Muddiest Point

One thing I'm confused about is the difference between various google digitization projects I've heard about. Google Book Search, Google Print, Google Book Library Project, etc. Are these all the same projects but with different names? Are they different efforts?

Week 10 Muddiest point

Is there any search engine for scholarly materials that creates a ranking system based on citation instead of links?

Also, I know you've gone over the diagram of the internet with the tentacles a number of times, but I still don't get the "IN" and "OUT" parts of the diagram. what do those refer to?

Week 9 Muddiest Point

When an xml document links to another website for its schema, which I understand is an XML document, can that document be automatically interpreted by the parser? I assume it can, but I wanted to make sure.

Week 8 Muddiest Point

We learned in class that metadata can be included in HTML (as in "meta name="author"" etc. Why do we need XML, then? Can't this meta tag do anything that XML does?

Week 7 Muddiest Point

In class you discussed whether or not websites we access using a neighbor's wireless connection detect our IP or our neighbor's. I didn't quite catch what the answer was. It's not for me, I have this friend who was wondering, ok?

Week 6 Muddiest Point

When we talked about the asymmetrical nature of Internet connections, it made me wonder about how this affects a system like Cable Internet. For example, neighbors share the same internet connection, and when everyone in my neighborhood is downloading at the same time, it will slow down my download speed. BUT, if everyone in the neighborhood is DOWNLOADING at the same time, will it slow down my UPLOAD speed?

Week 5 Muddiest Point

I'm a little confused about the definition of "Lossless" compression. Why is a GIF considered a lossless image format if not all of the colors are reproduced?

Week 4 Muddiest Point

I'm confused about the MARC records. What is the relationship between tags and indicators?

Week 3 Muddiest Point

In class I asked about whether or not Google.com uses Google Desktop to search my desktop bookmarks, etc. From what I understand Google displays the results, but they are not archives by google. Here is what google said:

Google.com Integration is a feature of Google Desktop that inserts a line of Desktop results above your Google Web Search results. Although your personal and web search results are shown together on your computer, your personal information is not sent to Google.

If you don't want to see Google Desktop results on your web search results pages, you can turn this feature off. Just go to the Apple menu > "System Preferences." Click "Google Desktop," then click "Search Results" and deselect the "Enable Google.com integration" box.

It is somewhat convenient to see these results in the search results, but can I trust Google?

Week 2 Muddiest Point

I understand that outline for computer hardware we received in class pretty much covers all current computers, but when did that model come to be?

Week 1 Muddiest Point

A muddy point for me is the distinction between content and container. John Blossom's quote from Week 1's PowerPoint presentation, "It’s the experience of the content, not its mass-manufactured container, that I value most", seems to me to devalue the context of the content. Isn't there a lot to be learned from the so-called "mass-manufactured container"? It seems to me that by divorcing the content from it's context, we lose a lot of potentially important or interesting information about the society or persons that "mass-manufacture" the containers.