We had the CEO of hostmysite.com come in today to talk to us about the business and the evolution of internet websites. It was cool to hear about the evolution of websites from somebody who experienced it all first hand. It's amazing to see how they've evolved from basically a brochure with spinning dollars signs to an interactive expanse of information. As the internet evolves we get a better understanding of its true ability, the ideas of limitless information (the only trouble of course being how to find it but google has made that much easier). It seems every company has a website now with valuable information beyond who they are and what they do.
On a completely different subject I just have to have a little rant about academics today and the internet. For one of my classes I have to do this project and part of it includes writing a paper. Like so many papers do, it requires some research. And like so many papers before it, our reference/citation sheet has to have more than just internet websites on it. Now I know that there is a lot of information to be found in the library, actual books and magazines and all, however when doing a project on a rather new form of technology (for my group, it's about the iPod) there aren't a whole lot of books out. 3 in fact, in the whole library. So where else are we to get our info? I know we shouldn't look past the valuable resource that is the library but in today's day and in my generation where many of our textbooks are not only offered in online stores but also word for word on some publishers websites it seems fairly ridiculous that teachers still insist we visit the library. What is so horrible about citing websites as long as they are credible ones? When will that day come when teachers don't specify how many books must be cited and just accept that the internet is there filled with more and more valid information everyday? But most annoyingly why isn't citing wsj.com as good as citing a printed article from The Wall Street Journal?
3 comments:
Beth,
I agree - it was pretty crazy to hear how HostMySite.net has grown so much over the past few years. They run a great company and are very generous as well. A while back a friend of mine and me launched this website, www.wereallymeanbusiness.com and HostMySite actually agreed to donate us free webspace for a whole year which I thought was really cool!
That's really too bad about your teacher being so lame about website sources. I luckily haven't had any teachers THAT old school... I've had teachers that asked us to stay away from websites when possible, but they never outright banned them. I also wonder when the day will come when teachers learn to openly accept internet sources... soon hopefully.
Good luck with the class and that report though... what class is it for? Engl312?
I too thought it was very interesting to have a person from hostmysite.net come and tell us about the journey they have undergone from when they started to the present day.
But more importantly I can not agree more with you about the article citations required by teachers. I am in the midst of writing a research paper on a fairly recent topic and it is just a fact that the Internet is one of the best ways to get information out there quickly and easily, and is therefore being used more often. By forcing us to limit our online resources in exchange for print resources which contain barely relevant or useful information is diminishing the quality of our works and is in the end making everyone lose out. So fight the power, I am with you.
Joel - That's so cool that you and your friends have actually made a website. After reviewing HTML in class it seems pretty easy but to make a site cool there's a lot of work involved, especially with all the repetition that HTML requires. I checked out you site and it looks really good. great job!
Tricia - Thanks for the support in fighting the internet cause. A woman made some comment today in class about how people of our generation tend to focus too much on the internet and neglect other soures around us. For the same project I wrote about she told us we should have called local sources to get more information. But for a simple school project we all thought it was a little overkill. The more I hear about it the more I think that there really is an unavoidable divide between the generations of us (those that grew up with the internet as a resource) and them (the library lovers).
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