Friday Video: Who Broke the Internet? with Tim Wu

Actually, just audio this week.

Posted in Audio Tagged with: internet, technology

Friday Video: History Channel Presents The Internet

Posted in Internet, video Tagged with: history, internet

Throwback Thursday: Using the Internet as a Reference Tool

This wasn’t my first book, but was my first book for librarians. Published by Neal-Schuman in June 2001, there is still a copy available on Amazon. It’s yours for the low price of $63.65

Posted in Writing Tagged with: #TBT, internet, publishing

Triangulation #92: Cory Doctorow

Journalist, science fiction author and co-editor of Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow, is this week’s guest. (Published on Feb 27, 2013)

Posted in video Tagged with: authors, corydoctorow, internet, twit

Why Data Caps Suck: The Animated Examination

via Boing Boing

Posted in video Tagged with: internet, isp

Triangulation 58: Doc Searls

Doc Searls longtime advocate for open-source software, talks to us about his new book The Intention Economy, and more.

Posted in video Tagged with: cluetrain, economics, internet, triangulation, twit

BookThing #4: The Shallows

For this month’s book thing I read The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr and to be honest I was expecting to be a text that I would disagree with page after page similar to books like Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur. But, surprisingly, I found myself not only understanding Carr’s arguments but agreeing with him more often than not. There are just some times you can’t easily argue with the science.

I still want to be careful however and not say that I agree with all of his conclusions. Ok, computers and the Internet may be changing the way our brains operate but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Well, maybe my opinion is more subtle than that. Yes, as Carr states, all technology changes us, whether is be as something as complex as a computer or as simple as a hammer. What worries me though is that one might be tempted, after reading this book, to assume that all change is bad. There are always those that worry that change will lead to the end of something, maybe even humanity itself. And, I suppose that being concerned isn’t necessarily bad either. Mostly, I just feel that this book placed his concerns in a well-deserved context, and that by being aware of those concerns we can make better choices in the future.

I’m sorry if this review seemed a bit rambling, but I’ve been mulling over what to say for a few days now and I’m still got a bit more thinking to do about this book, but I knew I needed to get these thoughts down before I moved on to some other projects.

As a footnote, I did listen to the audio version of this book instead of “reading” it. I do wonder what Mr. Carr would think of that…

Posted in Learning 2.0 Tagged with: bookreview, brain, computers, internet

Internet 2009 in numbers

The folks at Royal Pingdom have gathered a bunch of interesting stats about the Internet in the year that has recently passed. Head on over to the full article for all the numbers but here’s a sample of the ones I found particularly interesting:

• 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
• 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
• 47 million – Added websites in 2009.
• 8% – The increase in domain names since the year before.
• 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
• 18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
• 738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.
• 252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
• 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 350 million – People on Facebook.
• 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
• 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
• 148,000 – New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc.)

Tagged with: internet, statistics

The Internet at vintage book covers

Via PlanetOddity:

How would it have been if today’s popular internet websites and their web applications were artistically reinvented and designed as the 1960s book covers, so as to provide an insight into how these social networking sites may look if they were designed about 40 or 50 years ago? This innovating and enthralling series of images, in fact throw light on the illustrator’s creative thinking-process. The famous French autodidact graphic designer Stephane Massa-Bidal whose leading concept known as “Retrofuturs” (a mix of past, present and future), normally creates his designs with a minimalist approach and a retro touch.

Tagged with: books, internet

What is a browser?

I view this as job security…

Posted in video Tagged with: internet, video, youtube