Entertainment

Online services is a vast and fast growing business. One of the services is online entertainment. The four different types of online services i will be talking about are Radio, Games, TV and video. However there are many many more out there in the entertainment sector for example you now get online books and magazines.

Over the past week alone i have spent everday listening to online music through either youtube or spotify. I have played various amount of games on websites like miniclip and teagames.com. I have watched a few programmes that i have missed through BBC i player or 4OD. I do all of this in just a few days. When you think about how many people use online entertainment it makes you think just how big the entertainment sector is.

A lot of entertainment cannot be used without the source of internet, which means people depend on the internet to let them listen to their music or read their books. For example online games cannot be played without the internet especially multiplayer games. radio cannot be listened without the connections. watching missed progames on 4oD or BBC Iplayer is impossible to do without the internet.

On the other hand you could argue that you can read books without the internet you can listen to CD's without the internet you can also watch TV without the internet. But you can only do these kind of things to a certain extent, you would have to have a CD player and the CD's where as on the internet you can listen to your favourite music with the click of a button. To read a book you will need to go out and buy the book where as online you can read a book with the costs of a couple of pounds, you dont even have to move. It fast and easy.

Radio

Radio is a very popular way of listening the music. People can listen to the radio from all over the world the click of a few buttons.

I personally reasearched this and i was able to find radio stations from all the different continents and listen to the music. I was even able to find a radio station in iraq and also listen to it.

This is the website i used to find all the radio stations from all over the world. It was really easy to navigate and there is so much choice you have to spend some time thinking about what to listen to.

http://radiostationworld.com/default.asp

Examples:

http://www.alouette.fr/zenon/HomePage/index_1200.php

This website is one of the most popular radio stations in france. from here you can listen to this radio.

http://www.safm.co.za/portal/site/safm/

This radio is from south africa

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pashto/institutional/2010/03/000000_on_the_hour_news.shtml

This radio is from pashto

http://www.cpr.org/

This is a radio from Colorado.

http://www.rbn.org.br/

This is a radio from Brazil

http://www.abc.net.au/classic/

This radio is from Australia

Radio's are presented in a website view. Each radio station tends to have a website where the public can access a little music player which will either play live or will play recorded music. I find that the bigger that radio station is the better the radio's website will be. This means that the website will have better access to the music. To access a radio's broadcast simply type it into an online search engine like 'google'. Goggle for example will come up with a silly amount of different websites so if you want to find something specific make sure that you write in something specific. for example if i typed in 'listen to heart radio' the second link is the one i want and that will take me straight to the website where i can find the music.

Most radio stations are free and can be accessed from almost anywhere however some radio stations make you pay a subscription fee. Radio's can be targeted at anyone, from reception children to old age pensioners.

The radio is not limited to just the Internet the easiest way people find the the radio these days is when they are in the car and they are listening to their car radio. You can easily buy a radio clock or a radio box for around £10. Radio these days are very very easy to get your hands on.

Advantages to the radio are that they are a good form of entertainment and they are very easily accessed. People love listening to their favourite songs and now they can easily do that. There is also many different types of radio stations this is also an advantage as everybody is different and enjoy listening to different things.

TV

TV stands for Television. Television is where you watch your favourite programmes and films. Television has far to many different channels to even begin to list however the most popular in the UK are BBC1, BBC2, ITV and ITV2. Television was not started through the internet. A man called willoughby smith made the first tele withthe discovery of photoconductivity; but the man to make the first television with moving images was John Logie Baird in 1926. This means that TV is not unique to the internet.

This is John Logie Baird and his first tele

              This picture shows you the difference between the type of tele when the first came out and what teles are like now.

Recently people have developed a way to watch tele online and watch all you missed programmes. To find live television on the internet i find is very rare. Most businesses will put the programme up on the internet after the programme has been played. Programmes like these are called BBC i player or ITV player. These programmes should not have the ability to be accessed in different countries as the idea of these programmes are people can catch up with there favourite programmes who pay their TV liscense. These programmes are free for the UK, all you need to do is type the player would like into a search engine like google and click on the website you want. For example if i wanted to find the BBC i player, i would type 'BBC i player' into google and the link i want is the first one that comes up.

Most programmes like these are free, the ones i use are free however some may ask you to subscribe and pay for a subscription fee. This will normally pay for the up keep of the website. These programmes are aimed at the public who watch TV generally or people who watch that programmes channel. For example the Iplayer will aimed at people who watch BBC 1,2 or 3.

The advantage to these programmes are that people can watch missed programmes or catch up on a series. These programmes have defonately enhanced the technology of TV entertainment, as now people never have to miss a thing.

Video

Video is something that you can watch. By video i mean websites like youtube. Youtube is a large website with hundred of throusands of videos made by the public to share with the rest of the world. Youtube can be accessed from all over the world and absolutely anybody with a computer and a youtube account can upload a video. The content of the videos are checked before they are allowed onto youtube. This kind of video entertainment is unique to the internet and apart from some TV shows like you've been framed and rude tube there is nothing like online video entertainment. It is very easy to access any video, type it into a search engine and you get many many different types of video websites come up. For example karma tube and youtube are free to subscribe and load movies/videos however websites like lovefilm.com and moviescapital.com make you pay to watch films and videos. Some websites like lovefilm.com let you have a free trial for 2 weeks where you are able to download and rent unlimited amount of films, games and music for 2 weeks. This gives you a taster of what you can have. If customers like this they then get the choice to pay £5.99 a month to get this all the time service all the time.

Online video entertainment is targeted at mainly young adults who are into music, funny videos and films.

The advantages to this online entertainment is people all over the world can share and watch videos created from proffesionals and amateurs. Many popstars like sandi thom and justin beiber have been found on youtube. This entertainment is fast and easy. On websites like youtube and karma tube, If you just want to watch thousands of free movies 24/7 you do not need an account but if you want to upload videos and share them with the rest of the world you will need an account. the best bit is these are free accounts.

The disadvantages could be that videos that you do not want to be uploaded are uploaded you can do nothing to stop it. This can be used as bullying without other people knowing it.

This kind of entertainement has defonately enchanced techonology. people can now share their videos and music with the rest of the world.



Games

Games are played all over the world all the time.

Game stats:

25% of people aged 18 years or younger

49% 18-49

26% over 50

Real Time Services

  

Real time services are websites that are constantly updated to tell you and update you of a certain subject. Real time services are websites like e-news, plain arrival updates, traffic updates and weather forecast. These websites are now very useful. They are used world wide everyday.

I have looked at one specific real time service; i have looked at Jam cams.

Jam cams

This is a website that has live updates of the traffic and jams on the big motorways. This information is very helpful to anyone who wants to travel somewhere at that moment. It works by people collecting the information from the cameras and constantly updating the website.

There are many advantages to this; people need to know what is happening now and where it is happening. These websites let them know that. It also saves the business a lot of money as if these websites did not exist people would have to find out by phone and the business will have to have many phone lines and it would cost them a fortune to run this, these websites are better and a cheaper way of providing the information.

However there are some disadvantages. The websites are updated regularly however the timing is not precision. They are always a couple of minutes out. This is because the people collecting the information have to have the time to collect the information and then update the website.

This is a screen shot of the BBC website and their jam cams for the M5 J15 you can see on this picture that the roads are moving smoothly, however if you look on the website in very small writing on the image you can see the time it was updates and the time is 12.47pm. The time is now 12.51pm and yet no update.

Another way of getting to these websites is with your mobile phone. An amazing new technology has come out where people can browse the Internet wherever they are on their own mobiles. There is a GPS on the new smart phones now and this means that people can track where they are there and then. So there phone are almost like a sat nav as well as everything else new smart phones do.



Twitter/ RSS feeds/ instant messaging

1. Write about each one.
2. Then make a video of an instant messaging.

Twitter, RSS feeds, blogs (for information on blogs, look at other feeds) and instant messaging are all types of instant communication. In this blog I will write about each one and give examples of them all.



Twitter is a type of social networking website. Anybody may have twitter. Users send and read post in the form as text messages. Each post may only have 140 characters. These posts are known as tweets. they appear on the owners page and appear on the profiles of people following that author. To follow a twitter blog means you are updated as soon as the person you are following updates their profile. These posts are used for businesses who would like to recruit new employee they give a brief description in the amount of characters allowed, musicians also have these so their fans can keep up and know what they are doing.

The advantage of twitter is people are in constant communications all the time, its easy, quick and free. However there are bad points for example there is privacy issues and it may take time for comments to be left and people may take time to update their tweets. This means that twitter is not completely instant.

RSS feeds stands for really simple syndication. They have a way of 'transporting' articles across the internet. You will often see an RSS link on websites that have updates. For example RSS feeds can be for following updates of a musician, sports athlete, personal blogs or even the weather. People use these RSS feeds as a way of getting updates from all kinds of websites in one place. This makes it a lot easier to manage all the updates from all the different websites. Below is a screen shot of a BBC news article with the small RSS feed logo in the corner. This is where people will click to follow this article. On the BBC news you also get the option to send this article to your twitter, facebook, email, or print the article off. This is when you want to share the information you have found with other people.

Instant messaging is the fastest way of getting in touch with people. Instant messaging works by first making your own account, this includes giving your name, last name and email address, you can choose to add more information like phone numbers and address. Once you have made an account you have to add your friends or family, to do this you must make sure that first they have an account and then add there address to your invitory. When they log into their account you will be able to see whether they are online or not. If you are both logged on at the same time you may have a conversation for as long as you like, saying whatever you like.
 MSN is type of istant messageing service. Not everybody likes to use MSN (instant messaging service) because there has been a lot of people hacking into accounts.

Email

Email

Electronic communication is commonly known as email. An email is an electronic message sent through the internet. Most emails can trace the sender by the headers of the message. You can block any sender or spam any emails. You can attach files such as images and videos to email too. According to Darwin magazine the first email was sent in 1971.


"Email servers are probably about the most complicated servers to set up because not only is there a huge number of security implications to running your own mail server but they also tend to be split up into many small parts taht all do different, highly specialized, things" http://www.crazysquirrel.com/computing/debian/mail.jspx (this website is not one of the most promising websites and the spelling is quite bad however the basic information written is good)


Here is a basic time line of the history of email.

1971: Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer working for Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, developed a system for sending messages between computers that used the @ symbol to identify addresses. He now can't remember the first message he sent, or the exact date he sent it.

Tomlinson's system gained popularity by linking up users on Arpanet, the US department of defence system that became the basis for the internet.

1972: Larry Roberts - also at work on Arpanet - writes the first email management program that develops the ability to list, select, forward, and respond to messages.

1976: Queen Elizabeth II sends an email message on Arpanet, becoming the first head of state to do so.

1988: Steve Dorner invents Eudora, an application that gave a popular face to email by providing a graphical user interface for email management.

1989: The first release of Lotus Notes email software. 35,000 copies are sold in the first year.

1996: Microsoft releases Internet Mail and News 1.0, a feature of its third release of Internet Explorer. This is later renamed Outlook.

1996: A few companies - including the fledgling Hotmail - begin to offer free, use-anywhere, internet email.

1997: About 10 million users world wide have free web mail accounts.

1998: Microsoft buys Hotmail for $400m (£283m).

2001: Email celebrates its 30th anniversary with virtually every business in the developed world signed on

Mini email fact file:

247 billion messages per day means more than 2.8 million emails are sent every second. Around 80% of these millions of message are but spam and viruses.

Websites used:
http://communication.howstuffworks.com/email.htm
http://www.crazysquirrel.com/computing/debian/mail.jspx
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2002/mar/13/internetnews
http://email.about.com/od/emailtrivia/f/emails_per_day.htm
http://www.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&q=emails&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=1280&bih=699

Blogs

BLOGGING

A blog is a word which originated from WEBLOG. A blog is a type of website owned by individuals or large companies. People can make a blog about absolutely anything they wish, they enter a regular entry of their subject. For example big musicians use blogs so their fans can keep track of what they are doing and what events they have coming up, individuals can write about a new games, Cd's, Films (anything) that are coming and review them. When people write a blog, other people reading can leave comments about the subjects. A good word to describe a blog is an online journal.

Blogs date back to around 1990-1997, so blogs have only been around for around 15 years. Blogs are always advancing technology. For example recently something called RSS feeds have come around. This is where you can follow someone's blog. And I am sure that the technology of blogs will be continuing to advance.



Timeline

1990- Internet forum software, created running conversations with "threads." Threads are tipical connections between messages on a virtual "corkboard."

1994- The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves diarists, journalists, or journalers. Justin Hall, who began personal blogging.

 (information collected from - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog#Origins)

1995- the first use of the term weblog, it came from a paper named “Exploiting the World-Wide Web for Electronic Meeting Document Analysis and Management” by G. Raikundalia & M. Rees, two lecturers from Bond University on the Gold Coast.

1997- popular use of the term weblog.

(Information collected from - http://www.blogherald.com/2005/03/06/a-short-history-of-blogging/)

There is many many different types of blogs but some consist of these:

The Huffington Post online newspaper



TechCrunch latest technology blog

 This is two example of today's most popular blogs. Tech crunch is a blog all about the latest technology and The huffington post in an online newspaper. The most popular blog will always be changing as there is always new ones posted and new poeple to vote. Today the people have chosen a very popular online newspaper blog and a blog all about the lastest technology. Many people would choose the online newspaper to the real newspaper. This is because the online newspaper is faster to get to, it can be read from many different types of sources. For example phone, laptop, Ipad, Ipod... The Huffington blog is also free which means it is also cheaper than a real newspaper.
To get a newspaper you have to walk to place that would stock it, for example a newsagents. Then you would have to buy it and then walk back home again. If you had any of the sources mentioned above you do not have to walk anywhere unless you need to get to the source. You only need to click a few buttons and you arrive to the news you want to read. Much more convinient. Reading blogs like huffington is also much better for the enviorment as no paper is needed to make it. there is no mess and much less waste. This shows how news blogs have become so popular. However this does involve technology and the older generation are not always so good with technology, which means that they are more likely to prefer to go to get the real newspaper.
Then there is Tech crunch. This blogs will be read by a wide range of audience. This is because this website is aimed at anybody interested in technology and gadgets. People could be reading this blog at work, students in break time, computer techs in there free time.


There are around 7.4 million active blogs around the world. This means that there could be countless numbers of blogs that have been made and just not published.

There are many possitive and negative things about blogs. Blogs can be a brilliant way of getting your fellings and emotions out there. It allows you to focus on one subject and talk about that subject to many people all over the world. Blogs allow you to meet new people and make new friends and share your opinions with them. They are easy to make and easy to edit and change. Most of the blogs you get to make are also free. So this will invite more people to join. Blogs can express many different feelings such as funny, sad, happy, angry and people may find this entertaining. It can keep people amused/ interrested for hours. On the other hand there are the bad effects of blogs. The owner of the blog may not always get nice responses to their blog. Which means they will have to deal with spam comments and rude wording. There are also some potential security risks. For example people can hack your blog account and can gather all the information you have on there and they could also then create blogs with bad content. For example viruses. Blogs always needs to update themselves as techonlogy is always advancing. This means that the blog website may need to update at an inconvienient times. Unfortunately whilst the blog website is updating the whole website is unusable. This will put a lot of people off and they will not use them anymore.
People creating blogs also have to be very carefull of what they do as if you make a mistake it is immidiately live. This means that everybody who looks at that blog when you create it will be able to see your mistakes.
There was a story in the news about an employee who got told off by his employer. The employee then decided to write a horrible comment about him on his own blog, unfortunately his boss found this comment and the employee then lost his job.


Examples:

These are examples of induviduals blogs
http://blog.benhall.me.uk/
http://angiepedersen.typepad.com/
http://angrychineseblogger.blog-city.com/about_me.htm

These are examples of today's most popular blogs:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

http://www.techcrunch.com/

http://www.gizmodo.com/

http://mashable.com/

http://www.gawker.com/

http://www.engadget.com/

http://www.tmz.com/

http://www.boingboing.net/

http://www.thedailybeast.com/

http://www.readwriteweb.com/

• Personal: This is the broadest category and includes blogs about personal topics like politics, music, family, travel, health, you name it. They can be as long and as short as you would like them to be. The user can let anybody or no body see there blog(s).
• Business: Professionals ranging from Realtors to lawyers and stock brokers are using WordPress to share their expertise, and companies have discovered the power of blogs to personally engage with their customers.
• Schools: WordPress is a great way for teachers and students to collaborate on classroom projects.
• Non-profits: Foundations, charities, and human rights groups find blogs to be great tools to raise awareness and money for their causes.
• Politics: Members of parliament, political parties, government agencies, and activists using blogs to connect with their constituencies.
• Military: Members of the military use blogs to report what they see happening in various parts of the world and to stay in touch with their families.
• Private: Some people make their blogs private to share photos and information within families, companies, or schools.
• Sports: Blogs can be used for teams, athletes, and fans to share their passion for various sports.
• How-to, tips and reviews: There are lots of blogs that share tips and reviews about cooking, games, music, books, movies, and so on. Many will also use this kind of blog if they need help on a particular subject or question at school/college...

(information from - http://en.wordpress.com/types-of-blogs/)