WEB101 Week 5: Reflection

Web 2.0 has me intrigued. I have just finished watching the talk from Clay Shirky that he gave at the Web 2.0 Conference in 2008.

Clay Shirky - Where do people find the time. Web 2.0 Conference 2008

Shirky brings up some very interesting points about how people "will" find the time to contribute to the internet collaboration. His references to the industrial revolution and to the 'sitcom' are agreeable. Before the industrial revolution he comments that people were all drunk on gin, and then they all stopped being drunk and poof! we have the industrial revolution. Similarly to Web 2.0, he was asked by a TV producer "Where will people find time?" Well his comments in regards to this question do get you thinking about how many mindless hours we have all wasted sitting in front of the 'idiot box' as we are drilled with advertising and sitcoms. We are now starting to shift our time towards other matters, such as contributing to internet communities. We are seen as 'wasting time' because we are on facebook or twitter, but at lease we are 'doing something'. We are contributing and sharing, not just consuming.
His final comments on his little girls reacting to the TV not having a mouse is exactly where I believe the future for the internet will be heading. As the older generation have to be retrained from the mindless TV watching, time wasters that we grew up as to contributors and collaborators on the web, the next generation is already there and will continue to make this 'fad' grow stronger and wiser. More of a reason why to take this course in Internet Communication. Weather we like it or not, it's here to stay and will become a bigger and more important part of our everyday life. Stop burying our heads in the sand and start contributing to something bigger than that box in the centre of your living room.

Still more reflections to come this week. Stay tuned.

References

Clay Shirky - Where do people find the time, 2008 Web 2.0 Conference (Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyoNHIl-QLQ Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNCblGv0zjU&feature=related)

Update on Net 102 results!!

Hoorah I have passed my 1st unit with flying colours... Now to continue this trend for the rest of the course.

WEB101 Week 3: Reflection

So this week we discussed what the Web is... Where it began, how it has evolved over the last 50 years. Yes 50 years. It's hard to believe that the concept of the web has been around since the 1960 with the introduction of the the first hyper text document by Doug Engelbart. Read more about Engelbart's discoveries at http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html
But not until the late 1980s early 1990s did the web become the interest of the public... Thanks to the developers of Mosaic... the 1st web browser application that was available "free" to the public. Imagine if these developers never released their web browser to the public domain and web browsers remained "commercial"? Would the internet have developed into what it is today? Would it be as popular as it has become? My guess would be that we wouldn't have been bothered to use this tool and it would of only been used for research purposes and the general public would not of seen it as a useful tool.
I did see on the "Today" on channel 9 this week a segment they had on "What the internet has killed". Looking back at the early 80s where in every household there was a book shelf full of Encyclopedia Britannica's, which was where anything about everything was to be found. I remember using these books for all my assignments during my school years. But now all we need to do is turn on your computer, get onto the Web and the world of information is at your fingertips, and no longer requiring a large amount of space to be stored.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41AHNTK94HL._SS500_.jpg

  It poses the question on what you think the web will also kill in the future. You can rent Movies, download MP3 music, which could kill the video and music stores, you can send letters instantly at no cost via email as apposed to sending a letter via the postal system, you can shop online for your weekly groceries and have them delivered to your door, could this abolish a physical presence of a supermarket? You can do all you banking online from transferring money, to paying bills, without leaving the comfort of your living room.
I also leave this week with another question... will we become so antisocial that we wont leave our homes because we have everything we need at the click of a button? From cyber friendships on Facebook, to online shopping and virtual offices... could this destroy human nature as we know it?

WEB101 Week 2: Reflection

This week we were talking about "What is the Internet?" The Internet is not just the world wide web or email... these are things that need the internet to work. Learning about routers and packets and how the internet has evolved overtime, I was interested to find out that the 1st known form of the internet was way back in 1957 when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik I, the world's first artificial satellite was about the size of a beach ball. (Garber, 2007) In the race of world domination between the Russians and the Americans, the public feared that the Soviets' ability to launch satellites also translated into the capability to launch ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear weapons from Europe to the U.S. (Garber, 2007) But from this monumental occasion came the beginning of something that would change how the people of the world would live their lives in the future.

The first ever network of computers was established in 1969 by ARPANET. BBN delivered the first Interface Message Processor (IMP) to Leonard Kleinrock's Network Measurements Center at UCLA. The IMP was built from a Honeywell DDP 516 computer with 12K of memory, designed to handle the ARPANET network interface.

I was also interested to find out when the 1st ever email was sent. In 1971, Ray Tomlinson invented the '@' address for emails and an email was sent from BBNA and BBNB computers (see image below).

The first ever email from BBNA and BBNB in 1971 (source http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/ka10.html)

Apart from all this history about the internet, we reflected on our first personal experiences of the internet. After reading through a few fellow students reflections, you can see how peoples experience vary depending on their age, interest and location of where they first experienced the internet. It makes me wonder how my daughters first experience of the internet would be like and how it will vastly vary from what mine was in the 1990s.

We also had to visit http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/visual-tracert/ where you can trace the routing of your internet service provider and where each website you access actually lives in the world. Have a try of it and you would be interested to know where some of the websites you access actually live.

Learning a bit about the infrastructure of how the internet works and how it has developed over the years has given me a greater appreciation for it.

References

http://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/
ARPANET - The First Internet http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_arpanet.htm
http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/ka10.html

WEB101 Week 2: What was your first experience of the Internet? Has it changed over time?

I was still in high school when I first got the chance to use the internet. I was studying computer studies and we got to play around a bit on the web to get to know it. A group of friends and I started using a chat room. Little did we know that this chat room was run by a religious organisation and my friend had stupidly put her name as Lucifer. Well our IP address were tracked and the school was contacted in regards to the use of this name and us being on this chat room. This was my 1st glimpse on how easily and efficiently people can track you down just by your IP address. Imagine all the criminals out there sitting and waiting to catch your information without you even knowing they are doing it?  Since then I have always be cautious of how I use the internet and how much information I place on it. Also a use of a Mac also helps by not letting in those millions of damaging virus' out there.

So chat rooms have improved some what since the late 90s. We can now do video conferencing, instant messaging and viop calls using a variety of different software's to perform these tasks. (eg Skype, iChat, Messenger) The internet has certainly changed since y 1st experience of it back at high school.

Week 2 Web 101 Activities

Activity One - Routing in Action!
When you make a request to another computer on the Internet, that request passes through a number of other computers on its way to the host. We can see this in action:

• Click on this link to open a new page in your browser.
• Click the Proxy Trace button to see a visual representation of your request leaving your computer, passing through the web page's host in Los Angeles, and on to the Google headquarters near San Francisco.
• Now, change the remote address in the dialogue box to find the geographical location of the headquarters of wikipedia.org, amazon.com and flickr.com.
• Finally, see if you can find a popular website that is not hosted in the US or Australia.

It was interesting to see where your packets go to get their information. Looks like my packets always head down to Melbourne and then out to Signapore, then USA and then to where ever it needs to go.

I did find out that yes indeed www.oxyblumedia.com is hosted in America... Florida by the looks of it. www.istockphoto.com is in Canada.
www.flyeralarm.de is in Germany.
www.voice-pool.com is in Germany as well.

Activity Two - Who Owns What?
All domain names are registered either to a business or an individual. Now, we're going to use that knowledge to do a little snooping!

• Click on this link to open a new page in your browser.
• This page performs a search for the owner of a particular domain name. Enter curtin.edu.au in the whois lookup field and perform a check to find the owner (Hint: Scroll down to the registrant).

Registrant:                      Curtin University of Technology

• Now we know who owns the Curtin domain name - Curtin University! No surprises there.
• Now, perform checks on each of the following domain names to find who owns them:
• flickr.com

 

Registrant:
        Domain Administrator
        Yahoo! Inc.
        701 First Avenue
         Sunnyvale CA 94089
        US
        domainadmin@yahoo-inc.com +1.4083493300 Fax: +1.4083493301

• youtube.com

Registrant:
        DNS Admin
        Google Inc.
        1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
         Mountain View CA 94043
        US
        dns-admin@google.com +1.6502530000 Fax: +1.6506188571

 

• mickey.com

Domain Name.......... mickey.com
  Creation Date........ 1999-04-09
  Registration Date.... 2010-02-25
  Expiry Date.......... 2011-04-10
  Organisation Name.... Buena Vista Internet Group
  Organisation Address. 500 S. Buena Vista Street
  Organisation Address. 506 Second Ave. Suite 2100
  Organisation Address. Burbank
  Organisation Address. 91521
  Organisation Address. CA
  Organisation Address. UNITED STATES

 

• Now do a check for the following domain names:
• gooogle.com

Registrant:
        DNS Admin
        Google Inc.
        1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
         Mountain View CA 94043
        US
        dns-admin@google.com +1.6506234000 Fax: +1.6506188571

 

• yaho.com

Registrant:
        Domain Administrator
        Yahoo! Inc.
        701 First Avenue
         Sunnyvale CA 94089
        US
        domainadmin@yahoo-inc.com +1.4083493300 Fax: +1.4083493301

 

• Who owns these domain names? Why do you think this is?

Google and yahoo own these alternative domain names so that for those you mistype the address will still be redirected to their correct websites. Also stops impostor websites from emerging and mirroring their successful websites