Module 4 - Evaluating the Web

"In your own words, write an annotation for the source which could communicate to a reader both your 'judgment' of the site according to what you have learnt from the tutorial, and also the following information:
the reliability and authority of the site / source / article
the main ideas or subjects discussed in the article
the purpose for which the site was written (this might include any apparent external interest, intellectual motivation or contextual information) "

I consider this "source" to be the best of the three used in the last task.

Site 1 : http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc959.txt
author : J. Postel, J. Reynolds.
institution : University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute.
summary : The current RFC (959) for the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). An overview, history and technical specifications for FTP. Authors Postel and Reynolds. USC/ISI

Site/page evaluation: This page is part of the Information Sciences Institute, which is part of the University of Southern California, which establishes it authority. The original paper is from 1985 and this is still the current protocol. The protocol is heavily linked to by many educational institutions (in fact I had trouble finding anything else under the search keywords) and is also on the W3C site. This is the definition of FTP within TCP/IP and includes an overview and history of the protocol. It is a reference work and has no bias or agenda.

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"Compare your final analysis and annotation with the material you saved for the last task, and think about these questions (you may wish to discuss these questions in your group)

in terms of your own future use, which 'body ' of information (ie. the original 'snapshot' of the site, or your own, annotated, analytical version) would be most useful to refer back to?

In term of external users (i.e. if you included this site as a hyperlink or resource on a website) which body of information would best help them judge if the site was useful or of interest to them?"

In this case there is not a lot of difference between the sites own intro ( which I didn't use) and my own. However I can see cases where there would be a difference, mainly in context. For my own use, the annotated bookmarks I use in del.ic.ious serve me well and are accessible away from my pc. I can include all of the necessary info within the bookmark form provided, including tags.

Once again due to the fact that this references a protocol, there is no big difference between the snapshot and the annotation for external users.