Reflection

When it comes to using the internet, I will admit that I am not a fan of it. In fact, I never have been and I didn’t realise how internet orientated our lives and chosen career paths are becoming until I was introduced to the web media paper. At first, I was unsure about this paper until I learnt that journalists can specialise in writing for the web. On the TVNZ website you can follow television journalists blogs. I particularly find the one written by Corin, a TV 1 business reporter very interesting. http://tvnz.co.nz/business-news/unemployment-rate-sours-green-shoots-show-2890870

Journalism, where to start; as we all know there isn’t just writing articles for newspapers or magazines these days, but there are always websites that complement newspaper sites or magazines. This is because a majority of people rely on the internet as a major source of information.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

The internet is a whole new media, full of endless opportunities. It creates a whole different meaning to the ‘writing world’ because as a writer you can create your own digital identity. My digital identity if you like is called Fisherchick09, because I simply love fishing and everyone knows my work under that identity.

Over the past few weeks in my web media class I have been introduced to a lot of new areas that exist both within the internet and journalism.

One of our web media tutors, Steven Harlow taught us about the history of the internet and how to use research to assist us with our information about our given event and date. This was interesting as we were all given either a name or event that impacted the web in some way; which got us into pairs. We both researched our event and date using the appropriate keywords, search engines and other web tools. We were then asked to place our research into the form of a slideshow, collaborated by our class members onto a web browser. This was a useful skill to learn because it can be applied to our blogs by using links to back up our information.

Setting up a delicious.com account was straightforward as it was similar to setting up a bebo or a facebook page. I learnt how to bookmark certain pages and articles I found interesting using the delicious bookmarking tool and also tagging my articles with webmedia09 so I could share these with other class members. Until this lesson, I had no idea what delicious.com was or how to tag articles and share them with other people.

Julie Starr expanded our knowledge on the topic of search engines. A search engine is a tool designed to search for information on the internet. Keywords play an important role in this process as they are a key component not only for the researching but also for the results the engine returns. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine

She also introduced us to another device called Wolfram Alpha. We got into groups of three or more and we all had to research this device and write instructions about how this device worked. I found this exercise very helpful because I could apply this knowledge to my assignment about creating a how to wiki page.

Wolfram Alpha is a brand new way of accessing information on the internet. It isn’t a search engine because it uses its own data, instead of searching outside sites for answers, which google does. Wolfram Alpha collects objective data (facts that can be proven by science) and stores it using key words.

The computational knowledge engine sorts through its own database and presents the intrigued with relevant data.

Wolfram Alpha is a free source of proven information, it is very interesting as it presents the information to the viewer in the form of an in depth analysis. I looked up my birthday (26/04/1990) this returned precise results about the day, famous people who were also born and it gave other information which was relevant to that particular date. http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Julie also talked to us about twitter. I’ve had a twitter account for awhile now, but I had never really taken much notice of it. The impact that twitter has on the world is simply incredible, you can even follow Ashton Kutcher! I just hope it’s really him.

Much to my surprise the internet was not a difficult tool to get my head around. I am starting to explore the web more and I am also a twitter addict!

I also feel more comfortable with applying some of these topics that I have learnt about to my other papers.