Week 7

Lecture
Week sevens lecture is all about the World Wide Web (www), who created it, what is it and what you can do with it. The www was developed by Tim Berners in 1989; the reason for this development was to facilitate sharing research information. The web is useful in so many ways you can chat to people on the opposite site of the world for a very small price; you can shop online and you can obtain just about any information you are looking for.

There are some common misconceptions between the web and the net. People often refer to the web and the net as being the same thing, however this is not true. Without the net there would be no web. The net is basically the connection to the web. On the net you find computers but on the web you find music, videos and information. Also on the net connections are between cable and computers but the web connections are to hypertext links.

Web addresses are used to determine one site from the other. Web addresses is made up of several parts, for example, http://www.ecu.edu.au
• http:// = hypertext transfer protocol
• WWW = World Wide Web
• ecu = server
• edu = domain
• au = country

The web can be very useful however anyone is able to publish what they want on the web, be that true or false. By looking at the domain of a website you can generally determine if the site will be reputable or not. For example .com is commercial, .org is an organization, .net is a network, .edu is educational, of these domains .edu and .org would generally be the most trustworthy sites. This is because they are generic top level domains.

To be able to explore the web you need a web browser program. These programs include Internet Explorer, MyIE2 (Maxthon), Neoplanet, Netscape and firefox. All of these browser interfaces are similar and offer variants of similar tools for searching the web. All programs are designed to do the same thing so choosing one really depends on what you feel comfortable using.


Workshop
The web is filled with so much information with a lot of it incorrect. The task for week 7 is to determine whether the sites www.haggis.scotsman.com and www.molossia.org are authentic sites or not.

www.haggis.scotsman.com
1. Haggis is not an animal like the website says it is, but is sheep heart, liver and lungs mixed together with spices.
2. The webcam is not a camera but just photographs of locations around cities.
3. There is online shopping but it is fake as you can not purchase anything.
4. There are haggis facts which are incorrect and absurd. For example "There is a mistaken belief that the haggis is some kind of pudding made from sheep innards."


www.molossia.org



1. Molossia is not a real country, but the website states that it is an "independent nation, located in and completely surrounded by territory of the United States".
2. The photo of the so called president looks fake and just a man dressing up in military clothing.
3. The flag which represents the so called republic of Molossia is just a made up flag.
4. There are immature quotes from the "president", "you've got the same damn pants to get happy in". This immaturity suggests that this site is a joke as it is unlikely that a president would ever speak like this in public.

The second task is to visit www.martinlutherking.org and give reasons to whether or not the site is authentic but before entering the site suggest if the site will be authentic by analyzing the web address.

www.martinlutherking.org

When first viewing the web address I instinctively thought that the site would be credible. This is because I saw that the domain was .org which is a top level domain. This suggests that the information on the site will be correct as it is an organization. Being an organization there is a lot more to lose if the information is not correct on the site compared to a single person who publishes incorrect information on a website ending with .com. What I thought I would find on the site was information on Martin Luther King's achievements, famous quotes he made and all about his life.

Once I entered the site I felt confident that my first assumptions about the authenticity of the site were correct. However once I looked more closely at the site and entered different locations on the site I soon realized that the site was actually false. The site suggested that Martin Luther King wasn’t a nice man as they said in an article that Martin Luther King was having sex with three White women, one of whom he brutally beat. The purpose of this site is to supposedly expose the real truth behind Martin Luther King’s life. The site is a satire that portrays a real hatred towards Martin Luther King by the writer.

Readings
The readings for week seven were on the history of the World Wide Web. Both sites gave in depth information on the origin of the WWW. On http://www.w3.org/History.html the site has a time line from 1945 to 1995 giving information of the first steps towards the internet. For example Doug Engelbart invented the mouse in the 1960's and Tim Berners-Lee wrote a notebook program in the 1980's. The site http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/history/ivh/frame_theorie.html, also goes into detail of all the inventions which contributed to the making of the WWW. The site also gives information on different search engines, basic net data and the history of electronic mail.