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Aug. 3

Wednesday, July 29

Portals and practical purposes 

Topics for today:

• Portals: to commerce, community or "The Daily Me"

Assignment

• Pick two of your favorite Web sites for discussion in class
  • Why do you like them?
  • How did you find them?
  • Who made them, and why?
  • What alternative sources could confirm the information or pose critical questions about it?
• Press on with the Treasure Hunt!

Related sites:

• New and old media
  • Search engines, news sources, or "portals"? Yahoo, AltaVista, Pathfinder, MS-NBC, Tripod, Mindspring, Netscape, America OnLine and AT&T, just for a start.
  • Audio online, a recent magazine article about music on the Web.
  • The Media-in-Transition project at MIT, and the Daily Fishwrap.
  • Media Studies, a British view.
• The Web and HTML are still evolving
  • New control for designers, Cascading Style Sheets are next addition to HTML (just when you thought you'd learned it all).

Books for the (August) beach:

• Moody, Fred. I sing the body electronic. New York: Penguin 1996.
  Subtitled "a year with Microsoft on the muiltimedia frontier," this is a detailed description of a group CD ROM encyclopedia project, including the differences in working styles and understandings of the sitation between programmers, artists, editors, and marketing staff... with the shadow of Bill Gates and Microsoft over all. See below.

• Kidder, Tracy. The soul of a new machine. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1981.
  This book won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, describing how a small group of hardware and software engineers created one of the 1970s mini-computers. The software involved is machine-language microcode, not dancing graphics on a Web page, but Kidder tells a great story about people working together, trying to do impossible things on impossible deadlines. As one reviewer said, "All the incredible complexity and chaos and exploitation and loneliness and strange, half-mad beauty of this field are honestly and correctly drawn here."

So, What Did You Learn Today?