Posterous
Posterous is the dead simple way to put anything online using email ! I will try this out one of these days. Having a blackberry, this looks like a very good tool to keep blogging while I’m travelling. Are you using Posterous ?
Googlenomics
Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability. And Hal Varian is their chief economist! Loved his book Microeconomic Analysis, a very good introduction for the rigourous Microeconomic Theory by Andreu Mas-Colell.
Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Alpha (launching this month) is an answer-engine developed by the international company Wolfram Research. The service is an online computational data engine based on intuitive query parsing, a large library of algorithms, and A New Kind of Science approach to answering queries.
Update: The Quest for Computable Knowledge — A Short Timeline (interesting overview – pdf)
pdate:
10 Cool Sites
Exploratorium Ten Cool Sites is a collection of cool, interactive sites from the Web, hand-picked by the Exploratorium. Don’t blame me if you spend too much time checking this out.
The Semantic Web in Action
This article reviews progress towards the idea of a “Semantic Web: a highly interconnected network of data that could be easily accessed and understood by any desktop or handheld machine.” Accompanied by a glossary and related articles and links. From Scientific American.
People of the screen
The book is modernity’s quintessential technology—“a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of a turning page,” as the poet Joseph Brodsky put it. But now that the rustle of the book’s turning page competes with the flicker of the screen’s twitching pixel, we must consider the possibility that the book may not be around much longer. If it isn’t—if we choose to replace the book—what will become of reading and the print culture it fostered? And what does it tell us about ourselves that we may soon retire this most remarkable, five-hundred-year-old technology? Continue reading…
– Chirstine Rosen in the New Atlantic.
The first web site
Following the proposal for the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee to his boss, the first ever web site was created and available in August 1991.
The Oracle
Lauren Collins has written an extensive article on Arianna Huffington in the New Yorker. Arianne is the founder of The Huffington Post, a liberal online news and commentary website and aggregated blog.
The inventor of the internet
The Englishman Tim Berners-Lee in collaboration with the Belgian Robert Cailliau is usually credited with the invention of the Wold Wide Web.
However this is to some extent due to the work of Paul Otlet. His vision of a great network of knowledge was centered on documents and included the notions of hyperlinks, search engines, remote access, and social networks—although these notions were described by different names. The NYT published recently an article about the work of Paul Otlet to acknowledge his early vision of the web.
Update: I just discovered why the initial logo of the World Wide Web was green. It so happens that Robert Cailliau is a synaesthetic (when the perception of numbers and letters is associated with the experience of colors) and he sees all “W”s as green… So the logo was green not because WWW is a “green” technology.
Firefox 3 download time
Announcement: download Firefox 3 on 17 June !
RK translates: start downloading at 17:00 GMT….(yes, not exactly good communication from the Mozilla guys, but download anyway 
)
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
What the Internet is doing to our brains by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic Monthly.
People who have pledged
From the Firefox web site:
SET A GUINNESS WORLD RECORD. ENJOY A BETTER WEB.
Sounds like a good deal, right? All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours – it’s that easy. We’re not asking you to swallow a sword or to balance 30 spoons on your face, although that would be kind of awesome.
By the way, the official date for the launch of Firefox 3 will be posted here soon – so check back! Join our community and this effort by pledging today.
Are you joining too ?
Update: actually it seems you can start downloading at 17:00 GMT…..
The Library in the New Age
Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google? More by Robert Darnton at the NYRB.
Are Newspapers Doomed?
Throughout the week assorted writers, journalists, bloggers, and media scholars will discuss and debate the state of newspapers in the digital age on Britannica’s blog forum.
Monday, April 7:
Nicholas Carr: “The Great Unbundling: Newspapers & the Net“
Clay Shirky: “What Newspapers & Journalism Need Now: Experimentation, not Nostalgia“
Tuesday, April 8:
Jay Rosen: “Newspapers & the Net: Where’s the Business Model, People?“
Jon Talton: “When I Hear the Term ‘Citizen Journalist,’ I Reach For My Pistol!“
Wednesday, April 9:
Charles M. Madigan: “Why Almost Everyone is Wrong About Newspapers & the Internet“
Mary Stuckey: “How Online News Saved Political Rhetoric“
Thursday, April 10:
Colette Bancroft: “Reading Ain’t Dead: Books, Newspapers, and the Net“
Friday, April 11:
Caryle Murphy: “Foreign Correspondents & the Information Revolution“
Jennifer Saba: “Look at the Numbers: Why Print Will Continue to Matter to Newspapers“
Another thing to read next week and a subject I already made some comments on.
Wikipedia: The Missing Manual
Nicholson Baker has penned a comprehensive, if tongue in cheek, history of the charms of Wikipedia in the New York Review of Books this month: charting its journey from the beautiful idea a collective, not-for-profit resource, to the scourge of deletionists and the onset of wiki-vandalism.
Better Than Free
Kevin Kelly, one of the most intelligent Internet enthusiasts in the USA, gives a glimpse of his forthcoming book, which tackles the question of how the culture industry can survive when everything on the internet can be copied for free. “If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies? I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus: When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.” In Kevin Kelly’s blog Technium you can watch his “Book in Progress.”
24.be
The first Belgian news portal: 24.be. Ever wish you could get all of your favorite websites, blogs, news, weather, maps, address books, to do lists, email accounts, social networks, radio stations, search engines, instant messengers, video and photo networks – all of your favorite things in one place ? It’s of course not the first one doing something like this if you look beyond the borders of Belgium. First impression: easy to customize and pretty complete. Perhaps I will try this out a bit more. Not sure thou if it’s a good idea to have all of this on a single web page (with tabs, yes). The more you put on a single page, the less focus you have.
The fuel of the internet
While bloggers and print journalists lock horns over media hierarchies and journalistic standards, Web 2.0 is making Google a noiseless fortune. Full text (German – English)
Some quotes…
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…the web is a hotbed of journalistic haste, impassiveness, and superficiality. Its “iconographic extremism” threatens the culture of writing. From the depths of decentrality rises the “infection” of poor content. (according to Frank Schirrmacher from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)
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In traditional media, content is first filtered and then published. On the Internet, things are often the other way around.
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Google’s business model for its end consumers is “noiseless,” to formulate it carefully. (Google earns money from their Internet searches without the user realizing this)
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The economic ideal to which Web 2.0 aspires is a “market for one.” This means dealing in highly personalized goods, which possess the great economic advantage of having their prices individually determined by the readiness of the consumer to pay. This allows for the optimal exploitation of a market. This is what actually lies behind personalization and mass customization. (see paper by Hal Varian*)
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Google has an equally strong interest in freely available content on the net as the auto industry has in reasonably priced petrol. (a complementary goods theory)
* Hal Varian, although (?) now chief economist of Google, is a highly respected Professor of Economics, who I have encountered for the first time while studying microeconomics at the university (remember this book ?). He is also a central academic in the economics of information technology and the information economy.
Borges prefigured the World Wide Web
Did Borges prefigure the World Wide Web ?
The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges might seem an unlikely candidate for Man Who Discovered the Internet. A fusty sort who from the 1930s through the 1950s spent much of his time as a chief librarian, Borges (1899-1986) valued printed books as artifacts and not just for the words they contained. He frequently set his stories in a pretechnological past and was easily enthralled by the authority of ancient texts. Continue…
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