Internet and Users. Who is the Reader?

Internet has turned into a fundamental component of everyday life, as it plays a major role in advancing the globalization process. Globalization was fostered by the idea of creating equalaccess opportunities for all and facilitating communication worldwide. Using internet as the core platform, billions of people try to access and benefit from this opportunity through search engines, service providers, websites and social media. However, given the profound difference between internet and user’s languages, users end up on relying on search engines and tools to translate their ideas into a computer-readable language and derive information from them. In order to provide the best possible services, search engines and social media need to accumulate comprehensive data on each user’s identity. The challenge is that once they are fed with convenient information on each user, they tend to personalize the idea they grasp of him or her based on their given regulations and policies, which in the mid- and long-term results in managing users’ access to information.. By applying the reader-response theory, this paper seeks to focus on the challenges stemming from the adoption of users’ personalized profiles by Google, Facebook and Amazon as the most common part of users’ performance in internet. It also explores how the reading differences of the users and the tools result not only in personalized versions of users, but also engender an unrecognized virtual in-betweenness of users’ own perception of themselves and the tools’ perception of users

Is adaptation of e-advertising the way forward?

E-advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry that has shown exponential growth in the last few years. However, although the number of users accessing the Internet increases, users don’t respond positively to adverts. Adaptive e-advertising may be the key to ensuring effectiveness of the ads reaching their target. Moreover, social networks are good sources of user information and can be used to extract user behaviour and characteristics for presentation of personalized advertising. Here we present a two-sided study based on two questionnaires, one directed to Internet users and the other to businesses. Our study shows that businesses agree that personalized advertising is the best way for the future, to maximize effectiveness and profit. In addition, our results indicate that most Internet users would prefer adaptive advertisements. From this study, we can propose a new design for a system that meets both Internet users’ and businesses’ requirements

Encounters on the social web: Everyday life and emotions online

Encounters also happen online nowadays and, yes, they are still difficult to describe, even though it is sometimes easier to observe them-and obtain data about them- than in the past. The internet is crucially 'shaping the interactions people have with one another' (Johns 2010: 499). With the recent explosion and popularity of Web 2.0 services and the social web, such as Facebook (FB), Twitter, and various other types of social media, internet users now have at their disposal an unprecedented collection of tools to interact with others. These modes of online sociability allow users to pursue social encounters with variable levels of involvement, attention, and activity (Papacharissi and Mendelson 2010). For many of us it is now difficult to imagine our social relationships without access to the internet. The social web plays an important role in relationships among internet users (Boyd 2006), with the expression, management and experience of emotions being key to the maintenance of these relationships

A brief overview of online gambling scams

The internet has opened new possibilities for the development of online gambling scams, which target a large number of users. The vulnerability of users and the 'credibility' of fraudsters are key elements in online gaming scams. Professor Mark Griffiths, of Nottingham Trent University, examines in detail some of the most common internet gambling scams and how 'technology is being used to exploit and defraud thousands of people'

Subsidization Competition: Vitalizing the Neutral Internet

Unlike telephone operators, which pay termination fees to reach the users of another network, Internet Content Providers (CPs) do not pay the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) of users they reach. While the consequent cross subsidization to CPs has nurtured content innovations at the edge of the Internet, it reduces the investment incentives for the access ISPs to expand capacity. As potential charges for terminating CPs' traffic are criticized under the net neutrality debate, we propose to allow CPs to voluntarily subsidize the usagebased fees induced by their content traffic for end-users. We model the regulated subsidization competition among CPs under a neutral network and show how deregulation of subsidization could increase an access ISP's utilization and revenue, strengthening its investment incentives. Although the competition might harm certain CPs, we find that the main cause comes from high access prices rather than the existence of subsidization. Our results suggest that subsidization competition will increase the competitiveness and welfare of the Internet content market; however, regulators might need to regulate access prices if the access ISP market is not competitive enough. We envision that subsidization competition could become a viable model for the future Internet

Security Policies Approached by Value Analysis Concepts

This paper intends to redefine the role of the end users of the Internet facilities, in the process of creation of more secure transactions on the Internet, in respect of their privacy. In this context, the purpose is to introduce the use of end user (customer) value concept in the process of Security policy framework designsecurity, privacy, Internet, value analysis, end users, requirements