Posts Tagged ‘world wide web’
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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