This Week's Web Sites for Review

ICANN is nonprofit public-benefit corporation was established in 1998 to keep the Internet a safe, dependable and to ensure that computers are capable of operating properly with one another. The group is dedicated to coordinating Internet identifiers (addresses or numbers) which if they did not exist the Internet would not exist on a worldwide level. ICANN fosters Internet competition and the creation of Internet policy regarding unique identifiers.

The site has an RSS feed that one can subscribe to get up to date information from ICANN. They also have a newsletter and monthly magazine to subscribe as well as a special Contractual Compliance newsletter (information on the company's approach to ensuring that other companies observe their Registry Agreements and Registrar Accreditation Agreements). There is also have a blog on the site. The group appears to be up to date regarding the innovations in web technology and is applying it to their site. They also have an excellent glossary of Internet related terms which is very useful to a novice web designer.

This was an interesting site to look through. I did not know that a group like this existed. It is truly an important group since without it there would be no worldwide guidelines for the creation of Internet identifiers.

ICANN - http://www.icann.org/

The Internet Traffic Report web site was fascinating to search through because it showed me who in the world is utilizing the Internet. The numbers of usage are based on an index ranging from 0 to 100. The higher the value the more rapid and dependable the connection. North America always had the highest traffic every time I looked at the site.

This is a completely free site so it is a way to get information anytime and any day and the information is updated every five minutes. The site also has data on the response time to receive information from a site as well as the packet loss which measures the connection's reliability. Packet loss is okay as long as it is kept under five percent.

I like the fact that you can become involved with the Internet Traffic Report site by allowing the router from your web site to be added to the network of sites that they test. Also this site is very easy to use and is very visual with lots of simple graphs. Every aspect of the statistics are explained in a simple manner which is not off putting if you are new to this type of information.

Internet Traffic Report - http://www.internettrafficreport.com/main.htm


The Internet World Stats site was also interesting to view. The statistics on the site are based on the seven regions of the world: Africa, Asia, Europe, The Middle East, North America, Latin America/Caribbean and Ocean/Australia. Then each region is divided further by country so that a full picture of the world's population using the Internet. The demographics are from reputable source; the U.S. Census Bureau and the Internet usage data is also from a respectable source; Nielsen/NetRatings. The finding on the site were insightful: The Asia had the largest world usage with 39.5%. I was interested in finding out about the usage in Israel since the country has been involved in some great technological advances in recent years. The usage for the Middle East is only 2.9% with Israel being at 57.6% or more than have of this usage.

I like the use of pie graphs and bar graphs to visually show the mean of the numbers from the charts. It really brings the whole picture together. The site is very easy to read and to comprehend.

Internet World Stats - http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

CAIDA stands for the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis. This is a group with members from private companies, the government and research sectors whose goal is to foster synergy in the engineering and maintenance of the worldwide Internet infrastructure. CAIDA would like to for these groups involved to work towards keeping the Internet capacity and usage efficient even with the steady increase in demand.

Honestly this web site is intimidating to someone new to web site design. The site has quite a large amount of information which is in terms that are more for its intended audience web site engineers. CAIDA is keeping up to date with the innovations on the Internet. They have a blog and a wiki so members can interact and keep up to date on things in a more informal way.

CAIDA Internet Infrastructure - http://www.caida.org/home/

The Pew Research Center is a non-profit group dedicated to providing facts on issues and views and trends in the United States on an impartial baisis. Their data reflects seven areas of research:

1. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press
2. Project for Excellence in Journalism
3. Pew Internet & American Life Project
4. Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
5. Pew Hispanic Center
6. Pew Global Attitudes Project
7. Social & Demographic Trends

This web site has so much to offer on topics of interest politically and socially in the United States. I especially enjoyed their articles related to the 2008 Presidential Election. This is a site I will go back to in order to find out more about what is happening with the race. The numbers do truly tell the story.

Pew (non-profit research center) - http://pewresearch.org/

Nielsen ratings have always been associated with television for me. My family has been asked in the past to record TV logs for Nielsen showing what we watch during a certain short time period. It was interesting to look at the Nielsen Online and see how they rate Internet usage. Nielsen Online allows their clients access to a great deal of information including users purchasing habits, web rankings that compare their client's web site rankings to other companies within their industry and getting a view of their users' desktop behavior (what they do and where they go on the Internet).

Nielsen is a reputable company and it is good to see they have branched out to this new medium and realize the immense effect it can have in the marketplace. They have a very professionally designed site that you can see has many tools for their clients to access whenever they would like.

Nielson Net Ratings (private research center) - http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/

USF has a set of guidelines for any students or faculty using their own personal web space. Many of th guidelines mentioned are not many of the guidelines that are listed however there are some really good points that I noted:

• All intellectual property should be either of your own creation, be used with permission by the author or be in tune with University policy. As a future librarian I certainly strive to protect authors or artists copyrighted works.
• Web sites should not be used for illegal activity or prohibited activities. They give the example of spamming. Which I agree with since our web sites should be used for good purposes.
• The web sites should not be used for personal business or sales of non-university products or services. This is just simply not the purpose of a University web site; to use it for one's own profit.
• Web designers should not do anything that would result in a slow down of USF's server. This is of course for everyone's best interest since nobody wants to be slowed down when they are trying to do work on the computer system.
• Web sites should have navigational links to lead to all portions of the pages of their site.
• Web sites should have distinctive titles that describe the intent of the web designer's site.
• Meta Tags need include keywords and a description of the web sites content. This is helpful in terms of a search engine picking up your site.
• Graphics need to include their height and width for faster text downloading. If the image takes longer to load then text will appear first.
• Web pages and documents for download need to have concrete information. The URL needs to remain the same even if the document has changed.
• Important information available through the use of plug-ins should also be available in other formats for the user.
• Frames should not be used if at all possible because each frame is treated a a separate web page by search engines.
• Web pages that one designs should be viewable in Internet Explorer, Firfox and Safari browsers.
• HTML versions of content should be used over other formats like Adobe PDF files because the these files tend to be larger.
• Avoid using proprietary files like Word or Excel since it requires users to own specific software to open the files. PDF files or rich text files are a better option since they are universal.

USF Web Style Guidelines - http://usfweb2.usf.edu/ur/webadmin/webguide.html