3D Worlds and Socialising on the Internet

"Active worlds," similar to many other 3D chatting programs available on the internet, transports users to a 3D computer world where they can interact with other users from all over the world. The majority of these programs have similar 3D characters on screen to the computer game "The Sims," except users can actually create their own characters to represent themselves. This medium not only allows users to communicate with random users from random parts of the world but also allows them to be a different character for a day, so to speak, should they so wish. This notion of cyber freedom is further accentuated when many of these 3D chatting programs allow users to build objects in their own worlds as well as to make a living in the cyber dimension. This is vastly different to using Instant Messaging (IM) programs such as MSN Messenger because the latter only allows users to chat with people they know. On MSN Messenger for example, a user must add another user's email address in order to communicate with them. Other internet applications such as IRC and chat rooms allow users to talk to random users, but not in a virtual world setting like 3D programs, and certainly do not give room to have a "second life" on cyberspace. With faster internet connections and improved technology, 3D worlds are increasingly becoming a popular medium of internet communication as well as recreation, making the world fit onto the keyboard and allowing cyber creativity like never before.

The Search Engine

According to Encarta, a search engine is "a computer program that searches for specific words and returns a list of documents in which they were found, especially through a commercial Internet service." Users of the engine type in a keyword, phrase or something they want to search and the engine will retrieve an index of what is stored in world wide web sites. This is done through what is known as a 'web crawler,' a type of robot browser that goes through the web and constantly retrieves pages it finds. The next step in the process is the indexing of pages according to the words contained in them. Special priority is given to headlines and titles to best fit the words that users type in. When results are shown, in general, they are ranked in terms of the number of other pages which have links to them. This is based on the common belief that if a web page is good, then other users and websites will put links to them. Criteria for page ranking is different from engine to engine, the above mentioned method however, is a common one. Some really good engines include Google.com which is the most popular by far as well as yahoo.com and altavista.com. Google is generally well-liked because of its speed and comprehensiveness in retrieving web pages. News regarding search engines in recent times have included Google, MSN and Yahoo! being under fire for cooperating with the Chinese Government to censor Internet content and helping to trace political dissidents who published their essays online in China. Both people involved were traced via their Yahoo! account and sentenced to 8 and 10 years in jail respectively! This raised controversy in the Western world because the view of the Internet being a medium for free speech and thought was challenged.