50 Digital Ideas You Really Need to Know

Tom Chatfield is a freelance author, consultant, game writer and theorist. His first book FUN INC. was published worldwide in 2010. Tom has done design, writing and consultancy work for games and media companies, including Google, Mind Candy, VCCP, Preloaded, Grex, Red Glasses and Intervox. He has spoken widely on technology, media and gaming at forums including TED Global, the Cannes Lions Festival, the House of Commons, RSA, ICA and the World IT Congress. A former senior editor at Prospect magazine, he has a doctorate from St. John's College, Oxford, and writes widely in the national press, including for the Observer, Independent, Sunday Times, Wired, New Statesman, Evening Standard and Times Literary Supplement, and the site Boing Boing.

Introduction. FUNDAMENTALS: The internet; The world wide web; Internet service provision; Email; Personal computing; Servers; Browsers; Markup languages; Search. TOWARDS THE DIGITAL PRESENT: Web 2.0; Netiquette; Blogging; Aggregation; Chatting; File sharing; Streaming media; Rich internet applications; Wireless; Smartphones. THE DARK SIDE: Malware; Spam; Privacy; The deep web; Hacking; Cyberwar. PLEASURE AND LEISURE: Social networking; Games consoles; Mashups; Culture jamming. BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT: E-commerce; Online advertising; Analytics; Optical character recognition; Machine translation; Location-based services; Virtual goods; eGovernment. TRANSFORMATIVE TRENDS: Crowdsourcing; Free software movement; Digital distribution; Cloud computing; Going viral. SHAPING A DIGITAL FUTURE: Virtual worlds; Avatars; Net neutrality; Semantic web; Augmented reality; Convergence; The internet of things; Distraction. Glossary. Index.