Week 4 Tute Blog 2

How do search engines rank the stuff they find on the internet?

• Its relevance to the words and concepts in the query
• Its overall link popularity
• Advertisers/sponsors given higher priority/rank

Who, or what, makes one page (that you might get in your search results) more useful than another one, so that it is put at the top of your search results?

• "Because of the potentially large number of pages that can be retrieved by a search, good relevancy ranking is important. Most search engines use various criteria to construct a relevancy rating of each hit and will present your search results in this order. First generation search engines primarily use term relevancy ranking. This type of ranking judges relevancy based on the presence of your search terms in Web documents. For example, ranking will be based on: the presence of search terms in the title, URL, first heading; the number of times search terms appear in the document; search terms appearing early in the document; search terms appearing close together; etc. This is known as "on the page" ranking, since the engine looks at content on the page to determine its relevancy. " ( http://www.internettutorials.net/eng.html)

What are some of your favourite search engines? why do you like one more than others?

• Meta search engines eg. Dogpile save time combining individual engines and bringing up a wider variety of results in the one place, with the one search. It also has yellow and white pages search options, allowing a wider, easier and more efficient search.
• I also like the layout and simplicity of Google- it is efficient returning search results and I like the option to search Australian pages only as this often has a higher relevance to what I am searching for.

Scavenger Hunt

Before I start allow me to explain what I thought of this week's task: I found this week's task rather boring and must say that Iam still a fan of Google or Dogpile ( which I believe would have found me the answers to these questions a lot faster). Either way I do this, I still needed to double check the answers by cross-referencing different sources, so as to come up with an accurate and reliable answer(so why not use a fast and known to me, search engine to begin with). I tried out all of the search engines included on the resources list but I stand firmly with good old google.....because its not as frustrating, as some of these other search engines often didn't bring up anything even remotely resembling what i was searching for. Google or Dogpile are definately top search engines for a reason....the millions of people who use them each day are proof of their advantages over other smaller and obscure search engines like the ones we were using for this scavenger hunt. I did eventually find the answers through them, though I believe it took a lot longer than it would have if id been using a meta search engine like dogpile. My resulting answers are: (Their reliability was ensured by cross-checking answers from a range of different sources and by evaluating the reliability of the sources themselves. eg. an .edu site is more reliable than a .com site)

1. Who was the creator of the infamous "lovebug" computer virus?
Onel de Guzman, a 24yr old computer student ( http://www.a9.com/)

2. Who invented the paper clip?
This had a bit of a complicated answer. Johan Vaaler was the inventor of the first simple paper clip -a piece of wire bent into a "rectangular, triangular, or otherwise shaped hoop". Around the same time, Cornelius J. Brosnan from Springfield, Massachusetts, was issued a U.S. patent for a similar device called the Konaclip. It wasn't until 1901 that William Middlebrook patented a paper-clip making machine for the Gem Manufacturing company in England. The design of the clip( which most resembles our modern version) wasn't actually patented, the patent only covered the machine. ( ask.yahoo.com/20031120.html) (yahoo search engine)

3. How did the Ebola virus get its name?
It is named after the Ebola River in Zaire, Africa, nearwhere the first outbreak was noted by Dr. Ngoy Mushola in 1976 after a significant outbreak of the disease. (http://www.crystalinks.com/ebola.html) (hot bot search engine)

4. What country had the largest recorded earthquake?
The largest recorded earthquake was in Chile in 1960. There may have been larger unrecorded earthquakes but the 1960 Chile earthquake earned the title because scientisits were able to measure, record and verify its ground motion strength. It meausured 9.5 on the richter scale.( http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question63269.html) (ask.com)

5. In computer memory/storage terms, how many kilobytes in a terabyte?
1 terabyte = 1 073 741 824 kilobytes. (http://www.ask.com/web?qsrc=2417&o=0&l=dir&q=how+many+kilobytes+in+a+terabyte) (ask.com)

6. Who is the creator of email?
Ray Tomlinson. (http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/entdev/article.php/1408411)

7. What is the storm worm, and how many computers are infected by it?
It is a virus that installs a Trojan horse onto the message recipients computer. Anywhere between 250,000 and 10 million computers may have been infected by it, exact statistics are not known. (http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/storm.asp )

8. If you wanted to contact the prime minister of australia directly, what is the most efficient way? Post a letter. This is the prefered method as email is not a secure way of transfering information. (pm.gov.au)

9. Which Brisbane-based punk band is Stephen Stockwell (Head of the School of Arts) a member of? Black assains (I couldn't find this answer online, source: classmates general knowledge)

10. What does the term "Web 2.0" mean in your own words?
Web 2.0 is a marketing term to describe all the elements of the internet where the main purpose is sharing, connectivity, and interaction between users. eg. Wikipedia. The main difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, is that Web 2.0 has made using the net simpler and therefore more accessable to a wider range of people, allowing users to come together and net communities to be created. It has increased the prominence of the internet within our everyday lives, as html skills are no longer a necessity when posting information onto the internet.

Thoughts on Alphaville

WHAT WAS THAT? There goes two perfectly good hours of my life that i will sadly never get back.

Tutorial 3 Blogging Task

In today's day and age new communication technologies are readily being utilized in order to keep in touch with family and friends. Gone are the days of snail mail, (refer to Stephen Stockwell's Lec. 2 survey) which showed that approx. 50% of us have never even posted a letter (which is a fact i find kind of sad- if half of us have never sent a letter, less people must be recieving those charming hand-written letters of the kind that put a smile on your face, just cause you know that someone actually went to some sort of effort- and lets face it, the clinical form of a rushed and hurriedly typed email, with a blank background and monotonous looking text -even with little smiley face symbols, just doesn't stack up in comparison.)

Here's a thought, have penpals died out with the use of email? I remember when i was little, my best friend lived right next door but we'd still post each other letters just for the fun of finding something in the mailbox. The majority of snail mail that we do recieve now is official communication. So it would be fair enough to say that we don't tend to use it for social communication purposes anymore. The ease and efficiency of new communication technologies such as email and myspace are winning out. Yes, that same old friend and i are now listed on each others myspace instead, and the only social communication i tend to recieve by way of snail mail is from my grandma who refuses to use a computer. Think about it, these days we virtually have an email address for everyone we know and we would be admittedly lost without our mobile phones- and the almightly text msg. Our address books are hidden within our computers and phones. If they crashed for good, how many of us would actually have written records? Or for that matter, have actually memorised the phone numbers of our closest friends and family. Just how many people would you lose contact with? So, are we too reliant on technology? We look at new communication technologies and see the ease and efficiency with which they help us to conduct our lives. But has it come at a cost? Have we lost that personal touch?

The use of these new communication methods has risen with the availability of technology (eg. computers) within our society. Today, most households own a computer and have
access to resouces such as the internet. Most people have email addresses and use them on a daily basis. Slightly less people have My Space and Facebook accounts, but they are quickly becoming addictive as their popularity rises. Until recently I'd never even heard of Facebook and only just bothered to sign up to My Space because i was graduating and friends and i were splitting to all sides of the country and overseas- and it seemed like a cheaper alternate to keeping in touch than constant phone calls. Speed is also a major advantage to these new communication technologies, allowing fast communication on a global scale. A person in Australia can easily communicate with someone in another part of the world, with virtually just a click of a button. The speed of email/ myspace etc.. eliminates what would otherwise be a long period of waiting time via snail mail.

Privacy issues are fast becoming a downfall to communication via the cyberworld though. Identity issues are hotly debated topics at the moment. Is who your talking to over the net, really who they say they are? Are your personal details safe? Is the fact that people do post untruthful information, or on the opposite side of things too much information about themselves, a problem? I personally know everybody I list as a friend on myspace. I quickly learnt with a spade of random friend requests, to set my profile and pictures to private and friends only....the possibility of my own personal stalker didn't appeal. But whether other people do take these precautionary measures does depend on their purpose for using myspace etc, are they there to meet new 'internet' friends or are they only using it, like me, to keep in touch? People who have open accounts should be aware of what they post up and remember that anyone can view it, including the employer who might just cancel your interview, after having looked you up and quickly deciding that the "drunk and high" comment or picture you posted doesn't necessarily reflect the type of employee they're looking for. If you take pride in your image in the real world, why not in cyberspace? I've rambled on for long enough now. Im inspired to go post a snail mail hand-written letter- it'll make grandmas day....sometime next week.

Intro Post

Hey I'm Josie, I'm 18 and this is my 1st year at Uni. Im studying a Bachelor of Arts/ Bachelor of Business, basically because I couldn't decide on what else to do. I love being creative so an arts degree was an obvious choice but a business degree offered more concrete job prospects. I don't have a definate idea of where I want Uni to lead me and I've chosen this class as part of my 1st semester because it looked like more fun than filling my timetable up with a another maths filled business course. Here's hoping... so keep checking in and follow my time through this New Communications Technologies course. Bye for now.