Reflection for Day 6

Today we mainly touch on the topic of evaluation of internet resources. Having so much information, websites and articles on the internet we are often spoil by the numbers of resources. However not all the resources are useful and accurate. Therefore we need to do something to make sure that the content that we are going to use is useful and accurate. The way to do it is to evaluate the internet resource. It is mainly evaluated based on a few factors. The factors are as followed: purpose, coverage, authority, accuracy, currency, accessibility, presentation and arrangement, overall. The most important factor is overall. That is because in general the website must be easy to use; provide readers with detail that are trustable.

After learning that are the factors for evaluating the internet resources. We had to evaluate one of the resources that we had searched for last week. From the activity, I realize that it is not easy evaluating the content that we got because there are just too many factors to consider. That is part of the portfolio that we had to submit at the end of the subject. Although I had done much for the report for the portfolio, I will still continue to edit it to make sure that it is better. After doing that, we had another small activity which is “My Dream Holiday”. I will not talk about it in this post since I had already explain on that in the previous post. The great thing about this activity is that there are not restricted amount of money to spend on.



The last activity for the day is to discuss on YouTube. YouTube is a video sharing website which had gain popularity since it started out. It is actually just a video sharing tools between a small group of students for their project work. However the students realize that it is such a good tools that they expand it and bring it to the internet. It has grown over the years with millions of video on it now. Google bought YouTube over because YouTube is simply too popular with the people and Google with a large database is able to let it grow. Now YouTube contains lots of different types of video. It includes education, advertisements, tutorials, MTV and many others. Education videos are very useful as it allow the viewers such as students to learn some facts. While companies put up advertisements to promote their products. More companies are doing so because the viewers and traffics of YouTube are very high. Doing advertisements on YouTube is also much cheaper than using tradition media such as television and newspapers.

I usually go to YouTube when my friends refer me to a certain interesting video or to see some MTV. Other than that I use it to find tutorial on how to do certain things. However before I try out the solution that is in the video, I will often look at the comment given to that video. I certainly do not wish to screw up what I am trying to do. Those comment also help me make judgment on whether will I use the video. Therefore I don't use YouTube very often. My life will still go on as per normal even if there isn't YouTube in the future. I am sure if one day when there isn’t YouTube or YouTube isn't as popular as now. I think there will be a few reasons. One of the reasons would be that there is something that is better than the current YouTube that attract the people. If that is the case, it will be better in the sense that there is new technology or more creative ways of sharing video. The other reason is that Google suddenly want to charge the viewers for viewing the video. Anything that cost money will definitely turn people off.

The main purpose of YouTube now is to entertain the viewers. However there are also video which has research content that are useful to research. I would think that whether the video can be use for research will largely depend on the given topic. I don't think that there will be video n impact of youth using internet social network on YouTube. I would think that it is very difficult to do research using YouTube because most of the video have very little text or no text. Just video alone is not enough for a proper research. I guess the only way to do research based on video is to view the video and then try to translate into text. Other than that i couldn't think of anymore ways to use YouTube for research purposes.

When we were discussing on what are the factors that lead to the extreme popularity of YouTube and we discovery many facts. Such as it is free, includes lots of videos, user-friendly. However lots of video is also part of the downsides as having too many videos make it tough for the moderators to control the type of content available. This result in many useless and pointless videos that are upload for the sake of uploading. It only wastes the viewers’ time and bandwidths. That is not very responsible of the uploadeder. Some even posts fights or riots and that result in certain countries blocking YouTube. I think blocking YouTube as a whole country is pointless since people still can access it via open proxy. For now I strongly believe that YouTube will still continue to grow in the years to go unless there is something big and attracting the people to other site for video. Otherwise Google wouldn't have bought over it for billion of dollars.