JB 3623 Internet Communications

In honor of it being Super Tuesday, we’ll look at who we would vote for if our decision were being made on the basis of our candidates hiring people who could write valid HTML code, according to W3C standards. Here are the candidates remaining in the race as of the start of today:

Democrats

• Hillary Clinton
• Barack Obama

Republicans

• Mike Huckabee
• John McCain
• Ron Paul
• Mitt Romney

In case you’re wondering, Obama and Paul are the progressive candidates that are running Linux, PHP and MySQL while Clinton, McCain and Huckabee have their sites hosted on Windows servers running ASP. Romney’s site is powered by Java Server Pages, which could be Sun Solaris. Not that these things should influence your votes.

A List Apart is web magazine for “people who make websites.”

Increasingly, over the years, they’ve strayed from web design
techniques like HTML and CSS coding to more general topics like
getting along with your co-workers, client relationships, and one of
the topics of this article: copywriting…

Greatest Copy Shot Ever Written

Writing is the key to any success you’re going to have in media, whether it’s print, broadcast or internet. My favorite saying is: if you can write, you can eat.

This article is definitely worth reading, but if you don’t have time, here’s the
executive summary…

All great copy shots should:

1. Be five words in length.
2. Not mention the brand name.
3. Be declarative.
4. Be grammatically complete.
5. Be otherwise standard.
6. Contain alliteration, metaphor, or rhyme.

These are a few different kinds of web sites we’ll discuss tonight.

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In 1942, after a great victory in North Africa, Winston Churchill said:

…this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

On Monday, grades were posted so I guess it really is the end, not just the beginning of the end, of this class this semester.

In really ending, I’ll offer you this tidbit…

Dave Winer, who has been innovative in so many ways (RSS, blogs, scripting), wrote this on the topic of What would I teach a journalist?:

First, I’d forget about Drupal, and customized sites, and HTML, CSS and PHP.

Let each student create their own site at blogspot.com or wordpress.com, where ever they like. If they want to create five sites, let them create five sites.

What a privilege to be able to work with the students every day for 10 months. Don’t they get vacations or weekends off? I assume so. But five days a week, man, you could really get something done.

I guess he doesn’t understand education or the media business. Nobody in education gets you five days a week for instruction. The media doesn’t take vacations. News happens and someone has to be there to cover it.

While his description sounds something like our class, I hope you did learn something about HTML and CSS. These are useful skils that could help later in life and certainly in your professional career when the boss comes to you and says the organization needs a web site. If they asked me, I’d say you were ready.

Sometimes students ask me what it was like back in the day in Paul Miller 201…

Those were crazy days, but the answer to tonight’s question is “screaming”…

I’m a big fan of Mark Cuban who owns HDNet and the Dallas Mavericks. Given that he made billions in the early days of the internet by selling broadcast.com to Yahoo!, he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the internet and mass media.

Recently, Blog Maverick, his blog, had an interesting post entitled, The Coming Dramatic Decline of Youtube, in which he describes how copyright law will take down the service. He’s probably right given what happened to Napster, but then you were probably too young to remember Napster in all its glory of high crimes and misdemeanors. I love this quote:

The music industry is probably the only business that thinks suing its customers is a really good idea. I don’t condone stealing music or anything else, but the music industry needs to get its act together if it wants to survive. About four years ago, Steve Jobs approached them about selling music on the iTunes Music Store and they thought it was a great idea until Apple turned it into a profitable business selling iPods. Now that people are buying, instead of outright stealing their product, the record companies are looking to kill the only company that’s come up with a working solution for selling online music.

I wonder how many of you watch videos at YouTube or MySpace and then buy the music from either Apple or your local WalMart. If the music industry shuts down YouTube or MySpace, how are you going to hear about the great bands they’ve signed? It’s all about marketing….

I’ve added a photo gallery with the initial photos taken from our class on 1/12/2006 and with the WordPress headers we created on 1/17/2006 should you want to see what your classmates came up with.

Heather writes:

“As an advertising major (and someone who wants to own my own business someday), I was really excited to be creating a Web site. Of course, I have found out that we are not doing this…”

The name of this course is “Internet Communcations”, not “How to Build a Web Site.”
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