Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Learning Log for your BLOG

Guidelines for a Learning Log/BLOG
The learning log/BLOG provides a way for you to record your course related learning activities and provide an opportunity to think about ideas discussed during class and reflect on what you learned during the class presentations, discussion and readings. Your learning log should focused on your learning and not degrade into a personal diary which is a chronological account of events that have occurred. It should reflect actual analysis, synthesis and interpretation of what you have learned. The learning log should provide you with an opportunity to identify relevant issues from the class material, allow you to make connections between what you have learned and your own personal experience and provide you a way to sort your ideas and thoughts into a cohesive whole.

Through your learning log you will demonstrate that you have given some critical thought to the material presented in the class and developed your own opinion of what you have learned.

The types of things that you might put into your learning logs are:
  • How you reacted to the class presentations or discussions;
  • What kind of questions popped into your head from the readings or discussions;
  • How you reacted to something you read or discovered outside class time;
  • How you related the information presented, read or discussed to your own personal experience;
  • What things did you agree or disagree with from the material presented, discussed or read;
  • What new knowledge did you gain from the material presented, discussed or read; and
  • How might apply what you learned in a future application.

Questions to ask your self as you are writing your learning log:
  • How clearly and concisely am I explaining the event that grabbed my attention and engaged my learning?
  • What, specifically, have I learned from that will be of value as I develop as a manager?
  • Am I just restating material presented in the class and in my readings or am I actually demonstrating analysis, synthesis, interpretation or insight?
  • What are the connections I am making, what are the insights, what new idea, concept do I now possess?
  • Why is this new knowledge useful?
  • How is this applicable to my own personal situation?
  • How does this relate to my own experience?
  • How might I do things differently in the future now that I have this new knowledge?
  • What have I actually learned?

Do I really believe what I am writing?

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Understanding SEO

SEO (besides my last name) stands for "Search Engine Optimization". We will continue to discuss this as we build BLOGs and ePortfolios. Research and read about it. Why is it important? How could you use this as a leader/manager?

SEO this is a tool to show you the keywords or tags on a particular web page.

Google Rankings


Googlerankings.com was developed by Graphite-Works, Budapest, Hungary a European web design team, solely to retreive the location of websites on Google's search result page. Googlerankings.com is in no way affiliated, sponsored or in any way the property of or responsibility of Google.com. It is however a tool that uses the Google Web API to find domain names within the list Google.com shows for a given search, thus is powered by Google. Our service operates by the courtesy of Google Inc., and has been given permission to run by their legal department.


F.A.Q.
Q.: How to get better ranking on Google.com?*....more


Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Technorati


Technorati is a site that has indexed over 7almost 90 million BLOGs. Yes, that is 90,000,000 BLOGs. Please read about it and search to find/research 3-5 BLOGs that you think have some merit. Post them here as comments and we will begin to sort through them together in class.

about Technorati
...it all started with blogs. A blog, or weblog, is a regularly updated journal published on the web. Some blogs are intended for a small audience; others vie for readership with national newspapers. Blogs are influential, personal, or both, and they reflect as many topics and opinions as there are people writing them.

Blogs are powerful because they allow millions of people to easily publish and share their ideas, and millions more to read and respond. They engage the writer and reader in an open conversation, and are shifting the Internet paradigm as we know it. more...

http://technorati.com/about/

Google - details at the beginning....



As I was searching the web for a good quick read for you - I found a paper written by Sergey Brin (left) and Larry Page (right) who are the 2 founders of Google while they were still in school at Stanford. It'a a good overview of the original concepts. As you review - pay special attention to crawling and page rank which is what makes Google so effective.

ABSTRACT
In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/

To engineer a search engine is a challenging task. Search engines index tens to hundreds of millions of web pages involving a comparable number of distinct terms. They answer tens of millions of queries every day. Despite the importance of large-scale search engines on the web, very little academic research has been done on them. Furthermore, due to rapid advance in technology and web proliferation, creating a web search engine today is very different from three years ago. This paper provides an in-depth description of our large-scale web search engine -- the first such detailed public description we know of to date.



Apart from the problems of scaling traditional search techniques to data of this magnitude, there are new technical challenges involved with using the additional information present in hypertext to produce better search results. This paper addresses this question of how to build a practical large-scale system which can exploit the additional information present in hypertext. Also we look at the problem of how to effectively deal with uncontrolled hypertext collections where anyone can publish anything they want.

Keywords: World Wide Web, Search Engines, Information Retrieval, PageRank, Google

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html