Da quando il World Wide Web – la Rete delle Reti – è entrato prepotentemente a far parte delle nostre vite, la nostra società sta sperimentando un cambiamento profondo. Ma come è cominciato tutto questo? Quando, come e perché il Web ha cessato di essere una semplice fonte di informazioni, per diventare uno strumento di interazione tra persone? E come si evolverà il Web nel futuro? Partendo dalle origini di Internet e del Web, il testo esamina in profondità le caratteristiche del Web 2.0, il Web Sociale; affronta poi il tema del Web del futuro prossimo, il Web 3.0 (Web Semantico), senza tralasciare l’evoluzione futura più remota, ossia il Web 4.0 (Web Ubiquo). Spiega come tutto ebbe inizio con la digitalizzazione, il presupposto fondamentale per fenomeni di grande attualità come la convergenza digitale e quella multimediale, la crossmedialità, la rimediazione digitale. Dal punto di vista più strettamente comunicazionale, il lavoro – nell’attribuire al Web una natura mediale – affronta il tema del passaggio dalla comunicazione tradizionale alla web communication, in tutte le sue declinazioni e modalità: la comunicazione screen to face asincrona e quella sincrona. Anche gli aspetti più concreti non vengono trascurati: un intero capitolo spiega come comunicare nel Web e fornisce utili indicazioni pratiche per fare web communication in modo efficace. La seconda parte del libro è dedicata a un’approfondita analisi delle tre aree mediali del Web di oggi: l’area della conoscenza e condivisione (dai motori di ricerca alle enciclopedie online, sino alla nuova didattica rappresentata dall’e-learning), l’area del business (e-commerce come strategia di e-business, marketing virale e web advertising come strumenti di web marketing) e l’area delle relazioni sociali (social media e blog, colonne portanti del Web 2.0). Il libro comprende oltre 30 focus, approfondimenti relativi a casi concreti – tutti legati al Web – di storie di successo o particolarmente significative. Prefazione di Marino Livolsi, sociologo e Presidente del Corso di Laurea in Scienze della Comunicazione, Facoltà di Psicologia, Università Vita – Salute San Raffaele, Milano.

This book constitutes the proceedings from the 20th Tyrrhenian Workshop on Digital Communications, held September 2009 in Pula, Sardinia, Italy and focused on the "Internet of Things."

"The book provides researchers and developers of online collaborative systems with approaches for effective and efficient means that would assist e-learning students and teachers with precise and relevant information regarding the ongoing online learning activity at both individual and group levels"--Provided by publisher.

A well-planned marketing orientation strategy that keeps customers informed is the first step to building a long-term relationship with customers and providing them with appropriate incentives. The difficulty with providing a winning strategy in a highly competitive market, however, stems from responding to the specific needs of the customers. Customer Satisfaction and Sustainability Initiatives in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an essential reference source that links together three highly relevant topics in the business of modern economy—innovation, customer satisfaction, and sustainability—and analyzes their synergies. Featuring research on topics such as e-business, global business, and sustainable innovation, this book is ideally designed for business consultants, managers, customer service representatives, entrepreneurs, academicians, researchers, and students seeking coverage on directing sustainable companies.

This book adopts a multi-method multimodal approach to the study of online political communication, applying it to case studies from the UK, France, and Italy toward offering a portrait of the rapid ideological shifts in contemporary Western democracies. The volume introduces an integrated framework combining Sentiment and Emotion Analysis, rooted in lexical semantics, and the qualitative dimensions of Appraisal Theory, applying it to large corpora of online political communication from the UK, France, and Italy. Combei and Reggi highlight their combined potential in analyzing the multimodal resources in such discourses and in turn, revealing fresh insights into layers of subtext and the ways in which parties and movements frame their political programmes and values. The authors also take into account culture- and language-specific variables across the three countries in shaping such discourses. The volume makes the case for an integrated methodological framework that can be uniquely applied to better understand the multimodal communicative landscape of divisiveness in today’s rapidly shifting political climate and other forms of online communication more broadly. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in digital communication, political communication, multimodality, and qualitative and quantitative discourse analysis, especially those interested in corpus-assisted approaches.

This volume uses the study of firm dynamics to investigate the factors preventing faster productivity growth in Latin America and the Caribbean, pushing past the limits of traditional macroeconomic analyses. Each chapter is dedicated to an examination of a different factor affecting firm productivity - innovation, ICT usage, on-the-job-training, firm age, access to credit, and international linkages - highlighting the differences in firm characteristics, behaviors, and strategies. By showcasing this remarkable heterogeneity, this collection challenges regional policymakers to look beyond one-size-fits-all solutions and create balanced policy mixes tailored to distinct firm needs. This book is open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO license.

A guide to teaching and learning online. It presents a wide range of experience and research findings from leading practitioners and organizations around the world, including case studies from the Open University, the BBC, ICL and leading international academics.