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GoAnimate.com: SF Animation by Bbutcher


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RSS Feeds.

     RSS is a very simple internet tool to help people follow websites, blogs, news headlines, videos, an among other internet media. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and was created around the turn of the century. RSS feeds really didn't start gaining popularity until around 2005-2006, when more social networking sites, youtube, blogs, and other sites started to become more and more popular.

    RSS feeds can be found almost all over the internet. You can go to blog sites, or news sites and look for the little orange RSS symbol, click that to subscribe and it will be saved on your internet browser. You can frequently check this for updates and news. The page that shows all your RSS feeds is relativley simple to follow, as it shows all the RSS feeds you're following in the order that you subscibed to them. You can also select how the RSS feeds are handled within your browser that you are using (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome.)

    Overall, RSS feeds have become a very simple tool for users to stay up to date on their favorite websites, news, videos, blogs, etc. It is a widely popular tool that is becoming more and more common use in todays digital world.

Net Neutrality: It's The Right Thing.

Before reading the article on net neutrality, I already had, what I would call a pretty decent understand of what net nutrality is. Net neutrality is the idea that the Internet should be completely unblocked by the Government and Internet Service Providers (ISP).

                When I was reading through the article “Why You Should Care About Net Neutrality” – by Paul Kapustka, a few key issues really opened my eyes. It appears that major internet companies, such as Verizon and Google have been lobbying for net neutrality in Washington against the government, who have been throwing around the idea of “reclassifying Internet services as telecommunication services” so that they can be regulated to block out content, restrict access, and other forms of internet censorship.

                But what the big picture here is, is price. IF any sort of regulations get passed on the internet, prices are inevitably going to sky-rocket; not just for the prices of having access to the internet, but also putting a charge on the use of sites, such as Facebook, Google, Myspace…you can see where I’m going with this. Not to mention that companies could start using a type of “cell-phone style billing system” of the internet. Lets say that with your current company, you would be alloted 20 GB’s of data per month; this includes searching sites, downloading files (music, movies, games, etc), sending and receiving e-mail. If companys were to charge overages for going over the the amount of GBs that you haver per month, the price would be astronomical.

                Not only is net neutrality the right thing to do, it is also the most cost effective thing to do. Companies that start charging for the usage of sites, and the internet, would be losing money instead of making profit because everybody would be cancelling their contracts and finding either cheaper, more reasonable ways to access the internet, or free ways to access the internet.

Chapter One.

                Upon entering this class, I have pretty good general knowledge about the Internet and its uses. Reading through chapter one of “Discovering the Internet” I have learned how the Internet was created, and some of the different kinds of technologies that are used along with the Internet.

                The first part of the chapter is pretty much a general summarization of the Internet and its uses; which include browsing the web, communicating with other, downloading and uploading files, and making business transactions. It goes on to talk about how web pages and sites are created with HTML or XHTML, or programs such as Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Expression Web. It also tells how the Internet communicates and recieves data with TCP/IP.

                The ‘History of the Internet’ part of the chapter talks about the first example of the internet, ARPANET. E-mails, packet switching, circuit switching, and other types of computer communication came along with the creation of ARPANET, allowing bits of information to be sent from one computer to another. ARPANET eventually let to the development of Transmisson Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) which are the main protocols that are used today.

                ‘The Beginnings and Rise of the Web’ was the most peculiar part of the chapter to me. It explains the rise and mainstream success of the internet, the addition of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTML (URLs and such)) and the formation of different kinds of web browsers (Mosaic, Netscape Navigator).  The last part of the chapter talks about different kinds of internet connections (Dial-up, DSL, Cable, T1, T2, Wi-fi) and how they are currently used in todays world.

                Overall chapter one was very insightful to me. I learned a lot about how, and why Internet was created, how web pages were made, and different ways computers use the Internet to transfer information. I can’t wait to see what the next chapter brings.