Page 142 - Trust in ICT 2017

2 Trust in ICT

Blog (as a kind of social media)

A blog is a personal online journal that is frequently updated and intended to the open public, which is a
discussion or an informational site published on the World Wide Web [30]. Blogging can be seen as a form
of a social networking service. A key characteristic of blogs is interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments
and even messages to each other on the blogs. The interactivity of blogs distinguishes them from other static
websites. "Bloggers do not only produce contents to post on their blogs, but also build social relations with
their readers and other bloggers." The one is more personal online diaries and the other is more of an online
brand advertising of a particular individual or company. Many blogs provide commentary on a particular
subject. "A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related
to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive form is an important contribution to
the popularity of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (art blogs),
photographs (photoblogs), videos (video blogs or "vlogs"), music (MP3 blogs), and audio
(podcasts). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts."

Recently with the rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) have been
developed, in which the posts written by large numbers of authors are professionally edited. "MABs
from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions
account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic." There are many different types of blogs: personal blogs,
collaborative blogs, group blogs, microblogging (the practice of posting small pieces of digital content which
could be texts, pictures, links, short videos, or other media on the Internet), corporate and organizational
blogs. It is noteworthy to mention that the future direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions with
no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in contexts, but not a lot of mutual
understanding.

Wikipedia (as a kind of social media)
Wikipedia is a free, open content online encyclopaedia created through the collaborative efforts of a
community of users. It is a special type of website designed to make collaboration easy, called a wiki. Jimmy
Wales and Larry Sanger co-founded Wikipedia [42]. As of January 2008, the encyclopaedia offered over four
million articles. At that same time, Wikipedia is ranked as the eighth-most popular site on the Internet.
Wikipedia was the only non-commercial site of the top ten. Criticisms of Wikipedia include assertions that its
openness makes it unreliable and unauthoritative. Because articles do not include by-lines, authors are not
publicly accountable for what they write. Similarly, because anyone can edit any article, the site's entries are
vulnerable to unscrupulous edits.

Facebook (as a kind of social media)
Facebook is a popular free social networking website that allows registered users to create profiles, upload
photos and video, send messages, and keep in touch with friends, family, and colleagues. This site includes
public features such as:

– Marketplace – allows members to post, read, and respond to the classified advertisements;
– Groups – allows members who have common interests to find and interact with each other;
– Events – allows members to publicize an event, invite guests, and track who plans to attend;
– Pages – allows members to create and promote a public page built around a specific topic;
– Presence technology – allows members to see which contacts are online and chat.

Within each member's personal profile, there are several key networking components. The most popular
feature is arguably the Wall which is essentially a virtual bulletin board. Messages left on a member's Wall
can be texts, videos or photos. Another popular component is the virtual photo album. Photos can be
uploaded from a desktop or directly from a smartphone camera. An interactive album allows the member's
contacts (who are generically called "friends") to comment on each other's photos and identify (tag) people
in the photos. Another popular profile component is status updates. A microblogging feature allows
members to broadcast short announcements to their friends. All interactions are published in a news feed,
which is distributed in real time to the member's friends.

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