Getting More Out of the Internet!
- After reading this chapter i learned more about the different types of portal sites and the role they play in ensuring the contents is avalible to the public, employees, vendors, customers, and business partiners. Portals serve as a gateway to a wide variety of web content. Their are also consumer portals such as a general consumer portal and personal portals. With general portals they include information for you such as search tools, links to shopping, sport scores, and etc. Some examples are Yahoo, and Lycos. However, with personal portals you can customize the contents to meet your specific needs. Some examples would include IGoogle, and My Yahoo (see figure 1). Its a great way to keep up on the most recent news, wheater, and videos.
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Figure 1: Example of a personal portal, which allows you to customize the content. |
-We also have the options to explore vertical and industry portals which provide people with specific interests such as ethnic intersts, children's activities, and social issues. Some examples of these portals are penn states youth portal, msn latino, and export.gov.
-Finally there are corporate portals also called (EIPs) which employees, customers, vendors, and other buisness partners can use a single corporate portal to access specific information about the business and work with others.
- Also from this reading i learned about the charactoristics of a news-oriented web site. There are four important reasons for the growing popularity of news, sports, weather, and traffic web sites. The following include avalibility, immediacy, interactivity, and customizability. Most people would use news sites and traffic web sites to find out the most current information happening. Some examples are buffalonew.com, cnn.com, and washingtonpost.com.
- Some of these sites may also use streaming video or audio media. To attract more views this is mainly because they have video clips of the timely news, game highlights, and web sites interests. Some websites give peoeple the abiliy to listen to the radio and sport games (see figure 2).
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Figure 2: Streaming video in web pages. |
-Finally when searching online you can research encyclopedia and other reference tools. With online encyclopedias it provides people with information about anything your interest in researching. Web sites like encylopedia.com and dictionary.com help people define specific words and information (see figure 3). They are great ways to do research for topics and projects. From this chapter it helped me understand more about differents portals and internet tools.
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Figure 3: Online Dictionaries |
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Figure 3: Online Encyclopedia's |