Volunteering in an Internet Age

As Wikipedia puts it (partly) volunteering is: “An altruistic activity and is intended to promote good or improve human quality of life. In return, this activity produces a feeling of self-worth and respect; however, there is no financial gain”. But the most fascinating thing about this definition is that it holds true for this age too. Many verbs have received different definitions in contemporary times, but some have adopted accordingly. “Volunteer” is one.

A couple or a decade ago, it was all about charity related work where you would offer your effort and/or skills for a social event. But now there are many other activities that one could perform on the internet, which upholds the same values. It’s mainly two-fold as skills & effort, but eventually the same thing. As with offline volunteering, these are mainly performed for proprietary entities or non-profit organisations. At the end of the day, the world benefits, the online community benefits.

Although the topmost activity in this sphere is devoted to the Open-source movement, I wish to focus on a few popular products/websites that rely on Crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing itself is a new-age term, which could be broadly defined as, “obtaining the efforts of a crowd (volunteers)”.

Wikipedia is the best and most popular example. What more, even this article has a couple of hyperlinks to it already. This online encyclopaedia is almost totally built on the efforts of thousands of contributing volunteers. Not only the submissions, but moderations too are handled in a similar nature by ‘administrators’ who are chosen from the previously mentioned fervent contributors. That helps in maintaining the credibility, which is always a common question raised against crowd-sourced content.

My next focus is a company, and a popular one in Google Inc. Google’s products have now become necessary platforms for thousands of other products and services both online & offline. For example, Google Maps is one such platform. The fact that people are able to contribute to it has resulted in the rapid expansion and improvement of the product itself. Anyone could contribute to “GMaps” through the Map Maker tool which was launched about 5 years ago. Talking about maps, a special mention of a non-commercial/non-profit counterpart in OpenStreetMap also needs to be made. There may be differences in content and quality between the two, but they both acquire and deliver the same kind of service.

Apart from maps and among many others, there were other programmes such as (now suspended) “Google in Your Language”, where they obtained the contributions from volunteers in order to localize their products.

Even though there is no guarantee on the numerous types of ways your contributions could be used in a final output, the age old saying of “volunteer to make a better world” still stands, even in this day and age with a sense of self-satisfaction.

Towards a generation of e-Socials

Humans by default are social animals, not in the modern meaning but as a fact. This comes with their dependence on others to grow, to learn, to find food, to mate, to bear & raise offspring, and in short to LIVE. Initially I was a bit reluctant to proceed writing this article after a previous one on orthodoxy versus modernisation drew some criticism but continues to rank high in page views. If you think the same, then it accounts to another who's misread (with no pun) the whole thing. I try remaining moderate on most things I've come across in life and still am. The aforementioned article is no exception to that rule, where it stresses on the concept of 'balance'.

Continuing on this, I wish to highlight a new breed of human beings who could be termed 'e-Socials'. Simply this means people who socialise online and maintain a rather (in)different attitude offline - consider offline as the antonym of online. Personally, this inconsistent behaviour has put me off several times and I have all the reason to believe & assume that few more people find it rather irritating or confusing. My understanding has done away with the confusion part, since I now realise this to be a psychological trait, which in turn may characterise the behavioural aspect of an individual.

Interaction and implicit communication are imperative components of socialising. In today's web and networked life this has been achieved in other ways. Take for example a person in a chat room. They interact by typing, scream (by capitalising letters), show emotions via emoticons, and appear to be of a certain gender where in reality the person(s) is (are) not inclined to act as such. To elaborate, think of an individual in a grumpy state being able to express the complete opposite by typing in a smiling face (emoticon). The digital/virtual interface has facilitated the above merrily and successfully. I have met many people offline and have found them to be extremely different than they appear to be online. Some who appear very outgoing and cheerful online are surprisingly introverted and timid when encountered in normal day-to-day life. How could this happen? Is it a Multiple Personality Disorder or a distortion caused by living an extreme online life thereby ignoring to associate in REAL life? I'm not aware of any psychological analysis or study conducted on these lines but there couldn't be none either.

The arrival of social networking web sites has only assisted the above. Facebook, Google+, Hi5, Twitter, etc provide a bag of virtual substitutes for the online social being. People chat, share their thoughts, share photos, 'like' things, play games (as oppose to sports), find & make friends, entertain themselves, learn stuff and many many more by just sitting in front of a computer or by the use of a mobile gadget. Some even opt for the now rather conventional medium of email. What I think is, this is pretty alright if the whole world is connected and there's no need of offline interaction. But, (un)fortunately that's not the case. Hence, when there are two types the latest and uncommon become eccentric leading to confusion, irritation, agitation (in society) and you name it! So, we either wait for the transformation to happen imagining that this is a transitional phase and expect ourselves to be guzzled up by the tide. If there are no signs of it happening in the near future, then I say: GET A LIFE, and by that I mean a real one, not a forged one!

They know you more than you

Privacy is one of the most talked about topics of the information age. With more and more information generated it's bound to aggravate. As I see it privacy is two fold in our usage. One is the derived form (non-voluntary). The other is more straightforward where we submit our information to another party (voluntary). Many people are knowledgeable on what they submit to the World Wide Web or at least intrinsically think twice before doing so. If not, at least a bit of commonsense would do. This is of course assuming that you're really bothered about your personal information and hence privacy. But what about the other form, where someone else derives certain information on you based on various data? Additionally, you may think on the lines of a personality test. The first (and the last) time I sat for one, I scored pretty well. But a web based company could be in a better position of judging you with the amount of information gathered throughout the years. I intend of giving you some goose bumps largely based on these.

When we upload photos to Facebook, or post crazy status updates we are well aware of who could see them and the fact that Facebook stores it on their servers. Furthermore these sites have their own 'Terms of Use' & 'Privacy Policy' posted publicly although more often than not people really don't care reading them. As per internet statistics, the most popular, used and visited websites are Google, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo, Live, etc. and are run by US based companies. This eventually creates a certain web centricity towards a certain geopolitical location as well. This blog is no exception either. Privacy when coupled with politics can be a tricky issue, where it's sometimes even referred to as intelligence. But the gravity of infiltration, harnessing and action taken upon depends on the country's laws and regulations.

Just imagine the amount of information your Gmail or Yahoo mailbox contains. From passwords & bank/credit card account information to communication with crushes, your fetishes and even porn are only a few to mention. Not excluding religious and political stuff as well. And it's not only free web mail services, but chat software such as Gtalk, Yahoo, MSN, etc might record your chat history although you may have opted to go-off the record. If you think that's all, just consider the amount of searching you'd done throughout the years using all those popular search engines. What's the assurance that these companies wouldn't store your search queries or for that matter any personally identifiable information including location data. Google even has a function that allows you to delete/manage your search history termed 'Google Web History'. So if you're still the kind of person who thinks that Google doesn't know anything about your multiple accounts, I say wakeup! that's such an insignificant thing.

Data mining technologies are the most used in deriving information or patterns from this data. In fact, our search & browsing patterns, Facebook likes, email contents and anything similar is sufficient of determining our personality and interests. This helps in creating a somewhat virtual personality of you. The integration or interconnection of social and other major web platforms have only helped it.

Then there are the types who say, "So what? I don't care what any web company or country knows about me, I feel totally OK with it". Actually I myself belong in that category. The purpose of this post was to enlighten the extra-cautious individuals who aren't very comfortable with this issue and not to drive you off the web. Who knows, someday we might just have to admit that's how it is. After all, wouldn't it be nice to see Google predict what you'd be up to this coming weekend? ☺

Now why do I hear someone mutter "creepy…".

Few tips on how to save your internet quota

Is your workplace one of those places where restrictions on internet browsing has been imposed? And, is there a restriction on the amount of bandwidth you consume per day or week? Then better get yourself accustomed to using it [bandwidth] thriftily and wisely. Apart from that, it could be very useful for people with limited broadband packages. This article gives a few tips that would help your cause.

Look out for:

'Heavy' sites! Websites with loads of graphics, flash animations, streaming video/audio are the ones to lookout for. Sites classified as entertainment, news, gossip, etc often fit into this category. Occasionally, web sites with pages that refresh automatically every few seconds, such as Cricinfo could consume a lot of data although not necessarily identified as 'heavy'. Richly developed/designed web sites like Facebook too transmit more information between the user and the web server although unnoticed, in order to provide the user with a better browsing experience.

When browsing:

At times, our ignorance itself could be a reason. One such example is the Google Image Search. If you search for a certain term which yields hundreds of results and scroll down to the end of the result page, this will end up loading all the images in the result. But, if you were to scroll down page by page, images below are loaded only upon scrolling. Another instance is clicking on audio/video links which are linked or hosted on an external site, although embedded in a not-so-heavy web page which you are viewing. Streaming audio & video relatively consume much more data irrelevant of where it's played; in a flash player window or a popped-up media player. People who use web based free email services – Yahoo, Gmail, etc – tend to download large attachments in their emails without further thinking. But be aware that this could gobble up your quota, as any download of this nature is done over HTTP. A cheeky little solution is given below ;)

Exemptions:

Of course, intranet web applications and your company's / organisation's website and web based email will be excluded from quota usage if hosted internally.

What you could do:

Most content on a web page is not needed especially if you're reading an article. The flashy graphics and irritating advertisements are not the kind you'd often like viewing. So, you could stop the web page loading further once the content needed has been loaded. To do this, simply hit the 'Esc' key or click on the button next to the address bar. Later if there's an image you need to see, right click on the empty image box and click 'Show Image / Show Picture'. You might find this operation to be much quicker in Firefox than Internet Explorer. Disabling the loading of images on a web page will save a heap of quota, but you could view only the textual content of a web page. To disable image loading in Firefox, go to Tools -> Options -> Content and uncheck "Load images automatically". In Internet Explorer 8, go to Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced and uncheck "Show pictures" under "Multimedia". The paths and/or option names will slightly differ and vary depending on the browser versions.

If you're the type of person who checks the latest news and events happening around, visiting the relevant website(s) periodically might not be the best idea. Instead, you could subscribe to the relevant web site's RSS feed and manage it as a bookmark in your browser. These RSS feeds will display summarised lists of content (such as the titles of news stories) and you may view the entire article by clicking on the link to the related web page. View images below.

Bookmarks in Firefox







Feeds in IE

Remember me mentioning about rich websites consuming more data? Well, a neat but not so user friendly alternative is to use the mobile versions of such sites if available. Most of the frequently accessed websites on the net have their mobile versions. Some examples are Gmail, Yahoo, Cricinfo, Facebook & Twitter. These versions are designed for use on mobile devices and hence are very light-weight although with lesser functionality.

And the 'cheeky' solution for downloading big attachments; forward your email to your office email account if it’s hosted internally and save the attachment to your PC from there. This will cost you nothing except for the bandwidth consumed during the usage of the web mail service. Staying in the topic of web mail, in case you need to check your Gmail or Yahoo mail accounts frequently, better install the relevant toolbar. This way (given that you're logged in), you could get notified of any new mails along with the subjects.

Gmail notifications in Google toolbar

Obviously this is not everything and there are many more workarounds and practices you could adopt. While some might find this an added burden to their [internet] surfing behaviours, once got used, it will be negligible. Same as turning off the light before you go to sleep. After all it's your choice.