It’s been almost 10 months since I’ve started this blog. I still haven’t advertised my site (davetang.org) or my blog (davetang.org/wordpress) to friends and family, although if you Google “Dave Tang”, davetang.org is the second hit! (yes I Google myself). I guess I can’t compete with davetanghorses.com, with their 40 years of experience with horses (just to clarify, they are first hit, if you Google Dave Tang).

But the purpose of having my own site was just for the satisfaction of owning a domain, especially one with my name in it! And the purpose of my blog, was just to have an outlet for the many things that cross my mind. Although I am a bit more attentive to what I write these days due to a very bad experience. I dread what happened, but it was a good experience in professionalism.

But you know, sometimes I still want to delete this blog. Keeping this blog, opens me up to the world. I may be attacked, criticised and be judged for what I write. My pages are open to anyone with an internet connection (who at this stage, has to bother with Googling me). And there’s always the problem of me wanting my blog to be a perfectly articulated piece of art, which it isn’t and which it why I want to delete it.

But I mean, this is me. This is who I am; these are my interests and these are the things I care about. I am not perfect and there will be times when I have difficulty with issues, just like anybody else. So I think I’ve come to accept the fact that this is really me. And I’m not writing a novel either.

Viewing some of my monthly subscription videos for National Geographic on YouTube, I came across a special edition National Geographic video of Dr. Michael Wesch of Kansas State University, titled “The Future of Communication”. It captured my attention from the start as he was describing his experience in Papua New Guinea. The region in PNG that he studied was extremely isolated even more so than Bougainville, the place where I grew up. It was up in the highlands and he stayed in huts without electricity. But during a 10 year period he was able to witness a transformation in PNG. This transformation occurred with the introduction of writing, leading him to understand the relationship between media and relationships; media mediate relationships and when media changes so does relationships.

Dr. Wesch studies anthropology, which is the social science that studies the origins and social relationships of human beings. With his observation of how media can alter society and social relationships, he started to study the new media landscape called Web 2.0. In short Web 2.0 is web development that focuses on two things; users and information sharing. YouTube, wikipedia, blogs, flickr, digg are just some examples of Web 2.0 applications that allow you to share videos, knowledge, information, photos and articles respectively. As more people become connected to the internet and networks become faster and more ubiquitous, Web 2.0 applications will only get more popular.

Understanding how this new media landscape will impact society will help us rethink our outdated ideas, for example current teaching methods, which is Dr. Wesch’s interest. It was while lecturing that he noticed how current teaching methods were not suitable for today’s generation. I have not seen the other videos on his class projects but basically the projects have focused on combining the knowledge of every single student in his class. This new interactivity has let in a breath of fresh air in his classes and achieved impressing results. For his innovation teaching techniques he was awarded U.S. professor of the year in 2008.

The video has made me think about the future of communication and how it will shape everyone’s lives. And to help myself understand I have made delicious, digg and twitter accounts. I can see the definite trends in today’s society; open source software, free knowledge, applications that allow human interactivity, increased connectivity and faster network connections. If a collection of 200 undergraduates can develop ground breaking research, imagine the power of combining the minds of the world. The most popular sites on the web are the ones promoting interactivity; facebook, myspace, wikipedia, file sharing sites, etc. The most popular games are MMORPGs such as WoW. I think Dr. Wesch was right on the future, we will only see an increase in interactivity and faster connections to the internet, which will allow everyone to be connected to everyone instantly. Good or bad? No idea but it will definitely be very interesting.

So for the uninitiated, here’s my very simple example explaining some concepts of cloud computing. Few years ago I was trying to import my bookmarks from one web browser to another. After some fiddling around I found the folder that held my bookmarks and to my surprise and delight, it was a HTML file. That then gave me the idea of getting some free web space and simply hosting this HTML file online. Since I only knew of one company that had free web hosting, geocities, I signed up for a geocities account and uploaded this HTML file which I creatively called bookmarks.html. Now instead of having to import my bookmarks from one computer to another, or not having access to my bookmarks if I wasn’t using my own computer, I can access my bookmarks from any computer that has Internet access. I can now also add new bookmarks from any computer (that has Internet access) I want if I found an interesting site while surfing on another computer.

What does this have to do with cloud computing? Basically the cloud is a metaphor for the Internet. Cloud computing basically means having computing services provided on the Internet. Using my example you can see the benefits of the cloud (in my case the cloud computing service was provided for free), i.e. I had access to a list of my favourite sites from any computer with an internet connection, I have one centralised bookmarks file and I can now share my favourite sites with everyone with an internet connection. Since more and more people are getting connected to the Internet and we are getting faster Internet connections, this really seems like the future of computing. Businesses will no longer need to buy computing equipment, hire administrators or even web designers; they just need to pay for cloud computing services. Individuals will also prefer the cloud, as it can mean many things such as they don’t have to worry about backing up their data or can have access to their files from anywhere.

Google at the moment is really positioning itself as THE service provider for cloud computing. They provide services (mostly free) for you to store your conversations, your documents, your internet history, your journal, your photos and countless other things. I don’t like the idea of having everything owned by one company which is pretty much the only disadvantage I see in cloud computing, since it will only make Google stronger. But oh well, we’ve been living under Microsoft for so many years now, time for a change I guess.

So it has been a month and a bit that I have purchased this domain and paid for the web hosting. I haven’t spent as much time on it as I have wished. My web hosting company actually provides a lot of tools (if tools is the right word to use) for web development. They provide MySQL, PHP and Perl. Their control panel also makes it idiot proof to install popular internet applications such as WordPress, wiki, etc. I hadn’t expected this many features, especially since I only paid 80 bucks for the entire package, which includes a year’s worth of hosting. Perhaps had it been more expensive I would be doing more work on my site, just to get my money’s worth.

Nevertheless, as with all tasks the hardest thing is just to get started. At least at minimum I am now using the blogging software. I’ll try to put in a few hours everyday on the site or just update my blog with the catch of the day.