Posts Tagged ‘world wide web’
“If you like overheads, you’ll love PowerPoint”*…
Military Industrial Powerpoint Complex is collection created as a special project for the Internet Archive’s 20th Anniversary celebration in 2016, highlighting IA’s web archive. It consists of all the Powerpoint files (57,489) from the .mil web domain, e,g,:
Plumb the depths at The Military Industrial Powerpoint Complex.
* Edward Tufte
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As we hold our heads in our hands, we might recall that it was on this date in 1989 that Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to CERN for developing a new way of linking and sharing information over the Internet. It was the first time Berners-Lee proposed the system that would ultimately become the World Wide Web, so this date is oft cited as the “Birthday of the Web.” But his pitch was a bit vague, and got no traction. He resubmitted a second, more detailed proposal on November 12, 1990– on which CERN acted… so many consider this later date the Web’s inception.
“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man”*…
The Annual Library Budget Survey, a global study that queries 686 senior librarians about their budget spending predictions for the year, was published last week by the Publishers Communication Group (PCG), a consultancy wing of Ingenta, the self-described “largest supplier of technology and related services for the publishing industry.” The survey found uneven growth expectations for libraries worldwide…
Check it out at “How Are Libraries Doing Around the World?”
* (Groucho Marx’s buddy) T.S. Eliot
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As we keep our voices down, we might send informative birthday greetings to Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee OM KBE FRS FREng FRSA FBCS; he was born on this date in 1955. While working as a Fellow at CERN in 1989, he invented the World Wide Web, developing and demonstrating the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet. Currently the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the continued development of the Web, he remains a staunch defender of an open Web and the free flow of information.
[On the heels of yesterday’s almanac entry, should “Internet” be capitalized?]
Spinning a (World Wide) Web…
click here for larger, interactive version
In commemoration of Chrome’s birthday, Google enlisted Hyperakt and Vizzuality to create a celebratory chart of the evolution of the internet… The interactive timeline has bunch of nifty features– your correspondent’s fave: clicking a browser icon allows users to see how the browser’s window has changed in each release… a stroll down “memory lay-out,” if not memory lane– and a concrete reminder of the importance of design.
[TotH to the ever-remarkable Flowing Data]
As we resolve yet again to clean out our bookmark cache, we might wish an acerbic Happy Birthday to journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, and critic Henry Louis “H. L.” Mencken; he was born on this date in 1880. Mencken is the auuthor of the philological work The American Language, and is remembered for his journalism (e.g., his coverage of the Scopes Trial) and for his cultural criticism (and editorship of American Mercury— published by Alfred Knopf, also born on this date, but 12 years after Mencken ) in which he championed such writers as D.H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and Sherwood Anderson. But “H.L.” is probably most famous for the profusion of pointed one-liners and adages that leavened his work…
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. I am against any man and any organization which seeks to limit or deny that freedom. . . [and] the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
H.L. Mencken, photograph by Carl Van Vechten (source)
Imminent Domain…
It’s not too late, Dear Readers, to hoist oneself onto the web, and to become a contributing part of the 21st Century. Indeed, Last Words Left is a handy place to begin:
We started with a list of the 100,000 most used words in the English language. We checked to see which were registered as .Com or .Net. These ones [conveniently listed on the site] are still available. The full list of 35,000+ available one word .Com and .Net domains can be found here.
Absurdest.net? Parallelisms.com? Zealousness.net? One can take one’s pick here. (Note that clicking on an available url takes one to GoDaddy, where the domain name can be registered… one can of course register it elsewhere if one prefers…)
As we begin to worry about traffic and search engines rankings, we might recall that on this date in 1979 the first newspaper advertisement (for industrial machinery, as it happened) appeared in the Chinese Communist Party organ The People’s Daily. (Earlier that year the first post-Cultural Revolution newspaper ad had run in the Tianjin Daily, for Blue Sky toothpaste.)
The weight of the world (wide web)…
Chris Stevens at Crave (CNET-UK) wondered…
Using publicly available information, for the first time in the world, we have precisely and scientifically calculated the weight of the Internet. Obviously this information is only really useful to someone attempting to work out the cost of posting the Internet somewhere, perhaps to North Korea. Still, the casual reader — hi there! — may still enjoy learning just how damn heavy the thing is.
Read the entire analysis here. But (SPOILER ALERT) lest readers agonize in suspense, the total mass of the internet is:
As Chris observes, “very heavy indeed.”
As we contemplate the weight of innovation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1867 that Alfred Nobel patented dynamite. 21 years later (in 1888), a French newspaper ran a premature obituary of Nobel, ran his obituary under the cutting headline “Le marchand de la mort est mort” (the merchant of death is dead); Nobel’s reaction was to sign a will (in 1895) leaving the bulk of his fortune to establish and fund the Nobel Prizes.
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