Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Enhancing Learning Management Systems with Speech Tools and Web 2.0

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

The introduction of speech technologies and web 2.0 tools are two modes by which the learning management system reference material can be modified and also the learning capability can be boosted up. The web 2.0 tools are available worldwide and by effective communication, these tools can assist in making the learning more useful as well as appealing.

Learn how to make your learning management system speak.

 

There are many difficulties which the companies and schools using a learning management system have to encounter by implementing the web 2.0 tools and speech technologies in their course.. Though this tool provides assistance to the training and educational courses, but quite often there are distractions which affect the effective functioning of this tool.

In the online learning software, companies and schools are adding more number of tools such as, VoIP technology (Skype et al), wikis, discussion boards, podcasts and blogs and social networks.

With the introduction of web 2.0, there is great facility for communication between pupils and trainees. Nevertheless, advertisements are distractions, particularly school students. Your preference for the type of web 2.0 tool should be such that it doesn’t humiliate you. On MySpace, some advertisements are used which have negative aspects of many social networking and other sites. Take the case of OnSpace’s login page, where you will find continuous prominent ads disrupting while logging in. But some sites, for example, Google and Facebook give approval for only those advertisements which are less distracting.

Many debate that due to existing financial requirements, such ads are given permission. But, not many do it. Organisations like Google promotes methods which maintains users’ dignity and creativity without the use of loud and unwanted ads. In whatever way does Facebook do this. Skillfully, it permits customers to decide on the kind of ads they feel necessary.

In Facebook “engagement ads” are used to provoke customers to give a speech on videos, participate in an event, or mail a virtual present. As an example, the preceding year on the day of voting , Ben & Jerry’s procured an ad that permits consumers to forward an online ice-cream cone to their buddies, promoting its proposal of a genuine cone to those people who participated in election. The originality of social networking websites is the honorary reaction they motivate, and one such recreation on Facebook is advertising.

Other than disruptions, several web 2.0 tools assist the learning management system users to gain a more reciprocative and energetic learning experience.

Many learning programs are offered by an LMS for the pupil and the employee without any charge. In the computer world or physically, verbal communication is given more preference to typing. An LMS can be combined with social online programs to provide employees the opportunity to learn in a collaborative manner through the Internet.

Two other interesting progressions to observe in detail are speech recognition programs and speech synthesis programs; for instance, text-to-speech (TTS). The TTS feature is considered to be more superior than speech recognition technologies, but new developments in speech recognition technologies such as, Google, looks promising. A well-planned TTS program is of great help in fulfilling the necessities of visually affected learning management system users. It is difficult to believe that it is possible for the students and users with bad eyesight to hear any passage from the online screen.

Speech recognition is the latest topic with the current plan by Google to merge Google Voice with Google Translate. Just imagine if in the world, English is not the only necessary language for communication between pupils and trainee employees. It is useful if you can communicate with people of other countries fluently which in turn will assist in the improvement of web 2.0 tools learning management systems and online studies, and also international teamwork.


How Long before We See The News Delivered Direct To Our Computers? (Part 2)

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Naturally people will be more inclined to pay or set up a subscription for news content from highly trusted firms.You will not find any who are more highly thought of or respected than the BBC, and ultimately they may well be the only “free” news provider left online (although in the words of Robert A Heinlein “TANSTAAFL”– see licence fee). Such quality broadsheets and periodicals such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, The Times and Economist could all easily charge for access to online news.As a classic example, can anyone seriously doubt that people would have been queuing up to hand over their money to enable them to get more details on the Telegraph’s huge scoop about our MP’s expenses, this was a great story from a well trusted source.

What is Quality?

Would you pay for sites that aren’t “quality”?In other words, even though this works well for the broadsheets, can you see it working quite so well for the tabloids like the News of the World and the Sun?   Would you pay to see topless Page 3 girls or “exclusive” interviews with non-entity celebs? I would say that the answer to this question is probably yes.  Many people would do just that because after all, it depends on how you define “quality”.In my opinion, tabloids such as the Sun are in fact very good quality because they appear to be well written, deliberately amusing, well put together and they know their audience and when they want.

News is a Precious Commodity

So the bottom line is that yes we will be charged for news and the reality is it will work.This is partly due to the fact that Murdoch is behind the scheme and it really does make sense and could well be the saviour of our hard pressed newspapers.After all, we are already paying for a daily paper.That charge has always been ridiculously low in the UK, if you compare this with the cover cover for the same sort of quality US or European broadsheets.  So if you physically fork out for your news via print (and in reality you’re paying for it through the TV and radio via the licence fee too) and seem happy to pay for various apps or Premier League Football on Sky,  then why wouldn’t you pay for such a precious commodity as news?

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Will Newspapers Be Obsolute In Future Years Due to The World Wide Web? (Part 1)

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

There is a move to start charging for access to News Corporation’s newspaper websites, and this has caused a lot of unrest amongst commentators and aficionados who regard this as an intrusion into the whole ethos of the “free web” as we should be getting free access to all news.     It’s not the first time Murdoch has taken the Internet to task of course, having previously accused Google of poaching content it doesn’t own and urging media outlets to fight back.

“Google Devalues Everything it Touches”

It would appear that newspapers have seen new distribution channels changing the whole dynamics of their business.  Murdoch maintains that Google (which doesn’t produce any journalism of its own) have made themselves a fortune by simply organising the work of others and selling advertising against it while the originating authors suffer.The managing editor of Wall Street Journal, Mr Robert Thomson has actually come out and said that “Google devalues everything it touches. It divides content quantitatively rather than qualitatively.”  Google of course see it differently, maintaining that all they do is show just enough information to make the user want to read a full story with the headline, a line of text and links to send more than 300 million clicks a month to newspaper web sites.

It’s clear that hard news (even if it is from Fox) is a valuable and precious commodity.To achieve good journalism, albeit from a nationaly daily paper or even a monthly trade magazine is going to cost money.It doesn’t matter what our thoughts are on Murdoch, he has a smart head on him and has long seen free-to-access news websites as a business model that isn’t working right.The huge influx of online subscriptions fees at the Wall Street Journal have confirmed him that it is indeed possible to charge for content on the web.  I think he is absolutely right and not just because Murdoch needs to generate revenue to compensate for the declining earnings (led by newspapers) across News Corporation.

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Keep In Touch With Real-Time

Monday, March 8th, 2010

First speech was an introduction into how realtime has become so vital and how it leads the way with breaking news stories, such as the death of Michael Jackson and how Google and Bing argued over deals with Twitter.in all honesty, it’s nothing you haven’t heard before.

Second up was Rob Walk from a company called NovaRising. He showcases a platform they’ve develop which scans and parses tweets about music to break them down into thematic groups on genre, artist and sentiment. He feels that this could be something that the Search Engines are missing out on.That is a fair point, especially when Google launched real-time and there was so much spam that wasn’t being filtered, but probably the key thing is a ranking alogirithm for all results to filter out spam.  This is something Google has improved on recently.  and I think the likes of sentiment analysis is in pretty early stages in terms of sophistication, but it may one day be incorporated by search engines. Currently though i don’t think that’s their role.

Next up is Bill Scott from easelTV, talking about the integration of social network updates to TV screens, how TV watchers are profiled and how to “SEO TV” (something about metadata!).It may sound like I am a bit stroppy, but I don’t really see how this remotely associated with realtime search or at all interesting or forward thinking. Can you really think of anything worse than facebook or tweet updates showing up on my t.v. as I am watching my favourite programme. Let alone realtime ads (*shudder*).

Next on the agenda is William Fischer who is from Workdigital and he informs us all about a product they have developed aimed soley at the recruitment industry to semantically analyse realtime updates from the likes of twitter and Linkedin. It’s a sales pitch. This doesn’t interest me in the slightest. If I wanted a sales pitch, I would have visited a free conference such as Internet World or TFMA. Yawn.

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Dell Out With A Compatible Version Of Google Chrome OS

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Google’s Chrome OS, possibly, is the most awaited thing in 2010. The fact that everything is going to be on cloud and that users will not require to install anything (any tools, softwares etc.) makes Google Chrome a useful thing. A software that will work both as your operating system and the web browser is a sure thing to have in your computer. Also, with Google Chrome as the OS, things are going to work [very.  Well, that’s definitely too fast!

I did know about all this (the news of Google Chrome OS is everywhere), but was quite surprised to know that Dell has already made available a compatible version for mini 10v netbook users. I came across the information on this tech blog - onlygizmos.com. I personally am excited to use the actual Google Chrome OS, but until then Dell version would be a great thing to play with.

Anybody can download this 10v compatible version from the link given on the post - Dell Honours Geeks, Gives Chrome OS to Play With. You will also find a link to the instruction set on how to download and use the version. It’s a simple work. You can load the file in a USB and then get on using it.

Dell users are sure having a great time getting to use the Google Chrome OS, a 10v version though. Until the actual Google Chrome OS is released in the market for public usage (and that’s not until 2010), all internet fanatics may use this compatible version by Dell.

But a word of caution: The application has certain issues, so users are required to be very careful while downloading and using it. WiFi connectivity can be a problem. Nevertheless, it is worth trying out Dell’s work.


Google Authority & Backlinks do’s and don’ts

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

how to get more backlinks

OK, this is a big concept and I want to emphasise it’s not clear cut. But here is what I know in my analysis at the Backlinks clinic:

Authority - basics

The more authority your web pages have the better you will rank on Google. Authority means that people trust you and your content. The great news is that authorities trusted by humans are also trusted by Google. A good illustration is the .edu and .gov suffixes. These domains imply they are trustworthy sources of content and it’s an established fact that as far as Google is concerned backlinks from these web addresses to your web pages will contribute authority to your site. Another perfect example is Wikipedia as the web pages here are largely added by by tribes of people as opposed to a single person.

So it follows that authority is very heavily influenced by the source of your backlinks and if authoritative content link to your web pages then you inherit their authority and in the eyes of Google you become more authoritative and hence the trust in your site by Google goes up.

How Google decides what is and isn’t authoritative is confidential for good reason and falls in line with Google’s philosophy of “Do no evil”. The last thing the net needs is someone exploiting the methods that Google employs in its efforts to try and bring some order to probably the most important technological resource of our times.

How not to get Backlinks

And on this thought it’s worth my while stating some underhand sources and practices of building backlinks that Google not only disapproves of but appears to be moving aggressively to ‘’categorize as illegitimate authorities. In no particular order of severity, the common examples are:

  • Paid backlinks – web pages where individuals buy and sell backlinks
  • Comment spam – entries that contain links on web sites that are just not associated to the main theme.
  • Low quality and *duplicate content – ‘scraped’ or otherwise
  • Fast growth – there are a myriad of ways that this is achievable, Google isn’t stupid. Any sudden rise in the number of backlinks is going to register on Google’s radar, especially if it’s a recently registered domain.
  • Backlinks from ill reputed web pages – these are particularly destructive as you are guilty by association - need I say more.

*There is another factor where I may be on shakey ground, but major media portals appear to get a lot of authority and I have definitely found significant numbers of the same content over and over again on different portals with no penalties, I am still monitoring this, only as some of the results I am seeing defy the normal behaviors I normally expect to see. More on this is in a future article….