Go to the following website, http://www.faceyourmanga.com/ and start creating your Mangatar by firstly choosing your gender. The next step is about having different option of how to style your avatar. You can choose between a plenty of categories, e.g. face, eyes, ears, clothes etc. Within those categories you have again many options available. For instance in the face category you could choose between beards, sideburns, features, lines etc. Finally after you have done all your adjustments, you have to click finish and enter your email address. The Mangatar will be send to your email account within 30 minutes.
It really makes fun to play around with all the styling options, trying to make the avatar looking as similar to you as possible. One drawback of using this website was the slow web processing. Each time you choose a new category it took some seconds after you could see the options available.
People use the Web for different purposes; among others, getting connected by online communities and sharing information is one of them. According to the lecture, the term Web 2.0 is used to describe any technology that allows web users to create and share information, as well as, to collaborate easily with each other. There are a lot of different technologies offered by Web 2.0. The following paragraphs will introduce you to the most important types of Web 2.0 technologies: Blogs, Forums, Social networks and Wikis.
A Blog is a journal that is often authored by one person and sometimes teams. The blogger is in control of the discussion, but the audience can leave comments or questions. Mostly the blogger publishes thoughts about what he/she has experienced or learned. Usually, such blog posts are relatively short, but have enough information in it to engage the audience. There is a special form of blogging, called Micro blogging, like Twitter, where the posts are much smaller and differ in their content.
A Forum is different from a blog in that way that everyone is at an equal level, i.e. there is not only one author/author-team, but each participant can add some content or even a new topic. Usually forums are organized by topics. A special form of a forum is the Discussion forum, one like the ISM course page provides, where students can ask other students for help. It is not possible to change the edited posts of one student, but you can reply to each post, if you, for instance, know the answer to another student’s question.
A Wiki is a web page that can be edited by many people (e.g. Wikipedia). Characteristic for each wiki is the attitude that it is open and based on collaboration. Most Wikis use special software, but you can also go to webpages like, www.wikispaces.com, and create a basic plan wiki, for free. In general, if you see a wiki post, which is to your option wrong or can be improved, you can edit it. Most times, editing rights are limited with regard to edit, change or remove material.
A Social Network allows its members to organize around a person’s relationships or interests, rather than just focused on topics (e.g. Facebook). People in a social network are connected by a common interest and share personal information with the people they already know or those they want to meet.
Sharing of information and collaborating by using Web 2.0 technology is nowadays so important that not only private users, but also businesses and other organizations make use of it. Therefore the term, Enterprise 2.0, emerged, which allow organizations, by using Web 2.0 technology to streamline business procedures and to get better connected to any kind of stakeholders within that organization. Consequently, organizations can take advantage of deploying knowledge at all levels in an organization through collaboration and participation.
Since I never worked with any database software so far, this project was of great value for me. The power behind a relational database is of crucial interest for any business. I really enjoyed making my first experience with Microsoft Access.
The most difficult part of the project was to get the external data in the appropriate format without any import errors. It took me quite some time to import the “members” text file in the right format. Although I made the right adjustments, Microsoft Access had problems with importing the dates right. That’s why I changed the data types of the dates (birthday and joined date) into text data types. After everything was imported right, I used the design view to readjust the date fields in the date/time data type. I also adjusted some other fields and formatted it appropriately according to the given task.
Switching between the design and the datasheet view is very crucial to create and maintain a good database. Personally I think that knowing how to apply the different views as a tool is one of the most important things I learnt while doing the project. Also very important, when working with databases is the query function. Once you have a data table , query allows you to filter your data, depending of what you are searching. You have to create such queries and select what data source to use and what elements of that data source are relevant for your search. In the design view you can choose the relevant criteria. For instance, if you are looking just for a specific group in your datasheet, say just individual customer, you can let the query perform this task by going to the "Membership Type" field and in the criteria row you write “individual”. That is it. Now you can run the query, by clicking the red exclamation mark in the ribbon. Now you have only individual customer as output.
To make the data visually more attractive, Microsoft Access provides you with some nice tools, like creating a form or a report. In the ribbon, under the create tab, you can choose what to create. In principal , creatng a form or report is like creating a query, but kind of easier. For a form or report you have to select the data source (could be a table or a query) and the elements you want to include. Finally you can adjust fields and design it. While the form (new member form) is per individual, the report (recently departed members) is more like a summary, for instance for the executives. Both tools make the data more clearer.
How to improve the functionality within our member database? One way, I was thinking of ,is to improve the security of the database. Since there is customer specific data present, you have to be very sensitive to such data. That’s why I suggest securing any database like this with a password to keep customer data confident. Another issue of functionality is to create relationships between different databases. For instance, if you have a second database with all the bank details of your customers, you can connect both databases. If a customer’s contract expires, you need to stop debiting the customer’s account with the membership fees. With a relational database you can automate and simplify this process. Again, the issue of security becomes here even more important.
