I really like this program.  I think it’s really cute.  It reminds me of Kid Pix Studio that I used to play with as a kid.  I’d make videos just like the ones you can make on Scratch, and then make my parents watch ALL OF THEM.  It’s a cute, user friendly technology that could be fun to use in projects.

One thing I will say about scratch is that it doesn’t look to me like anything new, and it doesn’t look to me like a “programming language,” instead it just looks like an interface.  It could be used as a tool to teach the idea of programming languages to children, but it doesn’t look like a language in and of itself.

I read the “Top Ten Mistakes in Academic Web Design”.  As a Communications major this is a really interesting topic to me.  I have one big component I really liked, and one big component I really didn’t like:

What I liked–I like the attention they draw to download speeds.  As time goes on, the attention span of Americans goes down more and more.  This is especially true on the internet where people often only spend one or two seconds on a webpage.  Like the article said, images take up a lot of memory and can take a long time to load, especially if the files are bigger than they need to be.

What I didn’t like–The irony in this list is that the writer describes the downfalls of “dense text” as he writes his list in dense paragraphs.  Easy to read information on the internet is best written in one-sentence paragraphs.  This can be challenging for writers to adapt to, because it forces the writer to be more concise.  Also, if he’s going to write in large paragraphs anyway, his font should be bigger and the lines should be farther apart.

The most interesting part of this article for me was the connection between search engine algorithms and old-fashioned manual cataloging.  It never occurred to me that they are really the same concept, just that one is used in a real-world format and the other is in an electronic format.  I was alive and doing academic research for school when manual catalogs were still in popular use but I was to young to be expected or taught to use them.  By the time I became old enough the schools I went to wanted to teach the new, up-in-coming electronic cataloguing technology to the exclusion of the manual version.  As a result, I never got real exposure to manual cataloging so I never put much thought into the different ways by which it could be done.

I think it’s interesting that keyword-in-context indexing is based on the same logic of manual cataloging systems.  I think its incredible how complex cataloging has become now that we have computers that can process mass amounts of data.  The complexity of the algorithms is really astounding and its something I rarely think about when I enter a search-word into Google.