Chapter 5

Some of the things that I have read about in chapter five are portals, news web sites and reference and research sites. There are many types of portals. Some of the different kinds of portals are general consumer, horizontal, and vertical portals. There are also industry portals and corporate portals. General consumer portals have e-mail, search tools, weather and news. Yahoo and MSN are examples of general consumer portals. You can customize a portal the way you want it by making a personal portal. Vertical portals are for specific interests and industry portals are used for a specific industry. Companies use corporate portals. A corporate portal provides business information about a company. On a news website you can check the weather, traffic reports and sports. People like news-oriented web sites because of the availability, immediacy, interactivity, and customizability. CNN and MSNBC use streaming media on their web sites.

 There are different kinds of research and reference tools available online. There are encyclopedias, online dictionaries, google define and online reference desks. To define a word using the google search engine, first you have to type in the word define with a colon next to it. Then you write the word that you are trying to define next to the colon and hit the search button. There are also web sites to help you plan a trip. These web sites give you directions on how to get there and a map to help show you.  All you have to do is provide a starting location and where you would like to end up. Trip panning web sites are easy to use and are helpful. MapQuest, Google Maps, and Expedia Maps are trip planning web sites.

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Social Networking

Social Networking websites are becoming more popular with new members joining every day. Social Networking websites allow you to have your own personalized profile. A lot of people have their own blogs. In a blog you can write about anything that you want and can follow and comment on other blogs. Facebook and Myspace are examples of social networking websites. In a social networking website you can share your thoughts and pictures with other people on the net work. After you create your profile you can start adding friends. You should be careful with what kind of information and pictures that you are posting on a social networking sites. You can change the privacy settings so that only certain people can view your profile. People also share information on wikis and social bookmarking sites. In a wiki any member of that website can change add to or delete information that has been posted. On a social bookmarking website people can share some of their favorite websites with other people. Content Sharing is also a way that people share their favorite websites. On opinion websites, people can write reviews about a product or service and share it with other users

Social Media Tools

The way that we used to get information is different from how it is today. People used to post news and other information on bulletin boards. Now we have newsgroups, a newsgroup is where people post information. News groups end in a name that relates to it. Some of the different newsgroups end in alt, biz, comp, and rec. Alt stands for alternative topics, biz stands for business, comp stands for computers and rec stands for recreation. You can only read messages from the newsgroup in a newsreader. One way that people communicate with each other online is through texting and chat. You can send sms and mms messages from a web page but not all cell phone service providers have this feature. If you want to have a conversation with multiple people at once you can talk in a chat room. Another way that people communicate online is through an instant message.

E-Mail Features

In your e-mail, you can be on a mailing list. All of the e-mail addresses that are on the mailing list are connected to a list server. Listerv and Majordomo are the softwares that are used for mailing lists. If you want to be on a mailing list, you can subscribe to an open list or a closed list. When your mailing list starts sending you messages, it will either be in an individual message format or a digest format. When you are on a mailing list you can send messages to the list. If you don't want to make a post to the list you don't have to. It is called lurking when you just want to read a message from the list. If you don't have an e-mail you can create one using your web browser on a website. Yahoo is an example of a web-based e-mail service. There is many features in a web-based e-mail service. You can reply and forward messages, print messages, organize them in folders and move and delete messages. You can also add a signature to your message.

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