The Wonderful World of Technology

This is my first blog. I didn’t even know what a blog was until the first day of class, but I can tell you this, it’s a lot easier to start a blog then a webpage. As for a blog, you just sign up; fill in the blanks, answer a personal survey, and then, you are connected to a whole community of people that would have otherwise never entered your life. It’s actual quite cool. You can click on your favorite movie and see that someone in the Philippians loves it, just as much as you do. Of course, I am telling you all this, before I’ve actually posted this blog, so any difficulty I have may sway my opinion.

A webpage, on the other hand, is not as simplistic. After you choose exactly which host you would like to use, out of the swarm that exist, you then have to create it. While templates may seem to be the easiest way about it, I had difficulties customizing it. My first web page was through yahoo’s geocities. I dabbled with templates, a blank page, and then I even downloaded the free trail of Dreamweaver. The only thing I know about HTML, is what it stands for: Hyper Text Markup Language. I’ve seen what it looks like, and it might as well be Russian ;-) I was told that Dreamweaver was a great program, which would simplify creating a webpage. I disagree. I clicked, here and there, and then got in to my car to follow the advice of Teachers Discovering Computers. I went to the store and bought Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition. It was smooth sailing from there on, until I logged on to my site to discover that I had been excommunicated from geocities for providing links to pages other then theirs. Now, I am at angelfire. There seems to be a lot of ads and I am having problems displaying my pictures. If I am not satisfied here I’ll move to freewebs. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Being part of a virtual community does not come with out rules, guidelines, proper protocol, and the like, otherwise known as netiquette. When I performed a search of netiquette, Google returned over 14,000 results, from typing to corporate communities. Netiquette is very important and cyberspace should be treated like any other physical space that you may enter. Because the lack of face to face communication removes voices and expressions, it’s easy to forget that, there is a human out there. Manners and accurate information are only a few of the crucial aspect that make the internet a pleasant experience for the millions of people who use it regularly. Without netiquette, the internet would be out of control, breeding anger, personal attacks, fraud and misinformation. So it is important to be the best netizen of cyberspace possible.

COME VISIT ME!