Week 9

This week we discussed social networking sites.

To embrace and demonstrate the pros and cons of this type of Web 2.0 platform I have posted the rest of this portfolio entry on the twitter...

Week 8

This week we took a look at Wikis.

Quickly this is a list of the characteristics of a Wiki;

1.The main idea is it is a collaborative web page that is created by a bunch of people rather than just one or two site designers.

2.Once a wiki is up any editing such as text or image embedding is done in your web browser.

When editing they do not use HTML but their own code which is then turned into HTML when you finish the edit.

3. They have intuitive linking, something appearing in one wiki page is often given it's own page and that page can be reached simply by clicking on the word.

Example; chicken is mention in an article. It would be linked to a page about chicken.

4. There is an option to discuss the edit's with other people viewing the page before it is edited.

5. There is a log of the changes kept and the ability to go back to any previous version of the page.

Most of the lecture/tut was about wether wikipedia is an actual credible source.

I'd like to say that it is, usually.

The Wikipedia is, the wisdom of many after all so how could it not be a credible source?

After watching this I was convinced;

This guy however, is the founder of Wikipedia so of course he will tell everyone how awesome it is.

I think in the class we never came to a decision about wether it is a credible source or not. One side argued that it wasn't whilst the others did.

To keep this post short I'd like to conclude by saying Wikipedia is a great source of information. Everything I ever look for information on IS on Wikipedia after all BUT it should not be the only source you use.

I find Wikipedia is especially useful in finding out information that is already well known by some such as how many episodes there have been of a particular TV show. It isn't as helpful for finding out release dates of games and movies or about things that are upcoming. A lot of the time these are written by speculators or people who think they know everything but actually don't.

The Wikipedia should be used as a guide for further research by using the references left behind by the contributors.

The Wikipedia, if there isn't references, don't reference it.

Week 7

This week we looked at blogs.

I thought the lecture was interesting this week. Especially the story of the blogger that got his hands on a number of photographs of coffins containing dead American soldiers and then posted them on a blog. Previously this was not allowed to be done in the American media and it made the media in America decide to eventually stop following this rule.

I found it amazing how one blog managed to change a whole nation.

The other part I found great was how blogs can be used as a media watch of sorts.

The other story was about how a photographer had edited his photograph of a fire to make it look worse than it was. A blogger noticed this and posted it on his blog causing the photographer's bosses to get a bit annoyed.

In the tut we discussed wether blogs are a good source of information at all.

I couldn't decide, some blogs have brilliant information on them but I find that they are few and far between. There are more blogs that are dedicated to creative, like the photoblog I posted previously, or simply opinionated content. Some are just shit.

There are those that do give you links to good information. There is practically a blog about anything and it's quite possible to find a blog where someone has posted heaps of links to websites they think are useful and relevant to the topic.

Humans after all are the best type of search engine.

Hmm... I guess then that blogs are a useful tool to an extent but are NEVER the only source of information you should use.

I think that a blogs place on the web is for anyone to have their own space on the net where they can discuss and share whatever they want, including their own creative work.

Obama looking at awesome things.

This is why the web is awesome.
I just had to post it.
http://deantrippe.tumblr.com/tagged/presidentawesome

Week 4.0

This week we began our work on web 2.0.

Now, I can't say I fully understand the differences quite yet but II'll try my best to explain.

Web 1.0 was a promise of hypertextual interactivity. It was a great theory yet it didn't quite take off, mostly due to internet speeds and poor technology.

Web 2.0 is beginning to be what web 1.0 was supposed to be and possibly more.

Web 2.0 is heavily about participatory culture. These days you can publish any sort of media with ease. It is an application that is mostly about communication and community rather than business and static information like web 1.0.

Something important: Web 1.0 is a retronym. It was never called Web 1.0 becuase when it was invented no one could comprehend it being so much more than it was originally.

Web 1.0 only came around when people thought the web had evolved into web 2.0.

In the lecture Tama showed us a table showing some differences between web 1.0 and 2.0.

It was a bit like the one on this web site.

Heres the table written by O'Reilly;

Web 1.0		Web 2.0
DoubleClick	-->	Google AdSense
Ofoto	-->	Flickr
Akamai	-->	BitTorrent
mp3.com	-->	Napster
Britannica Online	-->	Wikipedia
personal websites	-->	blogging
evite	-->	upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation	-->	search engine optimization
page views	-->	cost per click
screen scraping	-->	web services
publishing	-->	participation
content management systems	-->	wikis
directories (taxonomy)	-->	tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness	-->	syndication

It's interesting to see how so many components of the web has evolved.

This table was posted in 2005 so its missing some important websites such as facebook and youtube.

I believe it may need rethinking soon, I've found the web has changed a lot over the last five years and it doesn't look like staying the same anytime soon...

Week 3

This week we looked at the World Wide Web.

We learnt that it's different from the Internet, is coded in html and some history about hyperlinks and the creation of the web itself.

1 thing you must definitely not do anymore; DON'T CALL THE INTERNET THE WEB!

They are different! One is a bunch of computer networks and one is an application that utilises it!

I found the lecture rather interesting this week, it was basically a brief history of the web.

Heres an even briefer version taken straight from my notes;

1945- A machine to retrieve all human knowledge to a desktop is thought of.

1965- Someone thinks of hypertext.

1968- Same guy demonstrates hypertext AND the keyboard and mouse. omg.

1990-Tim Berners-Lee creates the web and all the stuff that goes with it (see below).

1993-The first popular browser was invented. "Mosaic."

Late 1993- Internet is public domain! omg!

1999- Berners-Lee has a bit of a sad because he wanted everyone to be able to edit everything online as well as reading it, like a giant wikipedia, yet everything is read only.

All the stuff that goes with the internet;

HTML; hypertext markup language. A simple code that dictates what you see in your browser.

If you want to see it for this page just right click and click view source.

Hypertext; this blue underlined text. It takes you to another page online. Sometimes they can do other things too like downloading. Sometimes they can take you to pages you don't want to see...

URLS; Uniform resource locators. Goes through DNS' to get an IP. Example; www.google.com

The web has a huge number of websites.

In 2008 google reported they had indexed 1,000,000,000,000 of them.

Thats a lot of web pages.

Oh we were also asked to go here.

It's a wayback machine, a website that has saved hundreds of websites as they've been updated since 1996. You just type in a website and you can see what it was like in the past.

I particularly enjoyed seeing the google beta and facebook when it was about face.

Week Two

This week we looked at how the internet was invented and also how some of the technical jargon works.

Before this weeks lecture I went and did the topic 1.1 and the activities involved.

Heres what I learned about how the net works;

The net works like a pizza delivery, the hungry drunk guy (client) calls up the angry, underpaid, pimply teen (server) asking for a certain pizza from that shop (the shop being the website and the certain pizza being a particular page).

The teen then prepares the pizza ( server finds the right webpage), cuts it up and then boxes it (packet switching).

Then he jumps in his car and brings it to the hungry drunk guy (the page is sent to the client).

Of course it's a lot faster. And free.

Well it's a better metaphor than the one we had to watch;

I learnt what packet switching is; shrinking data to send online then sending through routers until it reaches the client. The data is then re-organized on the other side in the correct order.

And IP's; The computers address, anything connected to the net has one. Version 4 of these was introduced in 1977. However these are usually found by connecting an IP with a...

Domain name (DNS); A name or words mapped to an IP address (easier to understand and remember when typing). I believe they were introduced in 1984.

We also learnt some historical facts about the creation of the net which was quite interesting.

Also, apparently the web is not the same as the internet. The terms mean different things.
(Update) Oh! Yes, the internet is a series of networked computers while the web is an application that makes use of it!

And that was the second week.