Assignment Topics

From IT

Here are (in an early draft version!) some topic suggestions for the final assignments. Of course you can choose your own (provided we agree on it in advance!), but if you do not know what to write about you can choose between the following ones:

• The Web is dead, long live the Internet. See the article on Wired and the "reply" on BoingBoing

• The Cheap Internet: we are accustomed to a "rich" Internet, both in contents and in price (computers needed to show it, bandwidth, and so on). However, there are still alternatives to it that somehow "resisted" from the past. Does a cheap alternative need to be old? Is there space for a more modern one? Is there a need for a cheap Internet anymore?

• Online robots: from IRC channels to search engine scrapers, from Wikipedia vandalism detection to denial of service attacks, the Internet is full of robots who automatically perform more or less simple tasks in place of humans. Study and comment this phenomenon.

• Deep Web, Dark Internet and Darknets. Three concepts that might seem similar but introduce three totally different worlds. What are they? What happens in there?

• Living on a Cloud: how much of our data is "in the cloud" and not on our computers anymore? How does this affect the way we are using the computers? What are its pros and cons?

• The phenomenon of machine tags. Even if tags are born as free-text strings, some communities decided to give them some structure and use them in a different way. What are machine tags used for and how does this affect the way people tag things and recover information about tagged resources?

• Legitimate Peripheral Participation (look here, here, here, and here!) has been witnessed in wiki systems. What other systems or communities are characterized by this phenomenon? Provide extensive examples to prove your assumptions.

• After almost forgetting (for years!) the possibility to access Internet contents offline, a new wave of "offline-enabled" applications has become available such as news readers, flash video downloaders, email clients (i.e. Thunderbird and Gmail itself with Gears), and so on. Comment the phenomenon (why? how are people using their data? is offline better than online or vice versa?).

• Lots of systems available on the Web are on the edge between legality and illegality (i.e. they are often used to share copyrighted information, but are still officially alive). Is that just a dark niche on the Web or a business model? (suggested reading material: Cory Doctorow, "Content", available here).