Communication in a “Cloud”

During 2000s remix gradually moved from being one of the options to being treated as practically a new cultural default.
-In this model, a much large number of producers publish content into “a global media cloud”; the users create personalized mixes by choosing from this cloud.
-Furthermore, a user can also select when and where to view her news – a phenomenon that has come to be known as “timeshifting” and “place shifting.

The arrival of a new paradigm has been reflected in and supported by a set of new terms.
-The new terms are more discriminating than the old ones as they now name many specific operations involved in communication.
-Most of the new terms describe new types of users’ activities which were either not possible with the old media or were strictly marginal, if old terms such as “read,” “view” and “listen” were media-specific, the new ones are not.

Among these new terms,“remix” and “mashup” started to be used in contexts where previously the term “editing” had been standard
-For instance, when referring to a user editing a video. When in the spring of 2007 Adobe released video editing software for users of the popular media sharing web site Photobucket, it named the software Remix.

The “web” has changed do with the changes in the patterns of information flow between the original Web and so-called Web 2.0.
-In the original web model, information was published in the form of web pages collected into web sites. To receive information, a user had to visit each site individually. You could create a set of bookmarks for the sites you wanted to come back to, or a separate page containing the links to these sites.
-With RSS and other web feed technologies, any periodically changing or frequently updated content can be syndicated (i.e., turned into a feed, or a channel), and any user can subscribe to it.

The software technologies used to send information into the cloud are complemented by software that allows people to curate (or “mix”) the information sources they are interested in.
-Software in this category is referred to as newsreaders, feed readers, or aggregators. Examples include separate web-based feed readers such as Bloglines and Google Reader; all popular web browsers that also provide functions to read feeds; desktop-based feed-readers such as NetNewsWire; and personalized home pages such as live.com, iGoogle, my Yahoo!

The practically unlimited number of these sources now available in the “cloud” means that manual ways of selecting among these sources become limited in value.
-We take it for granted that Google and other search engines automatically process tremendous amounts of data to deliver search results.
-We also take it for granted that Google’s algorithms automatically insert ads in web pages by analyzing pages’ content.