DCM's

DCM’s

Email:

Email is a way of communicating to other people electronically. It’s the electronic version of standard mail. People can use it by creating an email address using one of many email providers, for example Google mail or Hotmail. They can then write whatever they want and attach files from their computer, be it a photo or a word document. They then type in the email address they want to send it to and click send. Depending on the size of the email and the connection speeds they have, the email will be received almost instantly, wherever they are in the world. An email account is free to create and you can keep it for as long as you want. Most email providers limit the size of the emails as sending big files takes a lot of time and space. An example of and email address would be: ‘30032823@hotmail.com’ anything before the @ can be whatever you want, but it cannot be changed once you sign up and select it. Anything after the @ cannot be changed as this depends on which email provider you use and what part of the world you are in.

IM:

IM stands for instant messaging. This has become a massive thing over the past few years. It’s like an email plus face-to-face talking combined. Instant messaging is where you log onto a certain program/website, e.g. Facebook. From there you can see other users you have added that are currently online. If they are online you can start talking to them in a chat window. The user on the other computer will receive this message instantly and will be able to reply, just like talking in real life. Other software such as windows messenger allow you to instant message someone, but you can also share and send files straight to them, like an email, although depending on the file size and both your connection and the receivers connection this can take a lot longer than and email.to use IM you need to have other peoples email address as that’s what you use t sign up with. IM is more of a private thing as you can select who has your address and who doesn’t

SMS:

SMS is text messaging from a mobile device. It works in a similar way to IM as you can send text messages from your device to another person’s device. Instead of an email address you use your mobile phone number. SMS is normally instant, but it depends on where you are, your service provider and how good your signal is at the current time, the same applies for the receiver of the message.

  

Bulletin boards:

A bulletin board is an online service, which allows users to upload and download software and data once they are logged in. They can also read news and bulletins, plus they are able to exchange messages with other users through email or in public message boards. Many bulletin boards offer online games, which allows users to compete with each other.

Discussion forums:

Discussion forums are online message boards where people can hold conversations and discussions in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms, as a post may need to be approved first by an admin or moderator before it becomes visible to other users. A single conversation in a forum is called a thread. Forums are generally used alongside video games, technology, sports, music and fashion.  Other popular topics for forums are Internet slang, Internet macros and Meme’s.

A forum is constructed as a tree like directory structure. The top end is “categories”. Under the categories are sub-forums and these sub-forums can also have further sub-forums. The topics (also known as threads) come under the lowest level of sub-forums. These are the places in which members can start their own discussions or posts. An admin or moderator will start most of the main discussions in a forum.

One other thing that is commonly found in forum posts is something called a ‘bump’. This is when a member posts in a thread for no reason but to get the forum to the top of the page.

Weblogs:

A weblog is a personal journal that’s being published on the Internet directly. It’s a bit like a forum but only one person is posting and the posts appear in chronological order. A weblog is the same as keeping a written journal on paper, it’s just typed out on a website under your own account. Certain blogs do allow viewers to leave their own comments on the bloggers posts. Weblogs can be seen as a form of social network.

A weblog basically involved someone signing up to a blogging website, and posting whatever they want onto it.

Newsgroups:

A newsgroup is like a forum, the main difference is that is focuses on one topic only. There are two types of newsgroups, binary and text. There are no technical differences between the two, but the naming differentiation allows users and servers with limited facilities to maximize network bandwidth. Newsgroups are hosted by various organisations and institutions. Most Internet service providers host their own servers, or rent access to one for their subscribers. Every host of a news server maintains agreements with other news servers to regularly synchronize. In this way news servers form a network.  This means that when one user posts to one news server the message is stored locally. That server then shares the message with the other servers that they are connected to, and so on.

Internet telephony:

Internet telephony is another term for VOIP. It allows people to call other people using the Internet. It’s used in programs such as Skype and msn to send voice data over the Internet.

Conferencing:

Conferencing can be any kind of multi-user discussion, face-to-face or online. Its basically a telephone call but with more than 2 people in the call. It can be done using just voices or a video can also be used.  It works in the same way as Internet telephony, just with more than 2 people.