January 24, 2011

Blogs and Twitter

I think blogs are fantastic. If you think blogs are just the ramblings of some self-absorbed teens, then... well, you're partially right. But you're not completely right. There are blogs out there on any topic you can think of and many of them are well written and very informative about their topics. Some of my favorite blogs are listed below and I read their posts almost daily...


A blog is simply a type of web site, and probably the most popular type. Every notable web site out there is either a blog or runs a blog and you can't read the newspaper or watch news without reading/hearing about a reference to a blog (or Twitter).

A blog is short for web log, and is made up of posts that are dated and displayed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent at the top. A reader can submit comments to a blog post and this helps blogs become an asynchronous communication tool.

A person who blogs is a blogger. A blogger writes posts for their blog on a regular basis. Sometimes they post a couple per week and sometimes they post many times per day. Some blogs have multiple writers/bloggers so not all of the posts are written by the same person.

There are two major blogging services: Blogger (capital B) and Wordpress. Blogger is owned by Google. Both of these services have lots of the same features and allow you to create very cool, customized blogs. Wordpress is a bit more popular for professional bloggers.

Twitter is best described as a micro-blog. It works almost identical to a blog but the posts are limited to 140 characters and smart phones and cell phones are common interaction tools. A post in a Twitter account/feed is called a tweet. And, people who regularly read the tweets of a particular person are called followers.

January 21, 2011

Why Some Elite Colleges Give Away Courses Online


A new book takes a look at how and why top universities are opening up access to their courses. We’ll look at several examples of this later on.



January 19, 2011

Safety on the Web

If you're going to use the World Wide Web, then you need know that their are risks.

Review the information about online safety and test your understanding...

January 10, 2011

Web Browsers

Web browsers are the software tools we all use most often to perform tasks online. There are a few different browser that make up the entire market share and we all have our favorite.

Picking a web browser for regular use is really no different than picking any software. You want to find a program that is fast and reliable and has features that make the things you do often easy and efficient.

A Little History

1991 World Wide Web (browser) is released as part of the Web development by Tim Berners-Lee.
1993 Mosaic, the first "popular" graphical browser is released.
1994 Netscape is formed by Marc Andreesen, a developer for Mosaic. Netscape is code-named Mozilla for Mosaic killer (Mosaic/Godzilla) and becomes the first commercial web browser. AOL starts offering subscribers access to the public Web.
1995 Internet Explorer is released as part of Windows 95. This starts the first big browser war.
1996 Opera, a Norwegian company, is released.
1997 AOL HAS 9 million subscribers.
1998 Mozilla, an off-shoot project/company of Netscape, is formed. Netscape source code is released as open-source.
2000 AOL has 23 million subscribers.
2002 IE has 95% of browser market share and the first browser war ends.
2003 Apple Safari is released and uses a rendering engine called WebKit, popular with mobile devices.
2004 Firefox, which is based off of the Mozilla/Netscape open-source code is released.
2006 IE 7 is released five years after IE 6 and copies many features from the main competition (Firefox).
2008 Google Chrome is released and browser war intensifies.
2010 Rockmelt, a social media browser is funded by Netscape's Marc Andreesen and based off Google's open-source project, Chromium.

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