal* have file uploading built in. Likewise, Macromedia Dreamweaver has an FTP client built in.

However, these are often inadequate. Movable Type only allows one to upload files; taking them down or editing them, or re-arranging the file system (like, for example, putting images in subdirectories) is impossible. I've never used the other publishing CGI applications, so I can't comment about them.

For those of you who—like me—always want free stuff, there is a free download of an excellent FTP client available:

EngInSite Data Freeway

So now you know. I've been using this one for several months and I think it's superb.

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* List of web publishers and links via Wikipedia

On a Foray into HTML-2

This post has been edited for accuracy

So, to recap: the Web and the Internet are similar and it's reasonable for people to use them as synonyms. It's just that the Web is what individual computer users have created with HTML, in the medium of the Internet. The Internet is older; it's th foundation and building material of the Web.

Web pages are created with HTML. This simply a file type that can be read by a browser. Web pages are "made" of HTML; HTML is a high-level computer language that explains to the browsers visiting the site how to display the text and images hosted at the website.

In addition to the HTML files that the browser reads, there are elements that the browser is told to display. Web browsers are designed to "read" (recognize the format and display accurately) JPEG images (*.jpg), GIF images (*.gif), TIF (*.tif), and bitmaps (*.bmp). They can also recognize other types of files, which I'll describe in a moment.

In addition to HTML files, the above-mentioned image files, and Java or Javascript files, you can post pretty much any type of file you want on your website. However, in order to read things like an MS Word document or Acrobat PDF, you need to have the software installed on your computer. Hence, the popularity of Adobe Acrobat. The software for reading PDF files is free; people pay to buy the software for creating *.pdf files. These files will display in a new window of the browser, or a window spawned by the browser's computer (i.e., Windows or Mac OS will launch MS Excel if you open an Excel file at a website).

WHAT ARE SOME OTHER FILE TYPES YOU CAN HAVE?
You can have MPEG's, which are files that are either audio, video, or both. MPEG refers to a standards committee (like you needed to know that!), and this committee keeps issuing new formats. MPEG-2 is the standard used for most *.mpg files. A variant is MPEG-4, which was modified to create the Windows Media Video (*.wmv, or "Wave") format; Apple Quicktime (*.mov) is a third. These file types can be created by different softwares, and they can be played back by freely ditributed playback software. Like Adobe Acrobat, the player is usually free, and the computer's operating system must spawn the player for it to be seen. The file formats are mutually incompatible, although some players can play more than one format.

In addition to these, there is Macromedia Flash/FlashPlayer. This is like the others, except that Flash allows one to create a digital image by manipulating objects in the Flash software; it's like MS PowerPoint, with the ability to animate the presentation and upload it to the web. Flash files (*.swf) are typically viewed as an animated graphic within the web page; it's not usually necessary to spawn a new window for playback. As a result, one can combine animated and non-animated elements in a single page. Also, Flash is very easy to use, in my opinion.

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COOL STUFF I NOTICED LATER: Here's a blog post about new features available in the latest release of Flash (hat tip to Wikipedia's Flash entry).
(To be continued)

On a Foray into HTML

Some terms of art for the web:

Some of you are going to hear some technical language used here that is quite intimidating. A case in point is the jargon associated with web pages, the internet, and so on. The fact that many of these terms have multiple meaning doesn't make it easier, but let us hope this does.

First, many people surfing the internet may be a little confused by the terms, "internet" and "web." These are almost, but not quite, synonyms. The internet is a network of networks that is connected (at least initially) through the telephone lines, using signals much like voice transmission. Modems used a universal standard for exchanging data through the phone lines, called TCP/IP. This format was developed in 1969 though the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a branch of the Department of Defense. Much later, a protocol called HTML was developed that allowed web browsers to treat data sent over modems and convert this into graphical images, such as a web page. At the same time that HTML was invented, web browsers were also invented by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). It's easy to see why browsers and HTML had to be invented concurrently: a browser had to be able to translate data from a modem into an image that could be displayed, and there had to be a standard that allowed browsers to speak to each other.

The internet was initially useful to computer terminals connected to mainframes, running arcane software like FTP, Usenet and Gopher. I recall having a lot of friends who were familiar with these services and talked about them a lot, and finding it inconceivable that these things would ever amount to anything but costly nerd toys. In 1992, however, Mosaic emerged as the first graphical browser, thereby creating--in a stroke--the world of interconnected hypertext we know as the "Web."

(To be continued.)