Module 3 - Web 2.0

The difference between these two sites is vast, despite the fact that at the core they offer the same information; a list of links.

The blinklist website is far more useful than the plain HTML page for the following reasons:

1. Legibility - The blinklist site is much easier to read, and has a far nice layout than the HTML only page. On the HTML page the text seems to run together, and is not as easy to read at a glance.
   
2. Metadata - The blinklist website has a number of categories listed beneath each link that tell the end user what categories this link fits under. This is very useful for quickly evaluating the site for it's relevance to my current search. In addition, by clicking on any one of the categories names, it takes me to a page where only links with that category are shown. This is an excellent ecxample of metadata filtering in use, that can help to whittle down potentially hundreds of relevant links to a few targetted and specific links that address an area I am interested in.
   
3. Votes - One of the key aspects of Web 2.0 is the collaboritve nature of online interactions. The voting option enables users to vote for or against a particular link. This can then be evaluated by end users. For example if the link says "Kittens" and there is one hundred votes against this link, I would not bother looking at it even if I was looking for information on kittens. Essentially, this voting could be considered as peer-reviewed links, so other users like you are telling you their thoughts on the link, hopefully increasing the relevance of the link for a particular user.

The Blinklist format is clearly the far superior format. It has enhanced functionality, is better designed, and easier to read. All of these issues could be overcome with the HTML site by a skilled internet developer, but it would certainly take a lot longer to create than the plug and play blinklist site.

Module 3 - Blogs

Blogs are a fantastic tool, that have really helped open up ownership, in a communal sense, of the internet to regular citizens.

Having circumvented the need for technical knowledge, blogging has enabled literally anyone to become a contributor to the body of knowledge on the internet. This open and free nature has greatly increased the number of people that are contributing to the net on all sorts of topics, from travel to tuberculosis, from aardvarks to apples.

Personally, I have used blogging very effectively while travelling and living overseas. It is a great way to keep in contact with friends back home, and a great way to share photos of stories from halfway around the world.

More recently, with the terror attacks in Mumbai, blogging was used by citizens to report on the state of the terror attacks, the location of terrorists, as well as being used to get images out the rest of the world in a city that was locked down by terrorists and police. This was a very effective use of blogging that enabled the outside world to understand the extent of what people in Mumbai were going through, and to offer words of support.

In this day and age, it seems that almost all media outlets have vested, and often non-disclosed, financial interests that skew the reporting in favour of advertisers, or the owners own corporate interests or political ideologies. Blogging is a very powerful weapon against this dis-information as it enables individuals or organisations to express their beliefs, thoughts, and opinions in a public forum without being edited by others with questionable motives.

Module 3 - Legal Issues

I have not used any images on my website that have contravened copyright laws, as I was acutely aware that this website would be used as part of a university assessment, and did not want anything illegal on there that might get me in trouble!

Further, the text from Khalil Gibran's "The Prophet" that I used in my web page is not copyrighted for two reasons. The first I will discuss here, the second I will include in the below paragraph. Section 180 of the Australian Copyright Act of 1968 states that:


(b) where the work is published--subsists, or, if copyright in the work subsisted immediately before its first publication, continues to subsist, until the expiration of 50 years after the expiration of the calendar year in which the work was first published. (No Author, n.d.)

As the work was first published in 1923 (according to the front page of the hard copy of the book I have here), the copyright is now expired on that book, and thus I can freely use it on my web page.

In addition to the expiry of the copyright, I would also be allowed to use the text for the below reasons.

I would not breach copyright laws if I was to use the Curtin logo on my page, as it is falls into the "Fair Use" category of copyrighted material for educational purposes. This policy dictates that express permission from the copyright owner is not required provided that the purpose of the copying is for "research or study, criticisms or review". (No Author 2, n.d.)

No Author listed (n.d.)
Copyright Act 1968. Austlii.edu.au
Accessed 19/12/2008 from http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s180.html

No Author listed 2 (n.d.)
Copyright at Curtin. Curtin University
Accessed 19/12/2008 from http://copyright.curtin.edu.au/essentials.cfm

Module 3 - Web Page

I found this task quite straightforward, as I have previously coded in HTML before and was familar with most of the tasks that were described in the tutorial.

The primary difference between HTML and blogging is that HTML gives you full access to the structure and layout of your page, whereas with blogging generally a template is chosen from the provider, and your ability to edit this is limited.

A HTML page is a lot more time consuming to generate than a blog, as blogs are generally comprised of raw text and perhaps some images or a video embedded. With HTML all the tags for each line and element must be correctly defined, attributes and variables must also be correctly defined, to ensure that everything renders correctly for your end users.

It is not a matter of saying what technology I prefer out of HTML and blogging, as they both serve different purposes. A blog is analgous to an online journal, or perhaps a newsletter. For the purpose of disseminating information on a regular basis, a blog is the preferable choice, as it is fast, simple, easy to use and effective.

If I was to create a web presence for a company I owned, it would most certainly be using HTML. In this way I can create any design I like, and display this on visitors web browsers. This is important, because a well designed site can complement my business, my current logo's and branding. It is also likely that this sort of web presence would be updated less frequently than a blog, so the ease of update is not as important as maintaining full design control.

Additionally, there is a level of technical expertise required to develop pages in HTML that is not needed for blogging. If you are short on time and cash and need a site online fast, blogging might be a better option as you will not need to pay a professional to create your site for you.

It is important to think about what sort of web presence one requires before creating a website or a blog. Think about what you need, your level of technical expertise, and your goals. The answers to these questions will help you to decide what technology is most applicable to your situation.

Module 2 - Chat

I downloaded ICQ to my computer and had brief chats with a number of my fellow learners, but found significant difficulties in getting our timing right. The only time that I was able to get online to chat was during my work lunch breaks, and this often did not work out well for my group of chatters, as they were all around Australia and indeed the world.

I enjoy using chat applications very much, but as I experienced, the biggest problem with them is ensuring that everyone is availble at the same time. It is for this reason that I much prefer using disucssion boards for this purpose, as one can post or read posts at a time that suits the reader, and again respond in their own time. This is one of the downfalls of chat, in that all users must be online at the same time which is not always mutually convenient.

In addition to this, I found that when I was at my desk chatting with my fellow learners, quite often my co-workers would assume that I was working and available, so I was frequently interrupted with work requests, which really throws my train of thought.

The benefits that are offered by chat can be outstanding - it is like a telephone conversation, in that it is real-time. This is very helpful for obtaining quick answers to questions, or to "talk out" and issue that one may be experiencing.

GROUP TASK ~ all students : All students regardless of the chat method and option you chose you must now: Using either ICQ, yahoo chat, Messenger, virtual or webct chat, arrange a discussion with your peers. You may do this in small groups if you like. Talk about which chat service you prefer, and what forms of communication chat is most useful for. Think about the following question: how does the method you are familiar with appear to differ from other chat or messaging such as ICQ, MSN or AIM? Which system do you prefer?

For this task I downloaded and installed ICQ, whereas for chat I normally use Gmail's native chat client, or Skype Chat.

Essentially, all text based chat applications serve the same purpose - to exchange short (or sometimes not so short) text based messages directly between two or more users. With this in mind, the differences between any 2 chat applications are more of a user interface than a functional nature. For this reason, I much prefer Gmail's native chat client, as it is extremely light weight; it has very few bells and whistles, has no external application required (other than a regular web browser) and is accessible on any PC that can access http://mail.google.com/. It serves my needs wonderfully, in that it is quick text based chat. I do not have the need for a rich chat client, like MSN or ICQ, and find it cumbersome, and to be honest, quite ugly. The abundance of colours, flashing text, over the top emoticons all, in my opinion, detract from the core purpose of the application, which is to enable quick chatting.

Module 2 - Lists

What are the pros and cons of email lists versus discussion boards?

Email Lists
Pros - Good for communicating with an individual, or a group or when you know who you want to communicate with.
Cons - Do not provide immediate answers. Need to attach files or write extensive information

Discussion Board
Pros - Good for discussing a topic with a particular community. Good for communicating with people with an interest in a specific topic
Cons - Does not provide immediate answers. Need to provide extensive information to people. (Tyson, n.d.)

Are there certain kinds of communication or purposes more suited to one than the other?

There are certainly types of communication that are more suited to email lists, or discussion boards.

An example of where discussion boards are more useful is an online disucssions area for a web-based course, such as NET11. The discussion board holds all the infomation for all historical posts, and enables one to easily review old posts, and to contribute to discussions that may be old and no longer active. Thus, with discussion boards, old posts and discussions are still relevant. With email lists, once a topic has been relegated to the archives, most people will not want to continue to discuss the topic and would request that the poster reads the archives before contributing something that may have already been discussed.

Tyson, J. (n.d.)
How Newsgroups Work. HowStuffWorks.com.
Retrieved 17/12/2008 from www.computer.howstuffworks.com/newsgroup1.htm

Module 2 - Email

1. What information about a user's email, the origin of a message, and the path it took, can you glean from an email message?

The following information can be established from an email:

• Username, domain, and country (if the domain name specifies this)
• You can see the server it came from, as well as the SMTP server name and the IP address
• The unique message ID

2. In what cases would you find it useful to use the 'cc', 'bcc' and 'reply all functions of email?

The "CC" or "Carbon Copy" function of an email is useful when an email involves a third party that was not on the original email list, or when someone needs the information contained in the email, but does not need to reply. In this case, CC could also stand for "Courtesy Copy", where you are advising someone of the content of an email, but do not need their feedback or input.

BCC is short for Blind Carbon Copy. The BCC feature is useful when it is not appropriate to expose all of the recipients email addresses to one another. An example would be when sending out a request for vendors to respond to a tender. In this case, you would not want the companies knowing who they were competing against nor divulging a potentially long email list which could be then sold or used for spamming people.

Using the Reply all function is ideal for an email-centred discussion. For example an email could be sent to a number of people asking for their feedback on a particular proposal. Using the reply all function ensures that each response is sent to each original recipient (and the sender). This feature is excellent for obtaining consensus on issues, and also for giving people a platform from which they can discuss all of their issues, and obtain feedback, help, or clarification from their team members. It is a very collaborative use of email, and one that many companies find very helpful.

3. In what ways can you ensure that an attachment you send will be easily opened by the receiver?

There are a number of ways of ensuring that an attachment that you send will be easily opened by the receiver.

If you know the user you can ask him or her what sort of computer and applications they have. Then you can ensure that you save your file in a compatible format for the receiver.

If you don't know the receiver, you could encode the document in a standard format such as a text file, Adobe Acrobat format, or a generic image format such as JPEG or GIF.

4. What sorts of filters or rules do you have set up, and for what purpose?

I generally have only two filters setup on my email accounts. One is for filtering spam emails to automatically delete them. For this I have a spam folder setup, and every time I receive a spam email I add that domain to my filter list.

The second filter I have setup is one that filters work related emails that come from a certain domain so that they are automatically filed. For example, any emails from @originwines.com.au are automatically filed to the Origin Wines folder. This enables me to easily keep track of unread emails, by organisation, and saves me from filing new emails when they come in.

5. How have you organised the folder structure of your email and why?

I have an extensive folder structure so all emails have a logical home. This means I can locate emails easily in the future if i need to, and it also means that all emails have a place to "live" as opposed to having a huge inbox with hundreds or thousands of messages all in the one location, which makes sorting and finding content in emails much more difficult. More specifically, I first have a top level folder called Clients, and one called Work. All work related emails are stored in the work folder, and all client related emails, in the client folder. Inside these folders is more and more sub folders, easily enabling me to categorise emails based on the sender, and the tasks, requests, or information contained within.

Module 1 Task A - Telnet Task

Record your outcome and reflections of your experiences and thoughts on this task in your learning log

Having previously used telnet, I went to Run... in the Windows start button and typed "telnet", and pressed enter. When the telnet application opened I typed the following commands:

1. o library.deakin.edu.au

Once I was connected to Deakin Library, I searched via the tex t commands available on screen, and followed the instructions.

I found this exercise quite easy, but also enjoyable. I like using computes to communicate purely by command line action, to me it feels like you are operating more in the core of computers, rather than at the GUI level.

While most people would not have the need to use telnet regularly, there are many occupations in the IT field where telnet is regularluy used to connect to, and manipulate, remote computers.

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, the rapid advance of operating systems and software has meant that most people to get to interact with this "deeper" level of computing.

At least those of us who enjoy using command line actions still have the ability to do so.

Top 5 tips for new bloggers

So, you have started your very first blog, but the questions looms;

What will I post in my blog?

Here are five top tips for blogging newbies:

1. Write about something that interests you.
2. Feel free to write controversial material, but avoid discriminatory or racist material.
3. Make sure the spelling and grammar is correct! Avoid "text speak" abbreviations, and use full words, sentences and correct punctuation.
4. Blogs can be a lot more than just text, try experiment with rich media experiences. Try embedding a video from YouTube or uploading photos from your digital camera, or camera phone.
5. Blog often! The more your blog is updated, the more often people will come back to your blog. It does't have to be poetry or award winning prose everytime, but the more the blog the better you will get. The more hits you will get too!

Take these tips as a guide only, everyone will have their own point of view. Take what works for you and modify what doesn't.

Oh, and the last lesson? Have Fun!!!

Happy blogging :-)

Module 1 - Internet Tools

I downloaded a number of applications from http://network-tools.com/ to complete the steps in this task.

When I attempted to traceroute to curtin .edu.au, I always timed out at the same stage, on the 13th hop. I tried this a number of times over a two day period, and always received the same result. This has led me to theorise that there must be something wrong with a connection for this hop - perhaps an incorrectly configured firewall, or perhaps just one of those annoying internet glitches that happen from time to time.

There was no average time to reach Curtin as the traceroute ultimately failed every time. If the traceroute did not fail, then I would have simply to add up the connection time for each step, then divide by the number of steps to obtain the average hop time

The IP of curtin.edu.au is 134.7.17.136

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For the next step in this task, I pinged both http://webct.curtin.edu.au/ and http://network-tools.com/

Below are the average ping times for each URL:

http://webct.curtin.edu.au/ - 243ms

http://network-tools.org/ - 49ms

I was quite surprised by the amount of time difference between pinging the two URLs. For one, I certainly expected the WebCT website to return a lot faster than the Network Tools site, partly because it is physically located much closer to me, in Australia, rather than Network Tools US based website.

I suppose that there are a number of reasons as to why this could be the case - my requests to Curtin could have been redirected through a network that was experiencing a lot of traffic, or perhaps it is on a much slower network than Network Tools.

I quite enjoyed this task and found It relatively straight forward, as I am used to using the ping command to test both whether external websites are responding, and to also test whether my internet connection is working. It is a very handy, easy to use and easy to remember command for ascertaining whether one's computer can access external web servers, or indeed has access to the net at all.

Further than this, ping is a quick and pain free way to establish the IP address of URLs, and can be of further assistance when troubleshooting issues with things like Load Balancers, or when multiple Web Front End's are in use.

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This task called on me to traceroute from my computer to curtin.edu.au and to compare the number of hops with the earlier traceroute.

It was interesting to note that from the A-Toolbar application, the traceroute ultimately resolves at hop 14, with the IP address 134.7.179.53

From http://network-tools.com/ it did not resolve after hop 12, receiving a number of time outs before ultimately aborting.

It is interesting to note the different IP address that was resolved to, and this leads me to think that perhaps curtin.edu.au sits on multiple servers with a load balancer, which may explain the different IPs. As to why it was not resolving from the Network Tools application, but was resolving from A-Toolbar - well that is a bit of a mystery to me! It is possible that at the time that I attempted to run Network Tools there was a brief problem at that exact time that I was running the test, and this issue was rectified prior to running my tests from A-Toolbar. Though it is possible, I don't think it is too likely. My hunch is that the problem is more likely related to the different IP addresses that are being resolved to, as opposed to the application requesting the traceroute.

Module 1 FTP Task - CAPITALIZATION MATTERS

"according to the readme file, 'CAPITALIZATION MATTERS' - what word goes in the blank?".

After following the tasks in this exercise, I located a readme.txt file on the remote server, which I then opened. Amongst other text in there, was the statement that CAPITALIZATON matters, the missing word in the question posed by this task.

I found this task quite easy, as I have had some experience with FTP previously, mainly using it to upload files to web servers, download files from remote services and to share files with friends.

I think that this has been an excellent exercise, and is especially useful for those that the use the internet, and have wondered how it all "hangs together" but have not known how.

Through this task, users are instructed to log on to, and navigate a file structure on a remote server. I would hope that when doing this, my fellow learners would have recognised that the familiar folders and file structure that appears on their PC is perfectly replicated on the remote server. Having this common and logical folder and file structure makes life a lot easier when working on computers, as anyone can jump onto (almost) any PC in the world, and when they see nested trees with folders and files, they recognise conceptually what they are looking at. Recognition of the structure will make users instantly effective when operating in this new environment, and thus has mitigated the need for any "ramp up" time to learn the new technology.

LOG ENTRY: Record your outcome and reflections of your experiences and thoughts on this task in your learning log

Module 1 Task B - Telnet Task

What a surprise! Despite having used telnet a number of times throughout my professional career, I had no idea that it was capable of such psuedo-animation as is displayed at blinkenlights.nl. Telnet obviously has many more capabilities than I am aware of!

I think what has been accomplished at this telnet site is a wonderful case in point about advances that are made in knowledge or technical capability. While technological advances by themselves often lead to enhanced productivity or creativity, I think what is more interesting is when a new, novel, application for a particular technology or tool is stumbled upon.

As well as being forward looking problem solvers, it appears that humans are also quite adept at looking backwards, at where they have come from, and applying new knowledge or techniques to old tools or applications. This 360-degree approach to knowledge has benefitted humans immensely throughout our history, as I am sure it will continue to.