The First Lesson of Infocomm Studies: The Internet and & the World Wide Web

On the first lesson of IS,  I learnt about the services provided by the Internet like news, e-mail, blogs etc. in the most convenient way. We can now access the Internet anytime and anywhere. Connection is established as long as the computer is turned on and that there is a cable modem, Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) or others. I also learnt that the Internet was created because. Scientists were finding ways to share information from all over the world without travelling. However, it was not the same as in the present. Dial-up connections were commonly used. It was the connection of a standard telephone line. It was very slow (as compared to morden-day broadband connections). The Internet can only be accessed when connection is established. I now know when to use what kind of broadband when I am in different places. For example, if I am in a rural house, it is best to use a satellite connection. I remember roughly how data is displayed on our computers. I found out what a domain name really means. It is the text version of IP (Internet Protocol), which is a unique number that identifies a computer connected to the Internet. There are nine basic types of websites. They are portals, news, informatic, educaional, business/marketing, entertainment, advocacy, blogs and personal websites. I also recall what the different Top-level domain names of websites, which identifies the kind of website, such as: .com for commercial, .gov for government websites and .edu for education. Next, I learnt what the World Wide Web is. It is a worldwide collection of 200 million and counting host nodes. There are different website addresses called URLs. There are also different Internet servers, called browsers, that allows us to view web pages. I understand how browsers display home pages. A home page is up to the user's decision, for the user's convenience. It is the first page that the browser displays and that it provides connections, called links, to other websites. To identify a link, the cursor should turn into a small hand and that the text is underlined and in a different colour. Nowadays, Internet can be accessed from a handphone using a microbrowser. It is mostly text and the phone must be web-enabled. Downloading from the World Wide Web means retrieving infomation from the Internet and saving it in a file in the computer. If in doubt on a website's URL, serch engines come to save the day! Just enter keywords or phrases called search texts. I learnt about the different graphic formats(e.g.: jpeg). A thumbnail is a smaller graphic to increase the web speed. I also learnt about multimedia, audio and others in the same category. I know how to publish a website and the meaning of E-commerce (business traction over the net). I learnt about FTP which is File Transfer Protocol, standard for download/upload files.I properly learnt about newsgroups, message boards and mailing lists. For other internet services, I recalled learning about chat (real live written conversation), instant messaging, internet telephony and most importantly, nettiquette, which is do unto others what you want others to do unto you. Finally, I learnt about Web 1.0 and 2.0, as well as the difference. Web 1.0: the host has to do everything by himself while others only watch. Web 2.0: The host gets help from its followers through comments. Well... it was a really enjoyable lesson! I can't wait for the next lesson to start!