With the two college kids, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the Google phenomenon came about and now, life is impossible without searching the Google everyday! It is just ten years the duo were students at Stanford Universe and in the ten years the world’s biggest and richest company had been created out of nowhere! Larry Page came out with a scanning technique to digitize the University of Michigan’s library of 7m books and Google Book Search is now history.
Internet has touched one billion people today. There are yet 5.5 billion to do. Vint Cerf, one of the founders of internet is currently chief internet evangelist & VP, Google. He says the many devices that access the internet would speed up the users and there are 2.5 billion devices which are accessing the internet, providing such services like payment, navigation systems, and numerous interfaces like SMS etc. These include mobile phones, laptops and other handheld devices. In 1997, there were only 50 million users, today they are one billion. Such is the fast growth of internet. The founder said that users today are producers tomorrow, education and businesses would thrive on the internet uses. The real power of the internet is to enable everyone to access information at almost no cost! That would create the real revolution in the lives of the people.
It can change our lives; ensure a good life for the people, even the poor! Internet revolution is on us. Every technological revolution has changed life for the better. Internet too is helping to change the businesses, the creation of wealth, in the cyber space. Virtual offices are now a reality. In fact, when telegraph was introduced many predicted the death of geography. It didnt.But the birth of internet has already made geographical locations of offices or the employees virtually irrelevant.
The very IT, ITes, BPO revolutions that have changed the employment scenario for the entire generation, and high salaries and thus the multiplier effect on the very range of services, the consumer boom etc are all the fall out of the global delivery of services thanks to the IT and communications technologies.
The power of the internet is now widely realized. Our life is impossible today without this revolutionary medium. It is hard to imagine that in the past too whenever a new technology was invented the public response used to be skeptical in the beginning and once the tool becomes widely accessible and democratic use for anyone who searches the internet, then the tool takes on unimagined dimensions. Now, blogging has taken its own world of blogosphere!
One is the very political sphere.
Blogs by definition is a day to day reaction to the daily news and events. It is a highly personal medium and it gives the individuals complete freedom and privacy to express their opinions on a variety of topics that catch their fancy. Blogging is a literary medium. It enables writers and thinkers to record their thoughts and their response to the day to day reading and reflection. There is then the reactive and parasitical nature of blogging, it sets feeding on its own act! Now the internet is subjected to censorship by some two dozen countries. In China, Google has volunteered to self-censorship.
China is blocking any discussion of democracy on the internet. It fears for its own Communist pretensions. Bloggers also face the prospect of attacks from extremist groups. In the USA, the Democrat hopeful, Edwards engaged two professional “blogmasters”, their writings against extreme rightwing religious views of leaders and the church evoked sharp reactions and they were fired!
But now we see another phenomenon in the USA where the new medium is used for Presidential elections. Both the Democratic candidates Mr.Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton announced their candidature on their websites. Since then their blogs are full of sound bites and even dirty messages to spread against their rivals.
There is now an Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. Everything is caught by the bloggers. It was widely posted the fact that Hillary Clinton was watched by 1m people and heard her caught on an open microphone singing the national anthem out of tune! Yes, there is the downside to the internet, your opponents and anyone else with a keyboard and a camera phone can catch you what you say and post it on the net! There is the You Tube.com, a free website for sharing video clips and the most popular Hillary-related items are unflattering!
As the blog is a powerful tool, it serves everyone, friends and foes. Now, anyone can mount an attack nationwide and of course it has to be attention-grabbing to go “viral”, that is for everyone who sees it to link it on their blogs or e-mail it to their friends. Now, candidates are creating “communities”, where the candidate lays down his plans and supporters must be inspired to write their own blogs, talk to each other and devise their own ways of raising money. It is noted that the candidate who does these thing best could raise half a billion dollars for this election. So far the most effective candidate on the web has been Mr.Obama.
More than twice as many people watch videos about him on You Tube as his nearest Democratic rival Mrs.Clinton. And four times as many as the top Republican candidates. Social networking site like MySpace help candidates to rally “friends” as signed on behalf of their favorite candidates.
Blogs are now an indispensable tool for election campaigns and in future the use of the weblog in politics will only make it a more powerful and effective tool to reach out a large number of people distributed in far off places. Internet is drawing more and more young people and it is found the young are no longer less apathetic about politics.
It will enable the young who are committed and the extreme activist types to organize themselves through this new youngish trendy tool.Blogs and bloggers, given the extremely private manner in which they express themselves freely and without any need for public display of any restraint sometimes use foul language, swear words. The print media can’t do that and the mainstream press has to be very careful in the use of expressions, more so when it is anything about the character of the candidates. There are defamation laws etc. But on the web, so far there is total freedom of expression, in fact, the more nasty, the more quick it gets noticed and taken up further in the scale of further exposure and scaling up!
Weblogs are now the rage. Everyday there is lot of new activity. There is innovation. There are some great brains engaged in expanding the horizons of the internet’s reach and relevance. So, in the one year time that is still left for the American Presidential elections, it is said that one year is a long time in politics. But for the internet, one year, it is said, is an eternity!