Journalism 2.0 - Knight Citizen News Network

Chapter 1: FTP, MB, RSS, oh My!
This is important for online publishing because the speed of an Internet connection
plus the size of the file to be downloaded determines how fast someone can
download your content. If it’s just text, like a news story, it’s probably only a few
KB and will download quickly, even over an old 56K dial-up modem.
Note: The “56K” refers to the transfer rate per second of digital information. So
dial-up users with 56K modems can’t expect to download information over the
Internet faster than 56KB per second.
How the Internet works
As you probably know, the Internet refers to a series of computers that are connected
and share information. A Web server is a special type of computer that
stores and distributes/presents information over the Internet.
But how does it know which information to serve? The URL (uniform resource
locator) or Web address is the key and is very similar to how you receive mail at
your home or office. Although you recognize a Web address like www.yahoo.com,
Web servers know that location as 209.73.186.238. That’s the IP address (IP =
Internet Protocol), which is a unique, numeric identity of a Web server location.
All Web addresses have corresponding IP addresses that computers recognize but
people never would. Registering a domain name secures a human-readable Web
address and associates it with a numeric and computer friendly IP address.
Internet vs. World Wide Web: Contrary to popular belief, these two terms do not
mean the same thing. The Internet refers to the network of connected computers
that share information. The World Wide Web refers to a way of accessing information
through the Internet using the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and Web
browsers. It does not include other protocols such as e-mail, instant messaging
and file transfer (FTP).
About Web browsers
The Web browser is the tool that people use to access over the Internet information
that is published as part of the World Wide Web. It is software that you know
as Internet Explorer, Safari or Firefox and it does three important things:
1. It searches and finds information.
2. It retrieves information and brings it back to you.
3. It renders the information for display on your computer.
14
Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive