Hi all, ### Textbook You should have read through chapter 2, and over the next two weeks we'll cover the material in chapters 6 through 12. ### Class Room The class is still on for 7:30 to 9:30 in room 1034 I spent several hours on Friday with the AV folks in our classroom, and we should have adequate AV/Internet facilities for the rest of the semester. ### CyberTimes In this Monday's Business section is a story entitled, "Thomson Jumps Head First Into an Electronic Future". It describes how a large Canadian media company is selling nearly all of its periodicals in order to invest in its online content delivery. The move is in preparation for the future, when "within five years, 80% of its revenue will come from the electronic distribution of information". Thomson is not the first, and certainly not the last company to take this move. Ziff-Davis, my old employer, recently sold all of its print publications in order to focus solely on the Internet (as well as raise money to pay off old debt). Strangely, they sold the print versions of the magazines while keeping the online versions, even though it was the print department that generated all the content. They are now in a situation where their content sites rely on content that is owned by a different company. On Wall Street, this is all good news, the Internet is 'hot' and print publications are not. So for better or worse, the stock price of these companies will rise. But what does it mean for quality of content? Looking at news sites like cnn.com, abcnews.com, salon.com, slate.com, and others - it seems that there are more sound bites and heavily summarized news pieces. If I want just headlines, I watch the news on TV, but I know that I can rely on the New York Times for in-depth coverage. That seems to describe the roles of television news versus newspapers. But what happens when a publisher chooses to forsake the print medium entirely in favor of the Web? Another story, titled, "In the War of 'All Politics, All the Time,' NBC Is Heavily Armed" describes (among other issues) the repurposing of content on NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, and MSNBC.com. It certainly is more efficient to hire one reporter and use his coverage multiple times, but what is happening to major media? In the past few years we have gone from many different voices to just a few: 1) General Electric/NBC/Microsoft/MSNBC/msnbc.com/Slate.com/Snap.com 2) Time Warner/AOL/Netscape/CNN/cnn.com 3) Disney/ABC/abcnews.com Is it posible that in the next few years we will have only a handful of news providers, each one repurposing the same content across their TV channels and Web Sites? How will this affect the quality of news? ### FTP At this point (Monday) only a few of you have completed the FTP exercise. If it's merely a case of procrastination, that's fine. But if you're trying and can't quite figure it out, send me a note and I'll walk you through it. I'll also go through some demonstrations in class. ### Tips of the Week 1) When downloading files, you sometimes have a choice between FTP and HTTP. FTP is usually faster, the HTTP server is already busy serving HTML files, while the FTP server is there solely in order for users to download files. 2) You can organize your bookmarks/favorites by moving them into folders and deleting old ones 3) In order to minimize Internet connection time, browsers save copies of Web pages in the 'Cache'. The next time you visit the page, you may not actually get the real thing, you may actually just be viewing the copy in your cache. You can manage your preferences to limit how many pages are cached, and you can always 'super-reload' a page to force a new hit to the server. Just hold down shift-control while clicking on 'reload'.