This is a long-term assignment which will be graded periodically throughout the semester (at least every 2 weeks, if not more often). You will be required to read a number of publications providing news about current trends in Web and Internet technologies and their applications. I would like you try to focus more on news about the technology than the business side of the internet in reviewing articles. You will be required to keep this journal for the next 6 weeks, i.e. through the end of October. From these publications you should:

• select at least 3-5 articles every week, from at least 3 different sources
• summarize/abstract these selected articles weekly. Write a condensed summary comprised of the 3-5 main points of the article. You must write these points out as complete sentences and can put them as bulleted points or as a paragraph.
• properly cite all articles and source based upon the proper citation styles as indicated in the required reading material about citations. There are 2 good web sites that discuss how to properly cite online sources these are:
  1. http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/cite7.htmlChicago Style for Citing Online References
  2. Columbia Guide for Citing Online references
  You can choose to use either style but pick one and stick to it.
• if at all possible provide a URL for referencing the complete full-text of the article.

You will be required to maintain this Journal online as a web page of your own making. Initially you can just publish a simple 2 page web site: one listing links to the sources that you are using and a second one listing your articles and summaries. Some students in the past have found it better to categorize the articles and have built there journal sites accordingly. I may alter the design parameters of this web page throughout the semester as you learn more and more tools to apply to it.

Due by next Monday, Sept. 17 is your site with an initial listing of least 8 sources of news and articles that you have found online. Due by the end of next week is your first installment of 3 articles. To start you off and give you an idea of what kinds of sources to look for you can view my small list of the many that are out there. (The ones listed on my page can not be part of your initial 8 sources you will be submitting to me, though you are welcome to peruse my sources to gather articles from.

If you dont already have somewhere you can host web space you might check out the University space that is provided to students (Call the University IT office to ask how to get access to yours). Also there are numerous free web hosting sites online and you can use any of those. Since this is a class in web technologies you might try a couple those sites and see how they work and what are the advantages and disadvantages of each. If you find out anything you really want to discuss feel free to start a new thread about free hosting in the assignments forum on our discussion board.. I am in the process of setting up a guest book site for our class and I will be posting announcement soon about where you can post your URL for your journal once you have it up.

Additional Note about your audience for this project:

Like everything you write or design you should do so with full knowledge of what audience you are writing for. For this project do not write the abstracts for me as your instructor or even for yourself. Rather imagine that your manager in the IT department of the company you are working for has given you the responsibility to keep track of interesting developments and trends in Web and internet technology, and has asked that you maintain a company intranet web page listing a few of the most interesting developments every week. So, your audience is possibly the whole company, probably with emphasis on fellow Web heads, IT professionals, and (if you want to look good for you manager) specifically your IT manager.