Week One: Clear

This week I learned about information search, netiquette, and copyright. After reading the posts about each subject, I thought about how each of them not only interacted with each other, but how they affected the business world. The information was all clear, and fairly easy to understand. This is what I learned.

Information search is important if a company is doing research on maybe a piece of technology, or about another company that they're interested in working with. Although information search is often portrayed as a fairly simple task, the work that goes along with it can be extensive as well as very intricate. This is because of the need to make sure that the information being read is from a legitimate site, such as government sites (.gov), or educational sites (.edu). Part of finding out if the site is legitimate, includes looking if the website has been recently updated, especially if the information being researched needs to be current. Another important part of the website, which overlaps with another learned concept, is the copyright.

Copyright is especially important in the business world because of all the publications, works, and material items that exist in today's society. In order to keep an idea that has been developed by a person, from being recreated over and over again, a copyright must be placed on it. Once a copyright has been placed on items such as books, plays, or movies, it can not be recreated, or distributed without the consent of the original author. This concept is vital when a business is creating presentations either for the general public, or for the company's use, because of the severe consequences that will be dealt if an item is used illegally. Such consequences include being sued for large amounts of money.

  Even though copyright is of huge importance in the business world, and information search is a necessary skill, netiquette has to be one of the most essential things in not only the business world, but for the Internet in general. Since text is usually difficult to interpret for a reader, the font, font size, and emoticons (i.e. smiley faces :-) ) being used are substantial in getting the message across.

Although I used to think that using ALL CAPITAL LETTERS was used in substitute for using bold, or italic text when it was not available to put emphasis into certain phrases, it is actually considered rude. Using all capital letters not only makes the message more difficult to read, it also makes the reader feel like the sender is screaming at them.

  All the information from the websites that were given through the course page made it easy to understand each of the concepts. In addition, I found this very helpful and to the point website about netiquette:
http://www.learnthenet.com/english/html/09NETIQT.HTM

On the web page, there is also a short YouTube video that was easy to understand and gave great examples.