Friday afternoon

It is a great day! It is a Friday which means it is the last day at tukies. Next week we are going to work at the CSIR....yeah! It’s back to the corporate world, dressing smart and feeling the pressure.

Today was a very busy day for me. It was more like I was browsing the net and gathering a lot of information. I used a lot of information from ebscohost. I read more or less eighty articles and I found a lot of useful information.

We started on a new task. We had to provide and analyse examples where the technologies that we previously worked on have been implemented by research communities in virtual knowledge spaces. This is some of the information that I acquired:
Examples of push technologies

• Synchronous conferencing
This is the type of push technology that is more focused on online chat. It is a computer mediated communication that researchers and other client can effectively use to share knowledge and learn something new. Synchronous conferencing is rarely also signify audio/video conferencing or instant messaging systems, given they provide a text-based multi-user chat function

• Instant messaging
Instant messaging (IM) is a collection of technologies used for real-time text-based communication between two or more participants over the Internet, or other types of networks. Of importance is that online chat and instant messaging differs from other technologies such as e-mail due to the perceived synchronicity of the communications by the users –chat happens in real-time

• Email
Stay in the loop with push-delivery technology, which instantly alerts you via your BlackBerry and other smart phones when messages are sent to any of your personal and business-based email addresses.

• BlackBerry
Black berry has the capability to proactively convey, or “push”, data to BlackBerry devices. BlackBerry Push Technology has been used to push emails to users and to coordinate calendar information.

• PointCast Network
It tenders services to publishers, as well as CNN, CNNfn, Time, Reuters, and Business Wire, among others. It also supplies a good selection of channels an important distinction with push technology because users often subscribe to the channels, not to the publications themselves. Their channels include News, Companies, Industries, Pathfinder, and more.

• RSS
RSS allows the clients or users to easily stay informed by retrieving new information from the sites that they are interested in are interested in. it actually saves time; one does not have to visit each site individually. RSS also ensures the customer’s privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter.

• Back web
It is an internet delivery platform. BackWeb includes WSJ Interactive among its sources, but not much else in terms of business news. It drives content to client such as news, stock quotes and virus and software upgrades.

• Headliner
Headliner is a technology that is nearer to PointCast in terms of publishing quality, with a large variety of stock quotes, news, political, and financial sources, together with Reuters and CNN. It is more flexible than PointCast since it allows users to subscribe to channels and precise publications and to explore keywords that emerge from latest headlines.

Some Problems with push technologies:


• Once installed, it never seems to go away
• It sometimes crashes PCs
• Ties up phone lines (a huge problem for home offices
• Uses huge chunks of disk space
• Pops up on the PC screen every time you turn around
• Even after it's uninstalled, little pieces stick around tying up disk space and causing weird little glitches on your PC

I learned a lot taday from my group mates.They are hard working and dedicated. I am very inspired by their commitment, one could swear that we have someone on our back pushing us. BIG UPS TEAM!!!!!