E-Publishing - Week 12

Dearest readers, today is a very sad day. It is the last E-Publishing lecture and therefore my last E-Publishing blog. Sad times. But on a much happier note.....it is 11 days til Christmas!!!!! Oh and of course I know you're wondering, it was a robin in my advent calender today.

Today's lecture was literally TERRIFYING! The Internet is dangerous, evil and unsafe was the theme of the lecture, and as I am typing I am wary as to not type by accident any "trigger" words that could trace me back to being involved in something evil (in fact could evil be considered a trigger word? oh dear....) Did you know, for example, that people now entering Iran are asked to show their facebook accounts? Scary huh! Apparently it is possible to tell now if someone is gay or straight by the contents of their news feed and their conversations with friends. Probably not such a big deal over here in the Western countries but places such as Uganda are campaigning for the death penalty for those found guilty of homosexuality. (Seriously! Click here to read more)

And as for protesting over the Internet...that's definitely out. No matter how hard you try you can never hide yourself on the web. Every computer has it's own unique IP address which can be traced straight back to you, and believe me, those groups that you join on Facebook filled with innocence and good feeling, that's being traced as well. China of course took it one step further and banned the use of Twitter!

There is definitely a vast amount of information on the Internet, but it is very easy to control what people see and read. We may see the Internet as a way of expressing ouselves, spreading awareness and giving us a voice but it is clearly not as utopian as we'd like to believe.

But let us briefly move on to a rather less scary topic, which is podcasting. It is built on the development of RSS feeds and was invented by Apple for use on the Ipod. Podcasts are mainly used for audio, to catch up on your favourite radio shows and can be easily downloaded from places such as Itunes. The BBC IPlayer is an example is a video podcast. And the good news is is that it is incredibly easy for you to create your very own podcast!! Check out Clickcaster to start podcasting now!

So that is it! E-Publishing is officially over. Well actually no its not as I still have that final project to do (you know the one I've been moidering on about for the last few entries). But as far as the lectures go, this was the last one and therefore its time for me to retire from the world of E-Publishing blogs.

So all that is left for me to say is:

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year !!!!

Nadolig Llawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda!!!

E-Publishing - Week 11

Ooooh so it's week eleven, also known as December 7th, also known as 18 days to Christmas and also known as the day that I got a chocolate snowflake in my advent calender. And that's right it's time for an E-Publishing overview!!!

So let's have a re-cap of what we've learnt over the weeks.

We've looked at blogging, publishing books using Lulu, interactive fiction, online news and visual novels and where everything started, what exactly is e-publishing.

So what is E-Publishing? After three....one, two, three....... E-Publishing is short for Electronic Publishing and refers to the publishing of works online, on compact disk, emailed or on an electronic reader. Simple yes? And of course E-Publishing refers to blogging, publishing books through, interactive fiction, online news and visual novels...ties in nicely. They all need a variety of technologies such as xml, sgml, html, pdf, PostScript, Internet, World Wide Web, etc etc and of course are all connected through E-Commerce....remember the publishing value chain? (and incase you've forgotten e-commerce is the buying and selling of products and services on the web or electronically). Oh and while we're hovering near the subject, now is the time when I should also bring up the term Print on Demand or P.O.D. It is a printing technology that in which new copies of a book are not printed an order has been received, obviously this technology did not come about until digital printing began as it was not considered economical before then. Smaller companies and also academic publishers rely solely on P.O.D whereas bigger companies tend to only use it in special circumstances.

P.O.D of course brings us back to Lulu. Lulu the online software that anyone can use to print their own copy of an out of copyright work. This is definitely a good example of a P.O.D company.

Basically. All forms of E-Publishing are linked by their base technology. All rely on the internet, and also formats such as .pdf and .html to make them work. Blogs also rely on RSS feed to show regular updates and to inform your followers of your latest posts, also they rely on the convention of hyperlinks (obviously as I've already used them in this blog entry alone). Anyway it is safe to say that fundamentally as their basic level all forms of E-Publishing can be linked by their reliance on technology. Whether it be in the form of the Internet and the World Wide Web or by RSS feeds and P.O.D, E-Publishing would simply not exist without today's technologies.