After a long delay, finally I’ve completed my short essay for NET12. From our 2 questions, I chose The Internet is a product of the U.S. military. Discuss. I’m praying our tutor will accept this and at least pass my essay. It’s worth 20 marks and about 1000 words.

I haven’t written an essay since high school! I found http://citationmachine.net a useful website for getting my citations and reference list in the proper format.

DARPA Challenger - One Motorcycle

I’ve enjoyed the essay writing experience, but the deadline really killed me. I must admit, it felt a little bizarre to listen to my own memories of what I’ve been teaching to my academic English students. Topic sentences, thesis statements, support your arguments, cohesion, summarise, paraphrase, quote, etcetera…

As an afterthought, I checked out the website for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Google revealed the change of name to DARPA, and the history of that change becomes interesting around 1993 with President Bill Clinton restoring the non-military acronym, putting an economic twist on it. Technology for America’s Economic Growth, A New Direction to Build Economic Strength. Although that was soon reverted in February 1996 well before the November presidential election, in which Clinton was re-elected.

While DARPA haven’t got Luke Skywalker’s arm nor the bat-mobile on their plans, a Google image search reveals some other cool/scary stuff in the works.

Okay all you NET12ers out there, I’ve finally made a start on the material. Here’s the proof: this smart YouTube video clip on web 2.0 done by Mike Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology in Kansas State University, raising some interesting issues and questions. I’ve just got to watch it again.

So HTML as many of us know, was designed for structurally marking up the document content. Then those nasty bold and italic tags came along, paving the way for content formatting. In the HTML wedding, document structure and format were married, inseparable until death.

Next uncle XML, the perpetual bachelor of structure, entered the reception describing data AKA content. Like all good drunk uncles, the XML stories are told again and again (the data is exportable). Picture a team of broken record players playing that embarrassing song over and over - uncle XML remembers every detail and the nephews and nieces are continuing to regurgitate the stories verbatim, all in their own accents of course (that’s RSS to the rest of us).

It was easy for the nieces and nephews to create their own stories too. Unlike HTML who’ll never divorce the divine formatting, Uncle XML made blog engines possible, he’s like a stud on Viagra. So with a blog born every half second we begin to wonder about single child policies. More on that later though…

The creative parents birthed all forms of content, more text, photo, video, and geographical; WordPress and Blogger, flickr, YouTube and Vimeo, and Google Earth just to name a few. Uncle XML also encouraged us to party, mixing our different contents together to form some delicious cocktails such as flickr maps.

Finally a way of classifying… As Jerry McGuire said, Help me… help you. Help me, help you. The machine needs our help here. We all give tags to the children because we found categories too box-like and didn’t cater well for the many permutations. ABC News stories give us the opportunity to tag. Through XML, your tags and mine, we create a database of all the content. This collaborative management is helping the machine to help you in your research.

Hypertext is not just linking pieces of content together. Web 2.0 is linking people, people sharing, trading, collaborating, and doing… Up for consideration are dozens of issues:

• copyright
• authorship
• identity
• ethics
• aesthetics
• rhetorics
• governance
• privacy
• commerce
• love
• family
• ourselves

Finally back at it. I’ve started studying my Bachelor of Arts (Internet Studies) and made a little progress reading the piles of stuff. The way forward is not only in books, but also on screen. It’s Back to School Power Tools for the Savvy Student. Thought I’d have more time for catching up with friends, making travel plans for our honeymoon to Italy, my home videos (Spielberg is going to eat dirt when he sees what I’ve got!)

Ha! Who am I kidding? Free time just went out the window. I’m paying for this?? 4 x 10-hour subjects (that’s double the full-time load) and the other 3 days (4 contact hours + 4 hours preparation and marking = 24 hours) to work at my income.

Top five tips for new bloggers

• Preview, proof-read and edit (check spelling, punctuation, etc.) before posting. When possible, do this with fresh eyes. If it’s a touchy issue, try to ask a friend/colleague to check over your post. You should moderate it yourself though.
• Try to include a piece of media to stimulate interest, at least a picture. If you have a flickr account, link your flickr account to your blog for easy posting from any photo. WordPress users may prefer the wp-flickr plugin.
• KISS - Keep It Short ‘n’ Simple.
• Identify and link to sources whenever feasible. *
• Distinguish between advocacy, commentary and factual information. Even advocacy writing and commentary should not misrepresent fact or context. *

* Those last 2 points are from A Bloggers’ Code of Ethics. There are also 22 steps you must do after setting up a blog and then 16 tips you must check before publishing an article.