Can we eliminate those zombie followers ?

If you are a user of any kind of Weibo of mainland China, it is not difficult for you to find a group of registered users which have became “influential”. (I seldom use Twitter, so I don’t know whether it is serious on that.). Everyday your Weibo account would be focused by several people with gaudy names or attractive profile photos, and you would be @ in commercial posts by some users you never known. We intuitively call these users “Zombie followers”, cause these people keep posting advertisements or doing focus on someone who needs a high rank, but they never post any energetic information about their life experience. What’s more, this kind of cheating has become a way of making profits. You can just spend little money on Taobao to buy thousands of focuses on your own Weibo in order to get a “V” authentication. Indeed, it crashes the balance of Weibo system and its ranking criterion.

a typical annoying @ on my Weibo

When Prof. Chan introduced the PageRank technology on lecture9, I was curious about whether “Zombie followers” have their power in Google engines. Later I know, the answer is definitely YES. As we know, in PageRank system, incoming and outcoming hyperlinks are important elements for computing the rank of a website. In order to gain incoming clicks or outcoming links, cheaters would post many unrelated URLs on their blogs or forums. These so called “rubbish spams” serious affected the healthy environment of the Internet.

In 2005, Two Google group leaders Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen introduced a method called “nofollow” to eliminate rubbish spams. Nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the ‘rel attribute’ of a HTML. It is an element to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. The attribute ‘REL=”NO FOLLOW”’ tells the search engine not to rank this link, but you can still visit.

How to set nofollow value

The ‘nofollow’ technology has gained great success, and then can we use something similar to fight Zombie followers in Weibo? Imagine that every user of Weibo has to set an attribute of his followers, for example, say ‘trusted follower/distrusted follower’. Then every Weibo user can have a hidden information which can only be seen by administrators. This may give Weibo operators a useful criterion to catch out Zombie follower and they can later send alert messages or directly ban these cheaters’ accounts.

Reference URLs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
http://baike.baidu.com/view/1584081.htm

Cloud computing for web games

Online Game was born with the origination of internet, its long history stems from 1970s. In the early years, online games were mostly played by real world friends in a LAN. With the development of internet and increasing speed of data rate, Massively Multiplayer Online Role Play Game (MMORPG) comes into people’s lives. Honestly speaking, it is not difficult for us to find the prototype of Social Networking stuffs in online games, as players in a typical MMORPG have their own identity and friend lists, some social elements like guild, auction and voice-based collaboration have already became fundamental functions of an online game.

MMORPG

While Online Games have formed a mature system, there is a new kind of online game called web game which becomes popular with SNS websites within the recent five years. Unlike traditional client-server online games, web games request no client installation on their users’ terminals, which make it more accessible for SNS websites users, and the important thing is that these web games have higher interactive level with a strong relationship to SNS functions. It is not difficult to find some apps or links of web games on most popular SNS websites like Renren.com or Weibo.com in mainland china.

a popular web game in mainland China

With the rapidly increasing number of web game players, web game companies encounter new problems on server technologies. Large number of users give a web game server heavy load, and it reduces the response speed of the server, which has a considerable negative influence on user experience. Traditionally, web game companies tend to rent temporary server from IDC suppliers, they don’t have own server as MMORPG suppliers. If they want to reduce the load pressure, more servers have to be rent and the cost is hard to balance. As a hardened online game player, I would not waste my time on a game which requires me to queue to log in at peak period, and uncomfortable delay makes me depressed when playing games.

a comic about network delay

One efficient way to solve this problem is applying cloud computing servers. Some IDC suppliers have started to offer cloud computing service for web game companies. For example, in mainland China, an IDC supplier CloudEX offers advanced IaaS cloud service called ECC (Elastic Computing Cloud) which is applied in many web games. 

All data processing is shared among several node servers spread in different provinces. The load pressure is reduced and the IT structure is easier for administration. Although cloud computing is more efficient, this technology is not universally used in mainland China. IDC suppliers spend big money on setting up node servers, and it is the web game users that pay this bill. The task to reduce the cost of cloud computing server still has a long way to go, however, it is a trend of future web games.   


Answer of questions in Note of Week 6
1.Class Activity One A
   (1)A Social Cloud is a resource and service sharing framework utilizing relationships established between members of a social network.
   (2)A Social Computation Cloud; A Social Storage Cloud; A Social Collaborative Cloud; A Social Cloud for Public Science; An Enterprise Social Cloud.
   Class Activity One B
   (1)A Social Cloud is a scalable computing model in which virtualized resources contributed by users are dynamically provisioned amongst a group of friends.
   (2)Cloud computing server for web games.
   Class Activity Two
   (1)Cloud computing is the use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service over a network (typically the Internet). The name comes from the use of a cloud-shaped symbol as an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it contains in system diagrams. Cloud computing entrusts remote services with a user's data, software and computation.
   (2)Did not reach to a conclusion.

2.What was the epistemic aims in (1) Class Activity One (individual work) and (2) Class Activity Two (group work)? Is there any change in epistemic aim? If so, why did you change your aims?

    I think the epistemic aim of Activity One is to acquire true, justified beliefs. The epistemic aim of Activity Two is to adopt minimally justified beliefs. I changed my aim in group discussion because I don't have a deep understanding of this topic, the aim of this group discussion is to find the common part shared by answers of different group members to reach a minimally justified answer.

3.Is there any differences in terms of individual and group epistemic cognition, how?
    
    The difference is that group epistemic cognition has exchange of understanding between group members which will make the result more generic.

4.How did you approach to the problem individually and in group, respectively? Is there any differences in the processes involved?

     Individually I would search for several answers on internet and then choose one which is more likely with my experience. In group we exchange our answers and form a new result through discussion.