the Internet is at version 10.0.0.4
Monday, December 28th, 2009
Whew! That’s good to know!
Friday, April 24th, 2009
By this time I’m certain everybody whom this news is important to has heard that GeoCities will be closing down later this year (reports Yahoo!, who owns GeoCities).
With the closing of GeoCities there is the little death of a piece of the Internet. GeoCities has been around since 1994 and I think I was one of the first 3,000 people to sign up, I shit you not.
Way before Tripod or Angelfire I was dumping data on my GeoCities account, in an early attempt to organize net-connected music and counter-culture activists in the St. Louis scene. I was a freshman in high school and actively involved with anarchist and socialist circles in St. Louis, and used the birthing Internet as a way to connect with like-minded thinkers and activists all over the country; I set up a page for the St. Louis chapter of the Industrial Workers of the World, and my name can still be found littered in the source code as the mailto contact:
See the original page still hosted on “Capitol Hill” – link here. Check out all the links I made!
in 1996 I helped coordinate the General Assembly of the Wobblies in St. Louis and used the Internet as a primary form of communication with activists travelling to the city, and assisted with lodging, special diets, etc. By the time of the Assembly I think I had migrated everything to a hosted ($) account, but still maintained the GeoCities pages as a way for old incoming links to find their way forward. The Internet was there to help.
So when GeoCities shuts down and eventually purges all of those pages, a little bit of me will die with it.
It’s an odd feeling, but one must acknowledge that like all things in life, nothing lasts forever. and 15 years – more than half my life – is a good time for that one page to be online, alive! Since then I’ve lost three pets, numerous family members and friends, graduated college, lived abroad, and made love to a lady from nearly every continent (except Antarctica, but seriously, who is from Antarctica?)! So GeoCities I’ll sure miss you. You helped connect me and us and helped birth what eventually became this wonderful Internet of ours.
…
The death of GeoCities also makes me reflect briefly on the “use” of the Internet. In 1996 a lot of people were hesitant to embrace the Internet as a tool or form of communication. Now we’d find it difficult to live without it. I’m thinking now of arguments by reactionaries against resources like Facebook, Twitter, even Flickr. Why do people resist what will only help aid them in their quest to organize people, develop an audience and a community, and eventually raise publicity and awareness and possibly even make some income along the way? Why?
GeoCities is Dead! Long Live GeoCities!
Wednesday, December 20th, 2006
So I just had a weird case of internet coincidence.
Where I work, we have presented a few talks by Mike Godwin, who is currently a research fellow at Yale University. Anyhow, I was trolling through some of our archives, saw his name and that led me to look up something-or-other related to him; I don’t think I found what I was looking for, but I did find a wikipedia entry about an adage – Godwin’s Law – that he coined in 1990.
The law states:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
My first reaction was, ‘Cmon, Bollocks!’ I’ve been on the nets for a looooooong time now, and while I can admit seeing a good number of discussions and threads break down to this language and verbal assaults, I can’t say it’s a predominant aspect of online threads.
Then, a few hours later, while I was doing some browsing about a kinetic tower being built in Dubai, and was skimming through the comments, Godwin’s Law approached one. There it was. Some user registered their name as ‘English Spelling Nazi’ and proceeded to instruct another user about proper spelling, for which they were actually wrong! It breaks down that there was a typo in the original article (innocent mistake); a commenter corrected the spelling in their comment, saying ‘It is spelt ‘Rhythm” and demanded wiki access to the article (rude gesture)- the word ‘spelt’ is the correct past-participle of spell in the English (i.e. British) language, in American English it would be ‘spelled’; as this person was already correcting another person on their English, ‘English Spelling Nazi’ stepped in only to embarrass themselves (stupid twat), for which another user highlighted them for their mistake (congratulations!). So an innocent mistake led to a rude gesture which led to a stupid twat, for which somebody was congratulated!
The internet sho is weird, idinit?
Related websites:
Mike Godwin keeps a blog by the same title as his internet adage.
Wired article by Mike Godwin.
Friday, September 1st, 2006
so last night I went over to visit my friends Josh and Ashley at Ashley’s house on Carlsbad off South Gravois. we sat on their
upper porch for a few hours talking about crime in St. Louis, our run-ins with petty criminals, and attempted to call just about everyone in our mobile phones to offer an extra ticket to the Cardinals vs. Marlins game last night at Busch Stadium. There weren’t any takers.
They don’t know what they missed, because it was one of the best baseball games I have seen, ever.
Chris Duncan hit a first-pitch pinch-hit home run in the bottom of the eighth to tie the game 2-2 and began a four-run rally to put the Cardinals up 5-2! All four runs that inning were spectacularly played! And Duncan’s home run was a firecracker. The instant you heard the crack of the bat you knew it was out of the park!
But all the while, what was going through my head was how to organize my digital photos. Earlier in the day I was searching through google links for the means to better organize and tag photos. I use and am a very strong proponent of Picasa, a Google technology. But even Picasa has limitations. Such as the photos above-linked: do I put them in a ‘Friends’ folder for Josh and Ash; in a ‘Cardinals’ folder for the baseball game; or under the rubric ‘St. Louis Trip 2006′ for everything from this trip, and have to visually search for photos therein when I need to? Perhaps the latter makes the most sense now, but I’m not so sure of that even, especially if I wind up taking over 600 photos on this trip, which is looking very likely — how do I find that one photo of Ashley in the crowd of the baseball game?
So one of the first links I stumbled upon in my searches was this post over at the official Google Blog where they mention recently acquiring Neven Vision and their technology which is potentially capable of scanning images and extracting information for you, to heighten search functionality.
I thought, “That’s great” and found it ironic that Google was already pre-eminating this psychological concern among digital photo enthusiasts. But of course they were!! They’re Google!
But then I got wondering about Neven Vision, and who they actually are. My searches were quick and futile, and it shows how when Google acquires technology they really move fast:
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