This lecture was all about the internet, its uses and history and gave us many examples of the best/most interesting websites on the internet. My favorite was Disaster Maps where you can see a real time visualisation of all the disasters that are currently happening around the world eg floods, fires, cyclones etc.
Lecture also discussed the dot com boom and the rapid rise and fall of internet based businesses in the late 1990's. As there were no lecture notes I hit up my good friend Wikipedia for some more information on the topic. The dot com boom occurred roughly in the period between 1998 and 2001, and it refers to the period in which countless internet companies were founded and soon after, failed. Such was the influence of the internet that companies who simply added a '.com' to their name saw their stock prices soar.
The initial success of the dot com boom can be attributed to the 'buzz' and novelty surrounding the internet at the time. Low interest rates also helped investors to get the capital needed for investment. Furthermore, because of the new medium, online companies were difficult to value and this resulted in many of the companies being rich but only 'on paper'.
The reason the bubble burst was because so many of the companies were over valued, and people were only buying their stocks because they thought the market would continue to rise, which it obviously could not do forever. Another reason that was covered in the lecture was that many online companies that sold products forgot to factor in the cost of postage. So their products may have been cheap (as the eliminated the cost of operating a store front) but then the high postage costs outweighed any savings that the customer would have made.
An interesting fact of the dot com boom is that internet companies that were successful and are still around today including Amazon and Google did not make a profit in their early years. Instead they were more focused on increasing their awareness and customer base, which obviously paid off for them in the long run.
Click here to see the full Wikipedia entry on the dot com boom (or the dot com bubble as they call it).
The lecture also covered social networking sites and the fact that there are a variety of other sites besides Facebook, MySpace and Twitter that allow people to network online. Many of the other social networking sites are specialist sites, based on a particular theme, culture or interest. See for example Gaia Online which is for lovers of Anime, or Ravely for people to share their knit and crochet work (thrilling!)
The lecture also covered how social networking, although heralded as the best thing to come from the internet so far, doesn't really allow the user to be very creative and can also be quite boring. You often end up hearing about the dullest parts of everyone's life "Ben is going to bed now", "Sally just had a cheese sandwich" etc. Furthermore you also run the risk of your future boss checking out your facebook profile and being none too impressed by the photo of you partaking in a beer bong (oops!).
This is where the lecture got really interesting, listing a number of websites that allow the user to be much more creative than any social networking site. We looked at Google Maps and saw how you can create your own interactive map where you upload your own picutures, videos and text about a location and then share it with your friends. We also looked at Sketchcast which I thought was the coolest thing ever and can't believe my internet savvy friends had not found it already. The clip below is one of the best examples of the site being used the way I think it should be. Although its all black & white and pretty basic, it attempts to create 'real life' action, rather than just recording you drawing a stationary picture, which is actually pretty boring... :(
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