Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Second day of our Internet and Journalism Workshop

Our second day in the workshop of Internet use and Journalism was also very interesting. We started with the recap of what we did in day one. Here we reviewed the ways of making a website as a home page, and also looked at the statistics on internet use. Alexa webiste was visited for this purpose.

It came to our surpirise that Tanzania was not listed as one among the countries using Internet in Africa. Kenya was there but not the rest of East African countries. In the found countries we basically looked at which websites are most viewed in the respective countries and this was followed by a discussion why such websites are popular than others.

The general overview of this discussion on website use, came to a conclusion that most browsers are not visiting the websites for news search but for other interests like, chatting, online shopping, blogging etc.

After this discussion we were introduced to wikipedia. It is a search engine. The facilitator told the workshop that the uniqueness of wikipedia is that there is a chance for a person who is browsing to edit the content found. We also got a chance to edit some of the content found. For example the content on media in Tanzania was very shallow. It even came as a challenge to us from SAUT; that we can assign our students to look for media history in Tanzania and update the content in the wikipedia

The rationale of this is a belief that as many people visit the website, there is a room for them to change and update the content in the wikipedia for the benefit of other users. But again there is a risk of fraudsters.

After such discussion we had an intersting topic on the websites that changed the world. We looked at the article by John Naughton. John has listed 15 leading websites. These include ebay.com, wikipedia, napster.com, youtube.com, blogger.com, drudgereport.com, myspace.com, amazon.com, slashdot.org, salon.com,google.com, yahoo.com etc.

From such a list we were able to visit and discuss each website and its importance. Moreover we spent enough time creating, publishing and updating our own blogs.

This task was the most interesting for the day. I actually found it interesting in our day to day career in teaching journalism and public relations.

The last part of today's session was to visit google search engine; specifically on images, maps and news. The day was closed at 1720hrs

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