Class 2/6/07

Class last Tuesday was pretty much awesome. And I do believe the entire class felt just about the same way as I do.

RSS and Bloglines is great. Now if we could just get every website out there to have an RSS feed it would be great. Can you imagine? No checking say the school's website to get updates you simply get on your bloglines and see if they have anything new right along with checking everyone's blogs. It definantly has made checking the class blogs alot easier. Sadly for everyone else, I havnt been on my blog until today (sorry guys).

Del.icio.us is also a great innovation. Over the years through my multiple computers and multiple reformats of those computers as well as surfing the web at friends houses or on campus, keeping up with favorite bookmarks has been a huge hassle. I had even started simply emailing my self links which clutters up your inbox. This will all stop now. I wont loose my bookmarks, I can access something even when I'm not home, my friends can easily access my bookmarks without me having to email them the link, I wont have to spend an hour or two saving all my bookmarks before reformatting my PC, etc, etc. I was so impressed with this website that I called two friends on the drive home and shared the information with them. One friend will especially benefit as she does not have internet at home and uses various PCs when shes at family and friend's homes.

If all our classes this semester continue to be as informative as these first two, I anticipate a great semester.

Class 1/30/07

In class on Jan 30 we learned about MAPping the internet in order to validate website. My group had the quite humorous Tree Octopus web page which was pretty obvious that it was fake. It was very interesting to run through the various exercises and dissect the website to learn about it. I feel I learned valuable tools that I will be able to apply in the future to determine a site's validity.

We also talked about how search engines order their hits. I feel this will be helpful in the future when I am searching for things on the internet. In the past I thought all websites ordered according to the page's relevance. Searchenginewatch.com is a very helpful site for learning about the different search engines. The one thing I haven't seen that I wish I could find is a listing/chart of the major search engines in one column and how they order their hits in another column. I may end up compiling this myself and posting it on here. If I am just missing it, someone tell me where it is please :)