Week 7 - Internet and WWW

How Internet Infrastructure Works

I like this site and think it provides pretty clear instructions of ... uh ... how stuff works. This is no exception and serves as a good primer for learning about internet structure. My question here in thinking about the "networks of networks" is the size of one of the big ISPs (Time Warner, AT&T, etc.) and how they are divided. Are there regional networks inside their national networks? I guess so, since when things go down, it isn't a nation-wide crisis, but would like to see how this breaks down nonetheless. Another observation here is direct fiber optic connections to the home/business and how long before that infrastructure is built up. Even in rural southwest Ohio, a company I used to work for could access a small fiber optic network via receiving a beam from the provider, but it wasn't a direct, hard, connection - and, accordingly had problems.

Andrew K. Pace. „Dismantling Integrated Library Systems“ Library Journal, vol 129 Issue 2, p34-36. 2/1/2004

It isn't too surprising to learn about the increase of third party software and add-ons to ILS development. Even in a profession as seemingly cohesive as the libraries, gradations of goals and profiles exist leaving each library in need of customized products, not just a one-stop-shop right out of a box. The trick is creating a market infrastructure to support this model.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page discuss Google back in 2004.

First, I'm wondering what has changed in the past 3-4 years at Google?
This video presentation is interesting in terms of getting a peek at how Google operates as a corporate structure and how immense it is. Most amusing is the simplicity of their search as evidenced by the example of the teenage blogger. Otherwise, I'm not sure how much I learned about how Google works in this presentation.