Front Page Worksop and Web Essay

Since the Front Page Workshop, I have come to the realization that I need help in understanding the program at a slower pace. I found the software to be somewhat difficult in creating links. The only thing that I have liked was the fact that I could change themes. That was the fun part. After the workshop I went on my own to try and understand the webpage. I was attempting to put my pictures on and I was having difficulty trying to put the pictures exactly the way I wanted them. Most of the time I was dragging and resizing the images. Then when I would preview the page, it looked off center and behold I was back on it again. Afterwards, Thursday's class I was working on my web article. My pictures I had finally fixed the other day but I wanted to link some headings within the text document so it would match my sidebar. However, its funny because I did not know that my sidebar was m.i.a. (missing in action) and my headings that I had put apart on my navigational site was now new pages and I had no idea it would turn out like this. So I attempted to contact the Microsoft Front Page Instructioner and her e-mail address was returned delivery status failed. I wasn't all that upset until I went back to front page and noticed that my pictures were out of order. I had to go back and refix it again. So today I am pretty much having the time of my life with the web page (this is not a joke and I am not smiling) so I hope by Thursday this all pulls together. Don't worry, I know it will.

Copyright seems to be a very big issue these days. In "the Tyranny of Copyright" by Robert S. Boynton, he discusses the how copyright and copyleft are both creating radical arguments for people who create and people who take. Copyleft feels that copyright is not allowing the public domain to be able to use things and that copyright has gone to far to the point that people can have their stuff copyrighted for long amounts of time even after they are dead. Realistically, there is nothing new under the sun and everything is always reused. I just think or perhaps find it really interesting that no one has said anything about fashion. I mean music is a big copy issue but no one questions that fact that fashion revamps clothes from the 80's 70's and so on. I mean should fashion years be copyrighted also. Should another designer take clothes and revamp it with a twist. I can understand how music people feel because you do all that hard work and its hard to make money when people keep downloading or rerecording music and passing it off. But now to my understanding is that they have this software that will not allow you to burn a cd so this way a person will have to purchase it but I think they may have ruled out the cassette recorder. Although a cassette recorder seems to be played out, it can copy CD's instead of burn them. Anyway I am not sure which way I will go with this copyright issue vs copyleft because now a days things are plagiarism and no one has its own ideas. Musically, people sample from other peoples work. I do agree that people should pay a fee if they are going to use someone else's stuff. How else are they going to make money. I may stay in the middle on the controversies. Copyrights were made for protection of a creators work and it should stay like that but I do not see anything wrong with taking an idea and making it better.

The presentations overall provided useful information for me because when I get in the process for creating my web design there are a lot of things that I must keep in mind. I think sometimes people can get all lost in the visualization and creation of it but can become unfocused to what the purpose of creating the design is all about. I think the book that my group read did have a usefulness its just too bad that we weren't all able to conduct a presentation that discusses its function for creating a web design.

However, the 4 basic principles was something to keep in mind and that was remembering your audience and purpose and knowing that readers have expectation's and constraints. Most likely if I were to create a web design I would probably have catered to my needs vs that of my audience. Anyhow, all the presentations I feel served some usefulness especially to those who are completely not in touch with cyberspace such as myself. So to make this short, the presentations were helpful to me because there are things I should remember to keep in mind when I am constructing my design

Someone Anyone Heeeeelllllllllllllllllllllllllllllpppppppppppppppp!!!!!

I really do not know what to say. At first I need to come up with a topic and finally after my office chat with Dr. Chandler, we came up with the idea of analyzing text and pictures. I found that article by abbot to be quite interesting and so I guess this should be an interesting topic. So I think that what I am going to do is look at how text and pictures are represented. I will look to see if there are any similarities among pictures and text by looking at different software or word processing systems. I am also looking to see if these pictures that represent text could anyway misinterpret the reader in any way. So I guess what I am trying to see if text and pictures can be misinterpreted. Then I will look at smilies. I forgot what Dr. Chandler called it as the technical term but I will figure out what to do with that and where it fits into my text/pic concept. Honestly if anyone can help me I would be more than glad to accept any suggestions because I have no idea how to start and what the heck I am doing :).

Ebay-

a marketplace for auctioning items by which consumers interact on the Web

Netgrrl and Chicoboy discusses reading, writing, and ratings on the website Ebay. Accoriding to them, ebay can be seen as a new way of literacy practice. The question then becomes what are these practices and how are they relevant on-line. Using the ebay website to construct these new literacies, the site has come up with a system of ratings and feedback. Here the users of the site gets to interact with those are buying and selling. The main focus of the site is for the community to leave feedback to each other in order to maintain a positive image that will reflect when other consumers participate in the autioning process. However the good can always become ugly when people leave negative feedback. This feedback whether good or bad is used for everyone to see when deciding to deal with the seller or equally the purchaser. The problem however with this feedback sytem is that people can change their identities and start new. Also, I would like to think that with different identities, a person can post any type of feedback they wish even if its to their own original site. The purpose of this system is to establish trust and a person's selling reputation within the community especially because the interaction is on-line and never face to face. But I would like to know how truthful can a feedback be when it can all be a lie???

In terms of social practices and literacy on e-bay, you can look at this newness from an angle that first deals with new features of reading and navigating through the text. A user needs to know how to read or write the text of item discriptions, navigate through or add to the website, read digitized images correctly and so on. If a person is illiterate to this form of literacy, they can easily be jipped out of money and/or item if they do not understand what they are paying for. I can personally attest to this because as a first and last time ebay user I was jipped out of my money and item. I misread what I was getting because the picture that person put up was misleading. What I was paying for was what I thought I was getting. When I tried to explain to the seller what the mistake was he did not want to give me my money back and as a result I left no feedback and God only knows how he rated me as a customer. I say this because it is important to understand what you are reading and that person has to read between the lines because what you may think your getting is not what your paying for. This becomes a major problem for those who seriously need to apply to ebay university (l0l) Also as mentioned in the article those who can not write or perhaps spell correctly are also in danger of being under bargained. If they seem to be uneducated then an educated person can use they to their advantage assuming that the seller is not fully aware of the value of his/her merchandise for sell. So within these new literacies, education is important and reading and wrtiting is essential to those in real and virtual spaces.

I had an extremely hard time trying to put people's blog site to my page and everthing I tried just did not work out. Today I realized that I can put links into this post so I have decided to post eveyones information within this text document. So bear with me.

http://0380fall05.blogspot.com/Mullinnix http://3080fall05mullinnix.blogspot.com/Smith http://3080fall05smith.blogspot.com/Richardson http://0380richardson.blogspot.comMoskowitz http://3080fall05moskowitz.blogspot.com/Josh http://3080fall05burnett.blogspot.comFeecia http://3080fall05anson.blogspot.comAngeli http://0380angelicabreros.blogspot.comSylvia http://0380tararuj.blogspot.comJackie http://3080fall05lopez.blogspot.comMatt http://0380harabin.blogspot.comNadia http://3080fall05lahens.blogspot.comAmanda http://0380fall05faria.blogspot.comRyan http://3080fall05valdez.blogspot.com

I hope this works

Its interesting to think that internet is made of genres like classifications of a book store. The article by Kress brings to our understanding that a genre can exist anywhere even if its on-line. Mainly from his purpose, a genre is anything you can read or perceive. It could range from a text to images to movement to pictures and it is still considered a text. He argued that the definition of genre as applied to text can not work on the net because its composed of images and links. So in order to define genre as it relates to the internet, we would have to think of genres in terms of the relationship it structures and it social relationship within the social world.

Now lets exaime Kress definition by first looking at the yahoo site (www.yahoo.com). Looking at yahoo, its composed of many genres like mail, shopping, games, finance, health etc.. For my purpose of examining a type of genre I am going to look at shopping. You access this page by the text or the image. A viewer might most likely click the image because for one its colors or noticeable and 2. its located left at the top of the page as a shopping bag. I reader can connect the shopping bag to a form of buying or purchasing. Next, by clicking on the yahoo shopping, you would find that there is another set of genres in the form of tabs. Each tab ranges from home items to music and is in the form of text. Then you will find a serch engine that opens up another set of genres or perhaps categories of how to access an item. You can either type in what you want to search (text) or you can play with the pull down arrow and pick from the list what you would like to search. Looking at the browse section, there are more genres in within it there is more text resembbling its sub-categories. However to draw more attention to the browse section, there is mini sub text that in color that allows the reader of the text to realize that there are new features or componets to the page that may be of interest to look at.

Now in the middle of the yahoo page is all sorts of images. Underneath these images are also text. You can click on either and be directed to another particular sight that caters to yahoo shopping like clicking on the image computer for example. On this page is more images of computers or related information and then there is only a section dedicated to computers and technology relating to it as links. According to Kress, what we see like images and text are implied by the creator of the site upon its viewers or readers. This in turn is equally implied to the participators of the site and actively communicate within it if they decided to purchase something. Finally, on the right side of the page are advertising links. By clicking on these links like walmart for example, it would take you out of yahoo shopping and directly to the walmart homepage where a person can shop anything walmart and be introduced to a whole new set of genres. This link is outside of the yahoo network and a whole different crowd of participants interact with the site.

Just an extra spice or ingredient to the yahoo page, there are flash text and images that can draw in a readers attention. (I just that was something cool to examine). However even within these different kinds of genres you can notice that anyone can participate in the page by clicking on links and sites, text and images, but in reality there is an inclusiveness to these sights because a person can not even purchase something without becoming a member of the group. You must register in order to login and shop. Of course you can browse but only to a limited extent. Its not strictly limited but there are some restrictions for people without a username and password you might as well forget shopping if all you can do is window surf (lol) and by the way if you do not have a credit or debit account you might as well hope in your car or bus and head straight to the mall because thats the only way your going to come home with something in your hands.

The excercise comparing Mozilla and Microsoft was quite interesting. Here in Mozzila, my group noticed that the sites or links on the website directed you back to Mozilla's homepage. If you clicked on one link then you can easily get back to where you started. Similarly in Microsoft, you can keep clicking on links and each link leads you further into the website. You can get so far that you can get yourself lost when you want to somehow retrieve yourself back to the original web page. Matt said that Mozzila has more of a centrality map because you can start from their homepage and get back to it. For example when you click on the articles from Usa today at the bottom of the article there is a link that directs you back to Mozilla'a home page.
Comparing Microsoft and Mozilla both pages have a pattern of use because they both have information that is accessable and visible for updates and software downloads to its users. Both webpages also have forums that people can participate in like chats and newsgroups. The difference however is that Mozilla allows the community to help one another with technical issues whereas Microsoft have their own agenda. Your tech support basically comes from a troublshooting page or directing a person to contact a tech support directly for help. So in itself, Mozilla is an open community causing interaction with its users and Microsoft is more like a close community isolating interaction to directly depend on them for the answers. Also with Microsoft, you can really move within the page constantly going to different sites finding out more information but with Mozilla like previous stated is more static. They keep you directly close to them not allowing its users to go to far without being able to reel them back in.