Topics

The following list of topics are provided as potential research areas for assignments. The list is annotated to provide a basic understanding of each topic. Students participating in the Fundamentals of IMD class will be encouraged to help choose and to add additional topics to the list.

Web 2.0: A label applied to the 2nd generation of web technologies, which focus on social networking, the web as platform, and collective knowledge.

The Art & processes of finding what you need: Exercises in web-based research that includes evaluation and analysis of information, the various tools used to find information, and advanced search techniques.

Personal Portals: are tools used to organize, manage, and make your daily work on the web more efficient and at your command. Portals can contain any content on the web, widgets for getting general types of information quickly.

Content Aggregators: Rich Site Summary (RSS) allows aggregators subscribe or collect sites you find to be of regular value, and all sites in your collection are automatically updated whenever content is added.

Social BookMarking: Web based storage for  bookmarks made available from any computer. A collection of favorite sites, but also create categories of tags and search tags of other users.

Web Host Management: Learning about uploading a WordPress blog to your own web hosting service.

Professional Blogging Skills: Whether you choose to keep a blog to create content you want to share with others, you still need to understand how professional blogging works. Features and techniques of blogging.

Planning a Weblog: Weblogs require planning to give direction to content, schedule of posting, plug-ins for you blog, and how to build audiences.

Collective Intelligence: Wikipedia is a demonstration of people contributing valid and expert knowledge to form a collection of intelligence. The advent of Web 2.0 began a period of users creating and sharing content on the web.

Podcasting/Vodcasting: Audio and or video files with RSS attachments that allow the audio to be subscribed to like weblogs.

Twitter – Microblogging: Twitter is the brief 140 character messaging system which is much more than its intended “What are you doing?” concept. Follow industry experts, use it for searching specialized topics provided by persons of interest in your domain.

Cloud Computing: Many applications are available online rather than purchased in a box. The cloud represents online environments for enterprise as well as personalized productivity and creative applications. This trend may well replace the boxed application that requires installing on your computer.

Mobile Computing: The smart phones are rapidly becoming major distributed information systems. New types of applications are possible with GPS aware systems that also have total connectivity with the internet. It is the platform of the near future which we will be creating sites for.

Mashups: Google maps is an example of an application program interface that is freely available for 3rd party developers to mix maps with a commercial entity, such as convenience stores. There are many such API’s available for users to mix and re-mix into mashups which have new functions than the original API.