Tag Archives: world wide web

Internet Addiction and Why Support Is Highly Important

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There are about 1.6 billion Internet users all over the world, according to a research by Internet World Stats. They log on the World Wide Web every day. This means that there are thousands of them who can be very vulnerable to Internet addiction—and around 10 percent of them really do.

Internet addiction may affect anybody from kids to seniors, and their mental problems can range greatly. Some of them can be so obsessed that they can spend almost 24 hours a day in front of their computers. Others are addicted to Internet porn. In other words, this type of addiction can potentially bring disaster to the life of the sufferer as well as to his or her family. To be brought into the right track, one of the best ways they should do is get the support that he or she definitely needs.

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Top 5 Reasons to Love Plurk

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Plurk homepage

Plurk is one of the more intriguing lifestreaming sites out on the World Wide Web right now. Launched in May of 2008, it takes the basics of Twitter and dresses them up in a snazzy interface, throwing some pretty interesting features into the mix.

Why "plurk"? The name alone sparks curiosity. According to Plurk’s creators, there are four ideas behind this catchy name. One is People + Lurk – yes, people do lurk online. Second, it is an amalgam of Play and Work, touching on the fun side of plurking. Third, it is an acronym for Peace, Love, Unity, Respect, Karma. Lastly, there is the potential for becoming a coined verb, just like "google".
Now, Plurk users call themselves "plurkers", the act of posting is called "plurking", and the post itself is called a "plurk". Very, very catchy indeed.

So what makes Plurk so much different from Twitter and why do plurkers love it? Here are the top 5 reasons:

1. Threaded Conversations
This is probably the number one feature plurkers love. When you post an update, your friends’ replies can be seen under it. Replies don’t get lost, and friends can read and answer to each other’s replies, turning it into a stimulating discussion. There is no clutter because the conversation only expands when you click on the original post.

2. Unique User Interface
Plurk splits the screen into two parts. The upper section contains your timeline, where all your plurks appear, arranged by the time they were posted. What makes the timeline unique is that it scrolls sideways. You scroll right for the past, and left for your most recent plurks. Scrolling is done either through the arrow keys or the mouse’s scroller.
The lower portion is the dashboard, which contains your info, userpic, friends list, and the post entry box.

3. Karma Points
Plurk addicts live for karma points! Karma points rise based on your activity and the responses of other plurkers to your plurks. More karma gets you access to extra features like additional emoticons or changing the image in your page’s Plurk logo. Getting over 80 karma points means you’ve reached Plurk Nirvana and nets you a shiny badge for your page.

4. Customization
Plurk gives you the freedom to personalize your page. You can choose from built-in color templates, install CSS codes from third-party Plurk layout designers, or create your own.

5. Cliques
One significant Plurk feature is privacy control. You can open your plurk to the world, limit it to friends, or have a private conversation with a single individual, all within your timeline. If you want certain plurks to be read only by specific people, you can group your friends into cliques, and then specify which clique can read your plurk when you post it.

Twitter still has the edge when it comes to third-party applications, page rank and plugins, but Plurk is more personal, more fun, and more close-knit. Users who admit that they use both sites say that they post mostly business or news-related shout outs on Twitter, while going to Plurk to have fun, goofy conversations with friends.

The Origins of Internet

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Team of people carrying an Internet cable.

Nowadays, people rely on the Internet for everything: from communication, to sharing media, to even for something as simple as keeping in touch or meeting new people. It’s difficult to imagine what life would be without the Internet, although it’s something that most of us born in the 80s or 90s would be familiar with.

The Internet was first envisioned in the 1960s by JCR Licklider, who proposed a global link of computers and called it the "Galactic Network." One of Licklider’s believers back then was Lawrence Roberts, a MIT Researcher. During the latter part of the decade, Roberts would be working with several others to develop ARPANET, which along with other packet switching systems developed in other parts of the world, would become the backbone of today’s Internet.

The term “Internet” itself was not used until 1974, when Stanford University’s Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine published "RFC 675", the first full specification of TCP. It took another decade, however, before the first TCP/IP-based wide area network was introduced. It was then that all ARPANET hosts switched over from the older NCP protocols.

By the late 1980s, the early incarnations of e-mail went on the Internet platform with the approval of the interconnection between NSFNET and the commercial MCI Mail system in 1989. Other e-mail companies like Compuserve and Telemail soon followed.

The Internet, as most people know now, began in 1991 with the introduction of the World Wide Web project. The launch of the Web made the Internet more user-friendly that even today’s children without programming backgrounds could understand and operate it. With the widespread use of computers at home, schools and offices, and the development of high-capacity and reliable telecommunications systems, the Internet is now a very common part of everyday life for more than a billion people worldwide.