Chapter 5

  Chapter five covered a lot of concepts that I am used to deal with, but I had no idea how they became what they currently are. To begin with, the author started covering push and pull technologies. Basically, push is when the content “shows up”, and pull is when you go and get the content. Secondly, I learned about an email-based communication system called Usenet. It was explained that the collection of news servers (with nothing to do with news outlets) connected to the internet make up Usenet. Back then, users would pull the content to their preferred device in the form of articles that they could read or reply to. This Usenet was kind of like an older Reddit, and probably was what set the foundations to it.

   Other interesting concepts were newsfeed, podcast, and microblogs. Newsfeed is a technology that sends subscribed users frequently updated content on a schedule. The word “news” refers to new information, and the word “feed” refers to a continuous stream. I also learned that the word podcast is a combination of the words “iPod” and “broadcasting” which is self-explanatory. The pod catcher software that the user has installed will automatically download the podcasts you are subscribed to on your device. Finally, microblog is described as a form of blogging that delivers short messages (maximun140 characters long) on a very frequent schedule. I immediately thought about Twitter, but I have never heard someone refer to it as a “microblog”.