I was both surprised and impressed that the World Wide Web was essentially created by one man – Tim Berners Lee. He had a vision for the WWW as being a way to connect anything to potentially anything else by way of a giant web of information. In 1990 he drew up the W3 proposal which outlined his vision and the workings behind his idea.

The web operates on an application level protocol called Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). This protocol tells the computer how to interpret hypertext documents. The language that is used to write these documents is called Hypertext Mark Up Language (HTML). Finally the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) tells the computer where to find information once you type in your desired domain address.

I think the most interesting part of this week topic was the Wayback machine excercise. We had to visit www.archive.org and use their application called the Wayback machine, to look up a variety of different websites and see how they had changed since they were first created. A few of the standard ones to look at were Curtin, Google and Apple. I also chose to look up a few sites that I use all the time worldofwarcraft.com and games-workshop.com (both sites from games that I play). Whilst all of these sites had different purposes and layouts they share some similarities. Back in 96-2000 sites where very heavily text-based and there were little to know images or animations anywhere to be found. This was due to both the slow connectivity, older computers and also to the more primitive web design ideas. Todays websites for the most part are very aesthetically pleasing and are quite user-friendly. Websites tend to feature large videos and animations that draw you in, and let you know what the site is about, rather than having to read a lengthy paragraph. Even when there is text on the page, say for links on the side, they are pretty well designed and are not just plain text in a box.

The World WIde Web has come such a long way in a relatively short amount of time, and with the way that technology is increasing it is quite an exciting idea to imagine what the web will look like in another 15-20 years.

The content seems to get more interesting as I progress through this unit, and I am finding myself somewhat hooked on learning about all these different aspects of the internet I never knew existed. I started taking this class to work towards the B.A (Internet Communications) with the hope of being a web designer, but I am already finding so many other areas of studying about internet that interest me.

This weeks topic was ‘What is the internet?’ – and after reading this weeks material and listening to the lectures I now have a good understanding of the history of the internet and about how it operates (such as by the use of the TCP/IP protocols). One point that was made in the lecture was that ‘The Internet’ does not equal The World Wide Web, I found this very interesting because these terms are used very loosely in our society today and are often thought of being interchangeable, when in fact they are two distinctly different things. I shared my feelings about this on the discussion board, and got some responses from other students who had also picked up on this and thought it was an interesting topic for conversation. In my post I added in a link to a website I came across which had a simplified explanation of what the internet is, and about the different protocols that operate on it. I was a bit unsure at first wether or not I should share the website I found, with fear of being on the wrong track and having people think I was somewhat “stupid”. I was very relieved to read positive posts from other students who found the website helpful and also posts from some of the tutors who confirmed that I was indeed on the right track and I had found a website that contained useful information.

Another highly interesting and educational week, I can’t wait for this weeks topic “….and What is the World Wide Web?”!!

There was two main areas of discussion this week: Whats in a name? and Who are you in terms of your internet usage?

For the ‘whats in a name’ question we had to find an online ID/username that could be used across multiple different social networking sites, the ones we were asked to mainly focus on were:

• delicious
• twitter
• blogger
• wordpress
• photobucket
• flickr
• linkedin
• friendfeed

The tool that we used to find a name that was available across many of the websites, was a website called namechk.com. You basically just type in your desired name and it tells you which sites it is available on, and which ones are already taken (I believe it shows you results for about 50 different websites). I was very surprised at the amount of different websites there were for social networking, and how similar a lot of them seemed to be. Prior to this activity I had only used facebook and myspace for any of my social networking activities. I have signed up for an account for all of these different websites, and I hope to start working on them soon to create my web presence (which is part of a later assignment for this class). Although I am a bit sceptical about having so many different accounts, I think that experiencing them all will help to broaden my views and understanding of internet usage in terms of social networking, as I am not too familiar with that particular area.

The second topic that was discussed this week was ‘Who are you in terms of your internet usage’?. Four questions were posted on the discussion forums:

1. How many of you have used email this week?
2. How many have used a social networking site in the last week?
3. How many of you have watched video content online in the last week?
4. How many of you have created media in the past week?

We were then encouraged to post our answers and at the end of the week the results were tallied. The results were:

1. 63/63 people used email – many specifying that they used it daily.
2. 58/64 used social networking sites – mostly facebook and myspace.
3. 62/64 people watched some form of video content.
4. 46/64 had created some form of content (photo, video etc)

These results did not really surprise me as I had assumed that most people taking this class would have a similar internet usage to myself (I answered yes to all of the questions). The result I was the most surprised by was the content creation. The internet has become such a great way to share videos and photos with friends and family, and to create images and artwork so I had assumed that almost everyone would have created some form of content in the past week. I guess that because content creation in this sense is newer than email and social networking it makes sense that more people would be doing the latter on a daily basis. However as I discovered in the namechk.com activity there are a large number of social networking sites and more and more are being created all the time, so its only a matter of time before it too becomes as popular as email and is a daily activity for almost everyone using the internet.

This first week has been very exciting and I can’t wait to move on too week 2!!

Basically, you go to chatroulette.com, your webcam/microphone are activated and you are randomly connected to people all over the world and are able to chat with them/view their webcam.

There is no account name or signup needed, all you have to do is access the website, interesting huh?

As many people have pointed out on the forums there is the problem of censorship, you really don’t know what you are going to see on the other end of the camera once you access. Could be something as harmless as another person just wanting to have a chat, or on the other hand could be some old guy whacking it on his bed >.< (disgusting thought, I know)! The biggest concern with this is the ease of which children can potentially stumble across this website, and be exposed to something pretty awful. While some have argued that it is no more harmful than randomly talking to people in a chat room, I believe that the power of imagery is a lot more powerful that some bad language, in this instance anyway.

Overall thought, I think that this in an interesting concept somebody has come up with. I have watched some pretty funny compilation videos on youtube, and it seems like people have a lot of fun (sometimes at the expense of others) but it all seems pretty innocent, at least in the videos I watched.

I haven’t built up enough courage yet to try it out for myself, but we will see.

I am a 21-year-old married mother of one (son – Dax Brandon Schulze 7 mths old). I grew up in Australia but after meeting my husband (American) on World of Warcraft, I moved to the states. After 2 years living in the U.S we decided to move back to Australia for a couple of years, and are now living in Sydney. I have always been interested in art and designing, and loved drawing as a kid. Now that I have become pretty much “addicted” to computers and technology, I would love to be able to combine my passion for these two things and start my own company designing websites. My husband gave me Dreamweaver CS4 last christmas, so I have been trying to get my head around it and learn some of the basics. I haven’t had a lot of time to give my full attention to is, but I hope to in the coming weeks.

On an unrelated note, I love the snow and snowboarding (hence the winter themed blog).

I have started undertaking tertiary study and am working towards my BA (Internet Communications) through OUA, studying at Curtin University. I started my studies last study period by taking an Introduction to University learning class through Murdoch Uni called SSK12. I was nervous about starting University study, especially when I seemed to have so many other things occupying my time, however I am pleasantly surprised by the way I have handled the new responsibilities that came with studying. I have earned 3 High Distinctions out of my 4 submitted assignments. I have my final exam in 2 days, so I guess that will be the real test, but I must say I am feeling confident.

Now as to the reason I have started this blog.

Well I have never blogged before, myspace/facebook status updates and messages are about the extent of my online writings. I decided to start a blog for one of the classes I am taking this study period called Web101. One of our assessments includes reflections on weekly tasks and discussions, and it was advised that we should either write them in word documents or start-up an internet blog. So I chose the latter.

I can write essays and answer academic questions pretty confidently, but when it comes to writing down my feelings and expressing myself I am a bit unsure. I think the reason for my uncertainty is that I have always been a relatively shy person, and I never liked to draw attention to myself in front of people who I didn’t know. Now if  you think about it, what better way to reveal yourself to strangers than to post a web blog. Even writing those last few sentences has brought more tension and uneasy feelings to the surface **sigh**. Oh well, here I am jumping in with both feet, lets see what happens……..