A plethora of issues and trends have affected Internet and Web publishing in the past five years. The class will be divided into four teams, with each team taking on one of sections listed below.

Each individual's assignment is to pick one subject area from the section to which their team has been designated, and to research the subject intensively. Then, find a topical angle (i.e., something that is newsworthy as defined by our class discussions, and to write an article of no more than 1,000 words, and not less than 600.

The article must contain appropriate links, and each page must have logical navigation.

POLITICAL
censorship
deep linking
intellectual property
Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998
file sharing/piracy
censorship
deep-linking
filters
cybersquatting
email hacking
website hacking
kid porn
privacy
online security
digital divide
domain stealing
encryption

INFRASTRUCTURE
ICANN, evolution of (domain-name systems)
TLDs
broadband/bandwidth issues (remember ISDN?)

CULTURAL
internet legends
blogs
gaming
dating
e-mail listservs
accessibility

BUSINESS
opt-in/opt-out marketing prefs
streaming
dot-bomb/e-commerce
ad units, evolution of
Spam
dead trends: push technology, B2B, portals
browser wars

Back to the syllabus