Internet Wars: The Ongoing Battle Over How the Web is Run
The people who are making decisions about the internet are, fundamentally, deciding the access of all future generations to come. Forget Afghanistan and Iraq; these are the theaters of war where democracy will live or die. SherWeb has an overview of the most contentious battles over who controls the web.
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Lo! The Internet Turns 40
UCLA’s Leonard Kleinrock remembers sending the first message over the Internet 40 years ago this week; the first word sent host-to-host was supposed to be “login,” but the receiving computer crashed after the first two letters. So the Internet’s first word was “Lo!” Soon came the first denial of service, and the first spammer.
In honor of the occasion, Asylum’s Tommy Christopher compiled the Top Ten Signs the Internet Has Turned 40.
10. Hangs around at clubs using cheesy, outdated pickup lines like, “All your base are belong to me, baby!”
9. Starts referring to YouTube videos as “talkies.”
8. Still uses MySpace, and thinks of Heather_69 as a “friend.”
7. Stays in the left lane of the information superhighway with its blinker on.
6. Google mysteriously changes its name to “Google, She Wrote.”
5. Star Wars Kid now on his second divorce after nailing his secretary.
4. Starts believing that Al Gore invented it.
3. Inexplicably purchases a Chrysler Sebring convertible.
2. Swears it goes to Pornhub.com for the articles.
1. Has to call its kids for tips on how to use itself.
I’ll add a bonus one: Uses the file menu to shut itself down…all seven open windows of itself. Any more ideas out there?
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Facebook Etiquette Rules People Still Break
With new users joining every day, many people either don’t know Facebook etiquette or they don’t care. The Golden Rule, and treating people as you would treat them offline is a good start, but just in case, here are some guidelines for how not to act on Facebook, and other social networking sites. For example, why would you post (and tag) unflattering or embarrassing pictures of your friends?
“I feel obligated to point out some of the obvious Facebook etiquette rules that people continue to break, in the hopes that one day, they think twice before posting.”
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Bizarre Spike Jonze Short
Last February, director Spike Jonez (Where the Wild Things Are) agreed to shoot a video for Kanye West’s song, “See You in My Nightmares,” which was then expanded into a creative, short film – shot at a nightclub over two days.
The end result is an uneasy glimpse of Mr. West at his worst, premonitions of his MTV Video Awards appearance abound, and the ending says a lot about the musician’s own battered image of himself. It’s a fine piece, and will soon be available on iTunes.
Unfortunately for Spike Jonez, it was leaked last week with the help of…Kanye West.
“We Were Once a Fairytale” was leaked to the Internet and posted on Mr. West’s official Web site, kanyeuniversecity.com. Within a couple of days it was taken down without explanation. Mr. Jonze said the film was accidentally leaked from the postproduction studio of a friend, and that Mr. West did not realize that it was not meant to be circulated yet. “I think he was like: ‘Oh, it’s out. I’ll link to it,’ ” Mr. Jonze said. (A representative for Mr. West declined to elaborate.)
NYT has the whole story here and here.
“We Were Once a Fairytale” (embedded video)
(Photo: Spike Jonez, Inc. & Getting Out Our Dreams Pictures)
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10 Internet Rules and Laws
The laws of the internet were never legislated, but passed into law by being evident over and over again. I was familiar with most of these laws, but some I didn’t know had names or documented origins.
4. Skitt’s Law: Expressed as “any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself” or “the likelihood of an error in a post is directly proportional to the embarrassment it will cause the poster.”
It is an online version of the proofreading truism Muphry’s Law, also known as Hartman’s Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation: “any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror”.
That’s nice to know. Link -via Digg
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Draw A Photo Masterpiece With PhotoSketch
PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from tao chen on Vimeo.
Designed by a team at the National University of Singapore, PhotoSketch is the latest and greatest in image creation systems. The full description of how it works can be found here, but the basic process is this:
Draw a basic object, name it and repeat this for any other objects you want in your picture, then name the background. PhotoSketch then searches the Internet for images that match the descriptions given, and after a bit of sorting out, you have all the elements necessary for seamless stitching. The possibilities seem endless. Check out the video!
This is getting so much buzz, the link is down as of 10/06/2009 1945 hrs EST.
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If You Printed the Entire Internet
Printing the entire internet is a ridiculous idea, but in the event that you actually wanted a printout of the entire internet today, then you would have to have started printing back in 1800BC. And if you wanted to read it all it would take 57,000 years, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, non-stop! A series of infographics at Creative Cloud gives us even more statistics about the mind-boggling size of the internet.
Link – via geeksaresexy
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9/9/09: A Day Without Cats on the Internet
(Video Link)
The pop culture blog Urlesque has called for next Wednesday, September 9th, to be a day in which cats are absent from the Internet. Ostensibly, Urlesque seeks to end the meme-driven exploitation of cats, but I suspect that it may find broad support for the movement among those who weary of lolcats, piano-playing cats, and other examples of feline ubiquity on the Internet.
What do you think? Should September 9th be a day without cats on the Internet?
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When was the Internet Born?
It was 40 years ago today, September 2, 1969 that scientists connected two computers at UCLA with a 15-foot cable and the machines were able to communicate with each other. The test data was meaningless, but the breakthrough eventually led to the formation of the internet, but there were plenty of other milestones. Which date is the birthday of the internet?
September 2, 1969: First time two computers communicated with each other.
Oct 29, 1969: Message sent from computer to computer in different locations.
1971: The first email was sent.
Jan 1, 1983: ARPANET adopted the standard TCP/IP protocol.
March 1989: Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.
April 22, 1993: Mosaic became the first web browser.
Which date should we designate as the birthday of the internet? Link -via Buzzfeed
(image credit: Flickr user lemonfridge)
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Personas
Personas is an application that searches your name on the web and returns a profile of what it finds. Mine is pictured.
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.
I was surprised to see I had more “sports” in my profile than anything else -must’ve been the Olympics. And it’s nice that my “legal” was bigger than my “illegal”! But the most interesting part was seeing all those things people said about me while it was processing. The one that stands out was “Your inquiry ‘Miss Cellania is an idiot’ did not return any results.” Ha! (Of course, now that I’ve written it out, there will be results for that query.) Try your own name and puzzle over the results. Link -via the Presurfer
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Music Royalties for Dummies
With all of the confusion recently on the internet about music and copyright, you may not know what’s what. Here’s something to help you learn about how music royalties work.
Considering how much “education” about music and copyright is out there (”downloading music is stealing!” ads and the like), most people have no idea how it actually works in terms of who owns what and who should get money from what kind of use. And lately, with issues like confusion over Pandora royalties, songwriters trying to collect royalties from blogs that post YouTube videos, and even arguments that video games may constitute a public performance of music, it’s just been getting increasingly complicated.
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Web Side Story: Internet, The Musical
What could be better than the Internet? How about the Interweb, the musical? Here’s Web Side Story (but of course), a musical by College Humor about all the good things on the Net in the style of West Side Story. Leonard Bernstein is probably spinning in his grave.
Web Side Story, written and directed by Sam Reich, produced by Eva Wong.
Hit play or go to Link [College Humor Video] – Thanks Stephanie!
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Internet Meme Scenery
Andy Baio of waxy.org blog posted 23 photos of backgrounds from various internet memes. Like Garfield without Garfield, the result is strangely disconcerting.
Would you still recognize what these Internet memes are, well, without the actual memes?
These photos are banal out of context. Only someone familiar with the original memes would sense something’s amiss, like the set of a play waiting for the actors to stumble into history.
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First Interspecies Internet Chat
Eleven years ago today, Koko the gorilla used American Sign Language to communicate with her fans via AOL chat. It was the first known interspecies chat on the internet.
Roughly 8,000 AOL subscribers joined the chat, which featured Koko, who signed her answers; Patterson, who interpreted them; and an AOL chat facilitator.
As the transcript clearly shows, Koko’s responses were a bit vague, but no more inane than some of the drivel littering Facebook pages these days.
Also check out Koko’s website, which includes a transcript of the AOL chat. (Thank, Gauldar!)
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Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing Spurs Productivity
Next time your boss catches you reading Neatorama instead of what your job description specifies, tell him/her about this study from the University of Melbourne.
Dr Brent Coker, from the Department of Management and Marketing, says that workers who engage in ‘Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing’ (WILB) are more productive than those who don’t.
“People who do surf the Internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t,” he says.
“Firms spend millions on software to block their employees from watching videos on YouTube, using social networking sites like Facebook or shopping online under the pretense that it costs millions in lost productivity, however that’s not always the case.”
(image credit: Flickr use Valerie Reneé)
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Animated Websites That Kids Will Love But Grownups Will Adore
There are sites on the internet for everybody, and kids are no exception. That doesn’t mean that sites intended for one audience cannot be enjoyed by another. This selection of sites is such that those of us who can occasionally be catalogued under adult may find the not so inner child coming to the fore. Simple pleasures are often the best. Pictured is Heromachine, where you can create your own superhero.
If your kids are a little older and like superheroes then this site will probably mean the last you will see of them until they come of age. There are hundreds of thousands of combinations and permutations available to them to create that superhero that they have always wanted to see. Of course, you may spend more time on this than the kids.
Link – via webphemera
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A Complete Photo Guide to Newcastle Including Amazing Abandoned Places
ILuvNUFC is prolific blogger on all kinds of odd and interesting things but his crown jewel is his photography site in which he has seemingly documented every last corner of Newcastle Upon Tyne – quite possibly the most any one person has photographed any one place on the web.
Some of his most compelling images are of deserted buildings in the area like St. Mary’s Asylum and the Cherry Knowle Hospital, which he has also catalogued extensively. Best of all, he includes a heckuvalot of juicy historical facts along with the images.
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Homeless Man Panhandles the Internet
Is this exploitation or genuine concern? 37 year old homeless man Tim Edwards has roamed the streets of Houston for the past five years.
Sean Dolan and his father Kevin saw an opportunity, and ‘hired’ Tim to be a part of their new website Pimp This Bum, soliciting donations for him. People can donate everything from food to a college education, and Tim receives $100 a day from the Dolans.
According to the Dolans, all proceeds from the website go directly to Tim. So why are they doing this?
Their theory is if they can make Edwards popular, they can make anything or anyone popular, a bankable skill to attract big businesses.
“Take a homeless guy on the side of the street that has a sign, ‘I should have used Monster.com,’ and Monster. com just turned (someone) into a walking billboard,” Sean Dolan said.
Link – via ascendgence
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Chinese Woman Put Her Life Online
Beijing resident Chen Xiao was tired of making plans for her life and having them ruined by natural, economic and personal disasters. So she decided to hand over her personal decision-making to China’s hundreds of millions of Internet users.
"I figured if other people came up with things for me to do, I might stumble upon something new and better."
Web users, known in China as netizens, have been finding plenty of things for Chen to do, from delivering pet food, to caring for stray cats, to taking a hot lunch to a homeless man, to attending the birth of a child. And she’s been able to make money at it, charging about $3 an hour.
Chen won’t do anything illegal, immoral or violent, although she’s been asked.
“When people stop needing me, I’ll go back to my original life. But I don’t know when that will come.”
– Chen Xiao
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Video clip from 1981 about online newspapers
Circa 1981 I was in the 5th grade and had a special class once or twice a week along with a handful of the other top math students in my school where we were taught to program in BASIC on Apple II computers. I was unaware f the wonderfulness that was even then beginning to emerge “online” – at CompuServe, which is the service featured in this video clip – and later at AOL (and elsewhere).
Looking back at it now it strikes me as remarkable how much changed so quickly over the ensuing years.
Does anyone have any 80s computing nostalgia to share? [YouTube - thanks, Tim!]
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Keeping Tabs On The President
Whether you love Obama or hate him, you’ll be happy to know there is now a tool to track how he has lived up to his campaign promises.
The Obameter has a compiled list of about 500 promises he made during the election run and it records if he: kept the promise, compromised, broke the promise, stalled the promise, is in the works on the issue or has not taken action on the promise. So far he’s stalled one, compromised on one and kept five, but it will be nice to see how he does in the long run.
I wish we had these for every president. I’d love to know how Kennedy, Lincoln or Andrew Jackson did on their promises.
Link Via Good Magazine
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VideoSift Clips of the Week
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Geophysical Survey of the World of Warcraft It turns out that WoW is really, really small: Link |
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Human Slip & Slide (It doesn't end there, folks, there's also an underwear stuffing contest!) Where do I sign up? Link |
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Double Fail at the Motorcycle Race Track |
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Shark Does a Spinning Jump Behind a Surfer Link (about time mark 0:10) |
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History of the Internet (If you like this, check out Neatorama's 10 Things You Should Know About the Internet and Wonderful World of Early Computing, Take a Stroll Down Computing Memory Lane) |
For more the web's most interesting videos, check out: VideoSift.
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