Week 1 Entry: COM 125 Lesson ONE

SPRING 2011

COM 125: Introduction to the Internet

Well we had our first lesson on the Internet with Mr Abel Choy (: We started off the lesson with a few jokes and a guessing game: "How much is Facebook worth today?" and; "Rank the top few websites". Turns out that Google ranks number one and is worth about US$199.7 billion. My uncle made a joke of Google once. He said, "If Google were to give shares to all their employees - I wouldn't mind working as their cleaner."

Aside from all the jokes, I found out that there's more to the internet than just clicking links and typing things into the search engines. Everything we see on the internet are actually packets of codes that are translated to give us whatever we see on-screen. I never knew there was a Internet and "Intranet" - a compilation of computers connected together to form a networked environment inside an organization. So technically, some of us have an intranet of our own right in the comfort of our own houses.

Over the years, the internet has penetrated many different forms of social media. One of the most common devices we see people using to access the internet, is none other than our mobile phones. Also known as "smart phones" today, people can easily upload pictures, download files and chat with their friends without having to drag around a heavy laptop. "Smart phones" can be used anywhere as long as there is a wireless or "wifi" connection, or a data plan.

Another interesting revelation was that of the the Web Versions: Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. From what I gathered from the class, a Web 2.5 should exist since a lot of the websites we see today are caught between versions 2.0 and 3.0.

Our first lesson ended off with a discussion on browsing and popular browsers. My personal favorite is Google Chrome. I like this browser because it is fast. And I mean. Really fast. You'll see what I mean right here in the video that I have posted. Google Chrome is also easy to use and it allows me to gain easy access to my Gmail account. Most importantly, Google chrome remembers the pages that I frequent, and it has not yet given me much trouble so far (:

Link for video:http://www.youtube.com/user/googlechrome#p/c/6C464642AA716B69/0/nCgQDjiotG0

During our second lesson, I heard some really familiar stuff that I learnt about in CSE 111. I honestly didn't think that COM 125 was going to be a module that looked into much technicalities. But I'm glad that the first two lessons have been good so far, and I really like the videos shown in class. They are highly informative.