*Offers a variety of Internet services

*Examples of services:

*News

*Sports

*Search engine/directory

*Web publishing

*Reference tools

*Maps

*Shopping

*Email

*Examples of portals:

*AltaVista, AOL, Lycos, MSN, Netscape, Yahoo!

*Contains newsworthy material

*Contain stories and articles related to some of the following:

*Life, money, current events, weather

*Examples:

*WSB-tv

*NBC.com

*Contains factual information

*Government agencies provide this type of info:

*Census data, tax codes, congressional budget

*Others that provide this type are:

*MARTA

*Medicare

*Promotes or sells a product

*Many examples

*Offers exciting, challenging avenues for formal and informal teaching and learning

*Online training for a new skill

*Online courses

*Online college classes

*Examples

*UGA

*Phoenix University

*Interactive and engaging

*Offer music, video, games, sports, chats, sweepstakes

*Describes a cause, opinion, or idea

*Presents views of a group of people or organizations

*Short for webblog

*Time-stamped articles or posts, in a diary type format

*Vblog – a blog that contains video

*Blogosphere – worldwide collection of blogs

*Vlogosphere – all vblogs worldwide

*Reflect interest, opinions and personalities of the author

*Allows user to create, add, modify, or delete web site content

*Collect recent edits on a web page so someone can review them for accuracy

*Anyone can modify a wiki

*Most popular - Wikipedia

*Encourages members in the group to share interest, ideas, stories, photos, music, and videos with other users

*Popular examples:

*Facebook

*MySpace (12 million visitors a day)

*Media Sharing Web site – different

*Allows members to share photos, music, and videos

*ShutterFly, Flickr – popular sites

*GoogleVideo and YouTube are example for video sharing sites

*Business that gathers and organizes web content and then distributes or feeds the content to subscribers for free or for a fee

*Private individual or family created

*People publish personal web pages for a variety of reasons:

*Job hunting

*Share personal experiences

*Family histories