Treatment Paper - Statesman article

I read a story on the Austin-American Statesman’s Web site, titled “Port Arthur teen remembers young organ donor who saved her life.” It briefly described the life of Lawrencia Keys, a Port Arthur resident who received a kidney from a girl that was fatally wounded in an all-terrain vehicle accident. The story also includes information about Keys’ life today and the donor’s family. While the story was an interesting read I felt it would benefit from the inclusion of a few multimedia pieces, namely a photo album of sorts to honor other donors.

I think it would work well to allow organ recipients who read the story to post short profiles on their donors. This would include a photo of the person, when and where they lived and a paragraph honoring the person. The Statesman could then gather them in a folder and add a link to this user-created content. It would be interesting, I feel, because of the human interest element; we all want to know what others like us are doing.

Links to additional content would also help. In the story I read that Keys suffered from spina bifida, a neural tube defect that caused a bladder problem, resulting in kidney damage. A link devoted to this subject could work, as well as an infographic detailing some of the problems associated with the disorder, in order to help readers better understand Keys’ plight. The graph could also include stats on how prevalent it is, broken down by various categories (race, ethnicity, region, etc.). The story ends with information about donating, and a link for signing up to be in the statewide donation registry would be an obvious improvement.

In regards to donating, it is obvious some people are squeamish about the idea of their innards being transplanted to another person. I would include with this story a pair of polls, asking what are the top reasons why a person does and does not choose to register as a donor. This information could then be organized with data showing survival rates of people living off donations, perhaps doing a common good by convincing people to donate.

The story describes Keys’ prognosis as good. She has started college and is living a normal life. A video diary would help illustrate this. Similarly to the video we saw on the UT professor, I would like it to be self-narrated, and perhaps include some interviews with Keys’ friends, perhaps about what kind of inspiration she is to them. Seeing her live a “normal life” would show people a bit about an afflicted person and help them realize they can operate just like anyone else and do not need to be, or should not be, stigmatized.

City targets Sagewood

A street in San Marcos causes problems for neighborhood and police. Sagewood Trail is a street in San Marcos that contains dozens of rental property where many Texas State students reside. The location of this street and the majority of residents being college students brings about many problems for the city of San Marcos. Continual complaints about noise, crime, traffic, and litter have resulted in police thinking of new ways to take action and deal with these issues.

The San Marcos Daily Record could easily add multimedia components that would allow readers to interact with this story and bring a certain appeal to any story with multimedia features.

The first multimedia component I would add would be a link to an interactive map that allowed readers to click on Sagewood Trail, from within the story, and be taken directly to a map of the city of San Marcos. This would give readers a better perspective of where the street is located and what the local surroundings are. The reader could click on any street in San Marcos and get a closer view of that particular location.

Secondly, I would add video footage of a typical weekend on Sagewood; to give the reader a better idea of what takes place there. I would have footage of how many vehicles are parked near and along the street. I would also film people walking on the street and parties in garages that can easily be seen from the street, and any trash or glass that might be in the road.

The third multimedia component would be three online interviews. I would have quotes in my story from these particular people, and allow their names to be direct links to online footage of their interviews. An online interview with City Manager, Dan O'Leary, Texas State University's Associated Student Government president, Reagan Pugh, and near-by resident to Sagewood Trail, Nancy Moore.

Lastly I would design an interactive game that allowed readers to choose to be either a cop or a student and parade through Sagewood trail battling one another. As a cop, the player would chase disobedient students that were breaking the laws. The cop has many weapens and goal is to capture the unruly student(s). If the player chooses to be a student, they will run from the cops and will be able to throw beer bottles and jump over fences and roofs to escape. Their objective is to escape from the cop and avoid being arrested.

Another South Austin Shooting

Sunday's Austin American-Statesman featured a short story in the Metro & State on yet another shooting in south Austin. Melissa Mixon wrote a succinct story of the events as told to her by Austin police spokesperson Laura Albrecht and two residents of the University Heights apartment complex where the shooting took place late Friday night.

Begin with the Obvious
The obvious multimedia treatment on this type of story would be necessary. We’d have to shoot the two sister residents of the University Heights apartment showing us where they were when they heard the argument and shooting, as well as where the shooting took place. Since the women said they no longer feel safe in the neighborhood, or even walking from the parking lot to their apartment, I’d have a separate video taken of their walk at night, with only their voices, demonstrating how far the walk is and what/who they might come into contact with on that walk.

Where’s the data?
A quick google search for "southeast Austin shootings" yields a plethora of recent new stories on shootings in the area but no one offers a summary or statistic on who, when, where or how often.

I would continue my multimedia treatment on the story by switching to a broad perspective that is sure to interest southeast Austin residents as a whole. I’d utilize gathered data to create a map, similar to those found on Google Maps’ hybrid satellite images, of what is officially considered southeast Austin.

I’d delve deeper by offering flags on the map at all locations where a shooting has occurred in the last 12 months. A scroll over the flags would yield a small text box pop up with the same general data on each shooting: date of shooting, who was shot, what was the cause (drug related, domestic violence, etc), who, if anyone, was arrested and/or charged.

Links are a Necessity
Additionally, I would offer readers a link back to the original story on each of the shootings, as well as any related articles since. The links to the original stories would offer readers the opportunity to see original photographs as well as any available video on each of the shootings.

Tables and Time lines
I would also create tables with the collected data. The first table would show a timeline of shootings over the past year. The second would show the increase in shootings, if any, over the past ten years. A breakdown in percentages of what each shooting was related to would also be available, for example 10 percent were drug related and 30 percent involved domestic violence. Another table would show annually how many cases resulted in a conviction. Yet another table would show a breakdown of what times of day shootings most often occur. An arrow left and right would allow readers to switch back and forth from one table to the next. A comments box below the tables would request readers submit ideas for other tables of data they’d be interested in.

Reader Interaction
A blog-like section would allow readers to interact even more by commenting on the shootings. Here they could report anything they perhaps saw that wasn’t in the news coverage or offer up suggestions for controlling crime in the area. This feedback might be helpful for the authorities, as well.

I'd also offer a link here to Apartment Ratings, a site where apartments dwellers offer each other advice on places they've lived and would never live again. Apparently University Heights isn't very popular right now with an overall Apartment Rating recommendation of only 24%.

Community Involvement
Finally, I’d offer links and resources including tips on how to create a neighborhood watch program. If a program was implemented as a result of the story and its multimedia treatment I’d dedicate a page on the site to it and the tracking of its progress.

A&E Rips Off Texas State Students

The article I decided to use for this project is called "A&E Falls Short on Agreement With Students, Faculty Member." I found this article in the University Star and I decided to use it because I was interested in the fact that a successful and respected television network like A&E produced one of its shows using Texas State students in an architectural design class. I was really impressed that the television show "Flip This House" found its way to San Marcos, Texas. After reading the article, however, I wasn’t impressed at all. In this article Armando Montelongo, of Montelongo House Buyers Inc., requested the help of these Texas State students to flip property on Smith Lane and construct condos. The students were instructed to get into groups and develop a plan for the construction of the condos and Montelongo would then chose the group that he believed had the best plan. The winning group would have their plan used for the actual construction of the condos and also receive $500. Because Montelongo decided not to purchase the land, the show never aired and the winning students never received their promised money.


The first multimedia treatment I would give this article is a slide show of the students working. It would show them creating and developing their site diagrams for the project. The slide show would contain pictures of the students through out the entire planning process interacting together. It would show them working hard in a professional manner that deserves recognition.


The second multimedia treatment I would suggest is an actual video of the students working. I think it should be narrated by the students themselves to demonstrated that they are the future architects of the world and that their ideas are solid. The video would show them explaining step by step what ideas they were deciding to use and why they decided to use them. They would explain in detail all of the architectural elements that they were planning to use.


The third multimedia treatment I would give this article is a map that shows you exactly were this property is located. The map would be interactive and when you clicked on the location it would show you how the property looked before and what it would have looked like after if the property had been developed using the student’s ideas.


The last treatment I would give this article is something called "You Flip It." When you used this application you would be shown pictures of dilapidated virtual homes that you then got to flip yourself. You would be able to fix up your home by adding things like paint, putting in new floors, adding extra rooms, and redecorating. When you are finished you could submit it and be told how much profit you would have made based on the changes that you implemented.

"Snakes on a Plane"

Snakes found in luggage at Ga. airport

In this short article I found on the San Antonio Express-News web, it was reported that numerous snakes, a dead bird and dead bird pieces were found in a man’s luggage bag at an airport. Stories that feature oddities are much easier to get creative with, but this story could have veered off into a number of topics. I chose this story because it seemed like if I was scanning over a news website and saw this multimedia I would stop and look over it myself.

Multimedia type 1:
In the article it mentions briefly that the man may be faced with possible fines. By researching into illegalities of this particular transportation and speaking with the federal wildlife officials I would hopefully be able to attain some sort of document outlining the “do’s and don’ts” of this type of situation.
By putting a link or image along with this article, on-lookers would be able to find out more information by being researchers, in a way, themselves.

Multimedia type 2:
Create a photo slide show of the pictures the officers and media took after discovering the man’s unique luggage.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution online is the only web page I found with some sort of multimedia picture [shown on right]. This picture would be included in the slide show.
I would also include more similar pictures of the contents, a picture of the man apprehended and pictures captured during the detaining by the officers.

Multimedia type 3:
Create a picture informing graphic hover that would allow viewers to place their computer mouse over an image and be able to read about the dangers of the different types of snakes: i.e. if the man had the venomous black mamba [shown on right] as one of his jarred contents there would be a picture with a hover box saying such information like:
“The black mamba receives its name from the black coloration inside of its mouth. It is the fastest moving snake in the world and one of the deadliest. A single bite may inject enough venom to kill up to 20 to 40 grown men.”
I would have this type of information and graphics for every unusual item that was in his bag.

Multimedia type 4:
Find the passengers that were on board the same flight and discoverers of the contents and ask/video-graph their opinions about the unique contents of the bag. Ask how they would feel if the snakes were alive but still contained as well as other relevant questions pertaining to the story.
With the footage I would create a short documentary. To make it a bit more interesting and dramatic I would relate/spoof it to the movie trailer of “Snakes on a Plane.” Given that no one was hurt the video would not be inappropriate.

Wired DIY: How to make your blog popular

I though it was only fitting to post a brief blog on a Wired DIY article for how to make your blog popular.

The CEO of Technorati, David Sifry, gives some short, but useful, advice we surely all could use - check it out.

Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet

When the average American thinks about the history of the Internet, what most likely comes to mind are a lot of acronyms and a few names of old guys who knew a lot about technology. In other words people generally think of a bunch of nerds in association with the Internet.

People are right to think about nerds in association with the beginnings of the Internet and World Wide Web. However, I found a really interesting and well built site called Nerds 2.0.1 that provides a glance at the history of the Internet. This site, built by Robert X. Cringely (whose name and picture are not very much unlike that of a nerd) and hosted by PBS, emphasizes the transitions that the Internet went through in order to get to where it is today which is in just about every home, office, and business anywhere.

I found it really interesting that the Internet (or its predecessor) began with the military and for military purposes. Then it morphed and became part of the “nerd” world. And another transition in the 1980s took the Internet to businesses. With Apple and IBM’s personal computers the Internet was made available to “real” people. Cringely writes, “At first, computers were the tools of technically inclined nerds, but new applications drew other people to the keyboard.”

Another thing that is pretty interesting on this site is the page entitled “Glossary of Geek.” It provides lots of useful terminology that is associated with the Internet. Something that I didn’t know was ALOHAnet (the first definition) which was created by Norm Abramson in 1970 to connect the islands of Hawaii over a network of radio transmitters.

A Cursory Glance at the Internet's Origin

We live in an age where our lives revolve around the computer. The Internet has influenced my life so much that it’s hard for me to recall a day when I didn’t use it for something useful. We use computers and the Internet everyday so it’s rather strange to realize that most of us don’t even know what the Internet really is. It’s even stranger to imagine that someone my age, who has grown up using computers, doesn’t know the history of this thing that has changed the way we live.
The Internet was originally created in the 1960s by our government during the Cold War. At this time, the United States Department of Defense was concerned about nuclear attack and not being able to communicate with government officials if it happened. The Advanced Research Projects Agency was created to make computer networks that would allow government officials to communicate with each other if the United States was attacked. In 1969, this agency successfully created a network of four computers located at Stanford, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah called ARPANET. Hundreds of computers were connected by this network by the 1970s and by the 1980s the network had grown even more and was known as the Internet.

The Inter..wha?

The history of the Internet and Web can be a confusing thing. Even those of us who consider ourselves somewhat tech savvy can get lost in the jargon.
While there were many milestones that led to the Internet we use today, there are two important inventions to note: the creation of ARPANET and the World Wide Web.
The Internet Society, a non-profit international group focusing on Internet education and public policy, provides a detailed, yet concise history of the Internet here. J.C.R. Licklider, who was the first to head the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the 1960s, envisioned computers could be linked together to access all kinds of information quickly and from great distances. His theory would later be put to the test and perfected over next the next four decades.
Lawrence G. Roberts, a researcher at MIT, began working at ARPA in the late 1960s. Roberts presented a paper in 1967 where he laid out his plan for ARPANET, the first packet switching network of computers, thanks to the initial research by Leonard Kleinrock.
This timeline outlines how ARPANET continued to develop and highlights milestones. By 1972 ARPANET included NASA, the Federal Reserve Board and the National Science Foundation in its network. By the 1980s ARPANET had expanded overseas and was retired in 1990.
Perhaps one of the greatest inventions since the creation of the Internet was the World Wide Web. Tim Burners-Lee, a physicist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, was responsible for the web as we know it today. He was looking for a way to better communicate information over the Internet by using hypertext, which he outlines in his proposal. Since then the web has grown in incredible numbers, with 135,166,473 sites currently online, according to Netcraft, which surveys sites on the web. Most of the growth can be attributed to social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, which allow users to create their own pages.
The Internet and web are ever-changing technology that continue to become more efficient and user friendly. Now the challenge remains to create access for everyone.

How America Got Online

It’s hard to remember a time before the internet, for most of us its hard to remember a time before high-speed internet, but despite what many of us may thing, the internet did not begin with the now primitive seeming dial-up connections and AOL 2.0 of the early 90’s.
The true origins of the internet can be traced back to 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1. Throughout the late 1950’s, the Soviet Union launched several artificial satellites, known as the Sputnik program, and their success coupled with their surprise launchings had the U.S. scrambling to regain it’s technological lead.
Within a year of the first Sputnik launch and as a direct result of it, the United States made a series of initiatives, many made by the Department of Defense, to re-claim technological superiority. One of those initiatives was the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). In 1962, J.C.R. Licklider of MIT came to head the advancement of ARPA and first developed the theory of a network of computers that could be used to share information for military and scientific purposes. Licklider was the first to champion the idea of networking and had a concept very similar to the internet we know today. Licklider found much help with bringing his concept to fruition in Leonard Kleinrock at MIT. Kleinrock had published papers regarding packet switching being used for communication as opposed to circuits. This idea, along with Lawrence G. Roberts, also of MIT, and his connection of the first two computers with a low speed dial-up telephone line were huge leaps on the road to computer networking. With Robert’s creation of the first wide-area computer network, the need for packet switching, Kleinrock’s idea, was confirmed.
When Roberts joined ARPA in 1966, he worked on better developing his theory of a computer network, and coined his plan ARPANET. Two years later, in 1968, when plans for ARPANET had been thoroughly designed, UCLA was selected to be the first node on ARPANET. In 1969, with Stanford Research Institute (SRI) providing the second node, the first host-to-host message was sent from UCLA to SRI. Within the year, four host computers were connected to ARPANET, and the predecessor to the internet we now know was born.

World Wide Web, world-wide phenomenon

The Internet has undoubtedly changed the way people think, act and communicate. It is interesting to note the backbone of the Internet, the computers powering it, came to fruition and began functioning by basically thinking, acting and communicating together.

According to the Internet Society's Web site (and the film we viewed in class), the 1973 ARPA research project (ARPAnet) was commissioned to discover a way to send "packets" of information remotely from one system to another. TCP/IP was born from this endeavor, and as a result, the Internet.

The ARPAnet founders' decision to use TCP/IP as the sole method of communication between computers was a far-reaching effect, one felt thirty-four years later (and will continue to affect the Internet into the foreseeable future). These tiny packets of information in the 1970s have now turned into huge files. Videos, games, programs and music are just some of the files available for download on the Internet, and more specifically, the World Wide Web.

Without the foresight of the scientists, politicians and countless others involved in the infancy of the Internet, the World Wide Web would not exist in the slightest capacity it does today. The transmission of information, sharing of files and instant communication between people is just one interesting parallel that bridges the gap between man and machine.

Sources:
www.isoc.org/internet/history/
www.pbs.org/opb/nerds2.0.1/

Pay bills, read the news, play games, watch ridiculous people doing even more ridiculous things, research anything, create and contribute multimedia content, stalk an ex, check the weather, attempt to convince the world your interesting – just a short list of the many things we can and do do online.

But is this how the creators envisioned their brainchild? Certainly not.

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider was hired in the early 1960s to develop a system that would enable the department of defense to effectively and efficiently communicate during the Cold War. The project would be coined the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) at its inception but then would be changed to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1971. Another change in 1993 would officially title the project ARPA once again and finally in 1996 the name changing would come to a long overdue end with the once more official title of DARPA.

Regardless of name change the concept has also changed immensely since the early '60s. Originally a government tool, the Internet as it exists today is vital to many or our lives and is proving to be a tool that could offer a better way of life to many others in less fortunate parts of the world through programs such as One Laptop per Child (OLPC).

The Internet is increasingly becoming the average man’s key to access and affect the world around him – a world that not that long ago would have been completely beyond his means. Today more and more people are staking claim to their very own slice of the online world. Whether they do this through social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook where they list intimate details of their lives for all to see, or through their own web sites, built with knowledge and tools readily available online. With the prevalence of sites such as Wikipedia your average Joe next door can even publish a history of the internet that many will simply assume to be complete fact.

This brings us to the future of the Internet - where do we have to go from now, can we even imagine? Many theories exist; some even foresee the demise of news as we know it. Dramatic, but might they be on to something? Check out Epic 2014 to see this dramatic theory that is sure to get you theorizing yourself.

Crawl Before You Walk, or, a Brief History of the Internet

The Internet, in all its glory and grime, has changed the way people communicate on a day-to-day basis. Though consumers did not feel the effects of the Internet until the mid-nineties, many people worked on its creation as early as the 1960s.

In 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. In response, the Department of Defense formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to push the United States to develop advances in science and technology. After the space program broke away and formed NASA, ARPA (also known as DARPA) was left to develop a network that would allow the US to control its missiles and bombers following a nuclear attack.

In his 1960 paper, J.C.R. Licklider first suggested the idea of linking computers together to provide an information storage and retrieval system. Not long after, Paul Baran, Donald Davies, and Leonard Kleinrock developed and implemented the idea of packet switching, where packets of information are queued and routed between nodes over data lines.

By 1969, a network, called the ARPANET, made its first link between two hosts; Stanford Research Institute and the University of California, Los Angeles. By 1981, there were 213 hosts, with a new host added approximately every 20 days. (Source)

In the 1970s, Robert Kahn of DARPA and Vint Cerf of Stanford University worked together to unify the network methods. They developed TCP/IP, a protocol still used today.

Eventually, the US Military portioned off a piece of ARPANET to be used exclusively for military uses, called MILNET. Networks in the ARPANET were still government funded, and use by anyone other than the government and universities was strictly forbidden.

Between 1984 and 1988, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), located northwest of Geneva, began operating with TCP/IP to interconnect their major internal computer systems. It was there in 1990 that a man named Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web, a way users can read and write via computers connected to the Internet.

By 1993, Marc Andreessen, NCSA, and the University of Illinois developed a graphical interface to the World Wide Web, called Mosaic. Microsoft would later develop Internet Explorer as a competitor to Mosaic and Netscape.

During the early 90s, independent commercial networks began to grow. All restrictions to noncommercial service disappeared by 1995 when the National Science Foundation ended it’s sponsorship of the Internet. Almost immediately, Internet Service Providers (ISP) AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe came online.

Microsoft took full advantage of the Internet’s growth when they released Windows 98 with the browser, Internet Explorer, integrated into the desktop.

Today, the Internet plugs ahead, putting information at consumers’ fingertips. Personalized services, such as iGoogle’s webpages, Amazon.com’s purchase suggestions, and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook keep the masses addicted to the glowing screens. The future, as they say, is now.

A brief history of the Internet

The history of the Internet spans back to more than 40 years ago. In August 1962, a series of memos about a “Galactic Network" concept served as the earliest known ideas of what is now the Internet. The thoughts that information could be shared between a network of several computers was the brainchild of Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider. A year later, Licklider was employed as a computer scientist for the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency to help government officials communicate during the Cold War.

We learned about the ARPA project in class, and that this was essentially how the Internet was born. It also gave birth to Internet Protocol and Transmission Control Protocol addresses. Today, the Internet and the World Wide Web have completely revolutionized the way people communicate.

One of the below Web logs mentions “Usenet.” The concept of the Usenet reminds me of how we share information via the Web today. The Usenet, which was first developed in 1979, allows participants to read and post messages in categories called “newsgroups.” To me, this sounds a lot like chat rooms, message boards, social networking sites and many of the forms of communication that are popular on the Web today.

One different aspect about Usenet is that it is decentralized. Everyone is an administrator, which is unique when you consider that today we are exploring whether a government entity or the free market should have control of the Internet. Another interesting fact about the Usenet is that it was the place where Tim Berners-Lee announced the introduction of the World Wide Web.

In his message, Berners-Lee said he wanted more information to be available to people. “The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to
make an easy but powerful global information system,” he wrote in his message.

Today, the World Wide Web is practically a necessity. We learned in class that this is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents accessed over the Internet. We share information over the Web using hypertext markup language, or HTML, which is still a popular form of markup languages for Web pages.

Recent news concerning the state of the Internet is interesting. About a year ago, I heard a podcast by longtime PBS journalist Bill Moyers titled “The Net at Risk.”

It explored net neutrality and big companies’ and big governments’ influence on the Internet. One concern of net neutrality is that Internet providers could charge a fee to companies ensuring that the companies’ content would load faster. Content speed is not currently controlled by major corporations.

On the PBS Web site, Moyers asks a provocative question in today’s media issue: Who owns the Internet? Our other forms of communication, such as newspapers, magazines, television and even phone services, are owned by a few, ultra-powerful corporations that essentially supply us with access to the information we need and want. The Internet is supposed to be what Moyers and others call a global democracy, but its future as a global democracy sometimes looks rather grim.

At A Glance: The History of the Internet

When talking about the Internet and the World Wide Web, it’s hard to imagine a time when the two did not exist. It is also difficult to think of the two existing independently, but they do have separate definitions.

The Internet is a decentralized connection of computers that allowed users access to any information on the network. The World Wide Web was created as a service that places a graphical interface on the Internet and enables the publication of multimedia documents on the Internet.

During the Cold War, the Internet was created by the U.S. Department of Defense to decentralize their current communication system between researchers and government officials. Both parties need to maintain communication in the event of a nuclear attack. The Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was designed by the government to study the computer networks and solve the government’s communication concerns.
Because of the ARPA’s involvement in the Net’s development, the network originally was known as ARPANET. However, the engineers working at ARPA coined the phrase “the Internet” to explain how the network interconnected other networks. By 1983, the network was officially known as the Internet.

Some of the ARPA innovations that make the Internet possible are transmission control protocol (TCP), Internet protocol (IP) address and the domain name system. Transmission control protocol is the method of breaking up messages in the chunks that are addressed to different computers, so date can be sent and received simultaneously. The IP address is a number system gives each computer a specific name that other computers can identify with. The domain name is a text-based version also used to identify computers on the Internet.
Without the World Wide Web, the Internet existed with text-based only applications such as electronic mail (e-mail), file transfer protocol (FTP), newsgroups, and early chat programs.
Before graphics, email allowed users to send text only messages to one another. Newgroups allowed other users to post an email of their opinions, and chatting allowed multiple users to communicate with text only messages in real time.

The World Wide Web invention of the 1970’s is credited to Tim Berners-Lee, who developed the Web as an easier way to share data across the Internet by using hypertext markup language (HTML) to communicate. The primary features of HTML are the allowable graphics and the ease of linking from computer to computer with the click of a mouse. The hypertext language gives users the power to publish and access information without using confusing computer commands. In 1989, Berners-Lee invented a more practical version of the Web, which has revolutionized the use of the Internet today. In the 1990s, the Internet officially became apart of mainstream life with the development of websites and search engines.

The Scrapyard of the Internet

I found a really interesting article from the BBC discussing a little history about the world wide web that not a lot of people know about.

This article by Mark Ward talks a little about two things that weren't mentioned in the video we watched in class: Usenet and Gopher. Usenet was another way for people to find documents over the Internet other than using the WWW.

Gopher was created by the University of Minnesota (mascot is the Golden Gophers) and released in 1991 and was actually more frequently used than the WWW early on. The downfall for Gopher ultimately was in 1993 when the Univ. of Minn. decided to start charging money for Gopher.

It's amazing to think that if someone decided not to try to turn an immediate profit on Gopher, the entire Internet as we know it could be drastically different.

Todd’s Brief History of the Interweb: Al Gore will tell you I’m a liar.

You wake up in the morning. Your automatic coffee machine has your java already for you. Ten years ago this is the part of the morning routine where you might go get the paper, and check the mail. Now you sit at the family computer and get your news and your mail digitally. We all enjoy the ease of life the Internet grants us, but how did it get started?
It all really started in 1958 with DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). DARPA, sometimes known as ARPA was a defense department agency created to help America re-establish technological superiority over the USSR.
J.C.R. Licklider, of MIT developed a theory that computers could be networked and two computers could exchange information over said network. His vision was surprisingly much like the Internet of today, a huge system of interconnected computers that could all access the same information from the same places. He told his friends at DARPA, especially one Mr. Lawrence Roberts, about this theory and the team ran with it.
Leonard Kleinrock, also of MIT agreed with Licklider’s theory, but rather than transfer information over this hypothetical network using circuits, he proposed information was packaged in “packets.” He convinced Roberts and several other colleagues at DARPA that this was the way to go.
In 1965 Roberts, in Massachusetts, and a professor at UCLA sent the first packet of information. From there, Roberts came up with the plan for what he called the ARPANET.
In 1969 after four years of hard work, calculating the geography and logistics, the ARPANET had four host terminals set up. The dreams of so many were coming true, and what we now know as the Internet was well on the way to being the Internet of today.
In 1972 the International Computer Communication Conference was held. This conference was vastly important to the future of the internet. The conference was the first time the public had a chance to see the ARPANET in action. The expo also was the birthplace of Electronic Mail, now known as E-mail.
E-mail was the brainchild of Ray Tomlinson at BBN, who wrote the first basic programming to read and send E-mail. From there, Roberts improved the application, simplifying and expanding on Tomlinson’s initial program.
Tomlinson came up with the idea because people all over the world were helping to contribute to the growth and accessibility of the Internet. Tomlinson saw this application as a way for all of the developers and users to communicate with one another.
Many people confuse the Internet and the World Wide Web. The Internet is simply the network. The web is all of the content that can be accessed using the Internet.
The Internet is relatively young, but has changed so much, and changed the way we live.

Sources:
Wikipedia.org - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
Internet Society (History Page) - http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml

Rewriting History Via the Internet

The world has forever been changed by the undeniable affects of the Internet. The Internet is a powerful medium that has completely transformed the way people live, work, learn, and socialize. Growing up during a decade in which the Internet became increasingly popular and widespread, it is difficult for me to imagine my life without it.

The Cold War was a time when the growth of technology was key for the safety and power of the United States rivaling the former Soviet Union. The U.S. government created an agency known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. With the help of J.C.R. Licklider, a student from MIT, and others such as Paul Baron who worked for the Research and Development Organization; a packet switching program was created. The goal was to develop a country-wide communication system. The ARPANET would become the first successful system. More and more computers started to connect to the ARPANET and by the late 1970s over one hundred were connected. The ARPANET would later be replaced in 1990 and the new system would be opened up to private organizations across the globe. The 1990s was the decade when the popularity and advances in the Internet completely exploded. Society may have not been ready for the Internet; but there was no stopping this phenomenon that redefined the modern world.

The Internet: A History

The history of the World Wide Web and Internet dates back several years before “www” was even used to describe this new medium. Vannevar Bush, a American scientist, foreshadowed the use of such a network in a 1945 article, when speaking of “trailblazers” that would work together to form a “mass of the common record.” Bush’s ideas for this “memex,” a forerunner to the CPU, existed even before that.

The groundwork for today’s Internet was laid as early as 1958, when the U.S. Department of Defense formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA would exist to work on missions designated by the Secretary of Defense, and was a reaction to the Soviet Union launching the world’s first space satellite, Sputnik, in 1957.

ARPA eventually began working on the first packet-switching network (as opposed to a telephone’s “circuit-switching") to send information from one site to another. The United States feared that should the Soviets deliver a nuclear strike, our country’s telephone system would fail, thus bringing on the need for a more stable network.

Scientists, professors and top graduate students in the country (members of ARPA) devised a system that would send information in “packets” - smaller bits of the original message. The packets contained headers identifying where the information was destined. To do this the government hired Paul Baran, who invented the “hot potato” routing method for these messages. Baran said he was inspired by mice running mazes, and theorized that chopped, equal-sized packets would be able to find their way to the destination, even if part of the network was destroyed.

Packet switching proved possible, and the ARPANET became a reality. The agency then attempted to set up a network across four different universities, using Interface Message Processors, or simply IMPs. These IMPs were smaller versions of the universities’ home computers, that could talk to one another through one central modem and killed the need for a separate network for each. In 1969 the first IMP arrived at UCLA and all four computers were connected before the year was up. By April 1971 the network included 18 computers.

The Internet was initially used solely for transferring textual information. Even e-mail was a side-project of ARPA’s Ray Tomlinson, who invented the application in 1969, just thinking it would be something cool to do between computers. E-mail exploded, and was known as the “killer app” for the fledgling network. But the giant leap forward this technology provided was not duplicated for 20 years, when in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, a user-friendly means of accessing the information offered by the Internet. Through the application of Hypertext Markup Language and a web browser, viewers could see and read data translated onto their computers.

The Internet has since grown into its current state after moving past one-way communication to two-way, where user and audience member meld to form a streaming, continuing flow of new information. This struggle to learn the nuances of multimedia, blogs and social networking sites is at the forefront of the greatest hurdles, and greatest possibilities, of the Internet.

What I think of the Internet & Web

After watching the video played in class last week I realized that I didn’t know all the intricacies of the Internet as I had thought. I use the computer every day, in fact if I don’t I feel as if I’ve missed something, sad but at the same time very normal. It’s not just the Internet that perplexes me; it’s the entire system of computers. There's a time line on a page I found that dates each year the steps in creating the internet. When I sit down to think about the knowledge the creators have to make such an intricate platform I am “mind-bottled” and lost. Up until just 10 years ago who would have thought to cross wires to make communication possible or to make a book that we could write on without actually writing. I guess I never really thought about all of the people who took the time, or made the time, to want to make something like that. I found a site that tells the main creators of the internet, it was a bit interesting. I don’t see how it could just arise in their brains or plans for the day that they wanted to create such an elaborate system. When I wake up in the morning my plans for the day consist of getting to where I need to be on time and eating, besides that I go through the day just to get through it. This probably will change once I get finished with my BA but for now all I see is the end of the day. I cannot imagine waking up one day wanting to change the face of our world by creating an interconnected web of communication. Leaving class last Wednesday really opened my eyes to our societies need to be connected at all times and really got me interested in what our life would be like if we didn’t have all of our nifty gadgets. I bet you all reading this cannot even fathom, unless you are old and remember the times when phones were strictly in the house. I looked up randomly the “internet for dummies” and was shot back in 32 seconds 2,790,000 different pages that alluded to my search. I didn’t go through them all, I didn’t want to and who would? Personally I feel that the Internet is an awesome resource but because we do have so much information (either fictional or not) I think it might be harmful to gaining information that one might really need. It’s strange that even as I type ‘internet’ in this blog it alerts me that I have used it wrong yet now it is so common the way I am using it I know I am the one who is correct, at least I hope. I found this site that takes you through all the ins and outs of the Internet and actually tests your knowledge of what you just learned. Now, I’ve not taken the test nor plan to but I think it interesting that they would even have a site like that anymore; it’s just “mind-bottling”.