"To us, the Web is a sort of shared external memory. We do not have to remember unnecessary details: dates, sums, formulas, clauses, street names, detailed definitions. It is enough for us to have an abstract, the essence that is needed to process the information and relate it to others. Should we need the details, we can look them up within seconds. Similarly, we do not have to be experts in everything, because we know where to find people who specialise in what we ourselves do not know, and whom we can trust. People who will share their expertise with us not for profit, but because of our shared belief that information exists in motion, that it wants to be free, that we all benefit from the exchange of information. Every day: studying, working, solving everyday issues, pursuing interests. We know how to compete and we like to do it, but our competition, our desire to be different, is built on knowledge, on the ability to interpret and process information, and not on monopolising it."

"what’s important here is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone. The real story is not the invention. It is the platform that makes the invention sing. Zuckerberg didn’t invent that platform. He was a hacker (a term of praise) who built for it. … just at the moment when we celebrate the product of these two wonders—Zuckerberg and the Internet—working together, policymakers are conspiring ferociously with old world powers to remove the conditions for this success. As “network neutrality” gets bargained away—to add insult to injury, by an administration that was elected with the promise to defend it—the opportunities for the Zuckerbergs of tomorrow will shrink. And as they do, we will return more to the world where success depends upon permission. And privilege. And insiders. And where fewer turn their souls to inventing the next great idea."

"By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto pyramid scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!""

"Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will "bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology." We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing. Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them."

"the vast majority of both consumers and video professionals don't know: ALL modern video cameras and camcorders that shoot in h.264 or mpeg2, come with a license agreement that says that you can only use that camera to shoot video for "personal use and non-commercial" purposes (go on, read your manuals)."

One of the best posts of 2010: "The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it. Subject to violent compression, Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, though a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex—agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on. Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost."

Browser market share infographic "reminiscent of the Firefox logo, ...freaky in the best possible way" says @bjepson

"Reassuring people about privacy makes them more, not less, concerned. It's called "privacy salience", and Leslie John, Alessandro Acquisti, and George Loewenstein – all at Carnegie Mellon University – demonstrated this in a series of clever experiments. In one, subjects completed an online survey consisting of a series of questions about their academic behaviour – "Have you ever cheated on an exam?" for example. Half of the subjects were first required to sign a consent warning – designed to make privacy concerns more salient – while the other half did not. Also, subjects were randomly assigned to receive either a privacy confidentiality assurance, or no such assurance. When the privacy concern was made salient (through the consent warning), people reacted negatively to the subsequent confidentiality assurance and were less likely to reveal personal information."

"The early R.F.C.’s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, although the latter quickly became the most common. Less important than the content of those first documents was that they were available free of charge and anyone could write one. Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard."

hilarious. i <3 matt

damning indictment of today's advertising situation

"a synchronization application for GNOME. It allows you to synchronize your files, photos, emails, contacts, notes, calendar data and any other type of personal information and synchronize that data with another computer, an online service, or even another electronic device."

"Well, the new Akamaized Copilot seems to get about 100% more throughput going from Boston to Los Angeles. More importantly, our exhaustive scientific experiments using beakers and chemicals and graph paper and slide rules proved that the usability of Copilot jumped from “tolerable” to “pretty snappy.”"

The three main innovations are HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol); URLs (universal resource locators, which Tim originally referred to as URIs, for universal resource indicators); and HTML (hypertext markup language). HTTP allows you to click on a link and be brought to that document or Web page. URLs serve as an address for finding that document or page. And HTML gives you the ability to put links in documents and pages so they connect. Tim created all three of these pieces of software code from October to December of 1990.

"In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized-- connected "up" to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding. I will try to explain why."

* Google homepage (the unified interface codenamed "Grand Prix") - http://www.google.com/m/gp * Google Apps homepage - http://www.google.com/m/a/YOUR_DOMAIN * iGoogle - http://www.google.com/ig/i * Gmail - http://mail.google.com/mail/x/gdlakb-/gp/ * Google Calendar - http://www.google.com/calendar/gp * Google Reader - http://www.google.com/reader/i/ * Google Docs - http://docs.google.com/m?iphone=true * Google Talk - http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/m * Google News - http://www.google.com/m/news/i

"a free set of web tools to help anyone determine if their net connection is blocking or throttling BitTorrent or otherwise limits their bandwidth. The Glasnost tool determines how your ISP is handling BitTorrent traffic and gives a readout on whether it's being denied, throttled, or otherwise impaired. Network Diagnostic Tool covers other problems that might affect your upload or download speeds. And the Network Path and Application Diagnosis tries to reveal the routing, network tools, and other "last mile" issues that affect net performance. The tests are fairly simple, and each seems to require a working Java plugin to run. The Glasnost test, for instance, creates a fake BitTorrent stream between your connection point and the test's servers, then monitors what happens to the packets.

"What are these renegade cybergeeks doing at the New York Times? Maybe saving it."

Why the iPhone could hurt the future of the internet or: "Despite the internet’s runaway success, its future is anything but clear. So says Jonathan Zittrain, professor of internet governance at Oxford University. He explains why the very devices and applications that have enabled internet ubiquity may now be limiting innovation."

"I plead guilty to Kamla's charge: I think about the web as experienced on a PC, and then about mobile as an add on. The tipping point has come; that notion has to flip: if we're trying to get ahead of the curve, we need to think first about the phone, and then think about the PC browser experience as the add-on. "

Free application GPass helps you bypass censorship and blocked web sites by tunneling network traffic through encrypted proxy servers. After you install GPass, launching an application using the proxy is as simple as double-clicking the app from inside the GPass interface. GPass will launch the program with all the necessary tunneling in place. (via:lifehacker)

oogle's real-time ad auction is the heart of their economic engine. Their stroke of genius, which gave them their seemingly insuperable lead over the other search engines in ad monetization, was to understand that selling the top ad position to the highest bidder was actually leaving money on the table. Given that advertisers only pay for clicks, Google realized that if they could project the likely click-rate on an ad, they could sell top position to the best combination of price and click rate. A $5 cpc ad clicked on 3x as often as a $10 cpc ad will make $15. By instrumenting, measuring, and responding to the click rate, Google made ad auctions smarter - through harnessing implicit user contribution.

"In 2010, bandwidth access will get cheaper, faster and easier for most of the world. O3b Networks is building a new telecommunications infrastructure offering low-latency links from 1 Mbps to 10 Gbps for core trunking, instant fiber-path restoration and 3G Cellular backhaul. Lowering access costs, increasing availability and bridging the digital divide, O3b Networks will enable emerging-market operators and Internet service providers to make the Internet a truly global and ubiquitous experience."

"Walter Benajmin believed that modern media permitted a revolution in perception that made us prey to dictators and false gods. He might have been talking about Facebook." "the difference between "follow[ing] with the eye, while resting on a summer afternoon, a mountain range on the horizon" and experiencing that same mountain range at a remove (imagine a picture postcard) makes it harder to appreciate the real thing ("Gosh, this mountain is beautiful! Just like a postcard!"), social-media technologies are creating simulacra of social connection, facsimiles of friendship. By ignoring that difference, as Shirky mostly does, we keep moving heedlessly toward a future where the basic human social activities that these new technologies are modeled on--talking, being introduced to new people by friends--are threatened."

having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well.

A federal judge has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom its records of which users watched which videos on YouTube

Blogger-based blog that showcases blogs that never made it past one post.

allows two peers behind two separate NATs with NO port forwarding and NO DMZ setup on their routers to directly communicate with each other.

"When ever you get a mobile phone you replace plans with co-ordination." Shirky (semi-transcribed notes, as the podcast was miserably recorded)

not sure how i forgot to tag this earlier. a riff on how today's sitcom is the social lubricant that gin was in the industrial revolution

iruses, spam, identity theft, crashes: all of these were the consequences of a certain freedom built into the generative PC. As these problems grow worse, for many the promise of security is enough reason to give up that freedom

living in the 21st century requires understanding what people think, feel and want in different parts of the world, given that both the challenges and opportunities of next several decades are global, not local ones.

"Sometimes an idea is so awesomely stupid, it passes through a conceptual looking-glass and becomes stupidly awesome." (via: woot) Icanhasmanbabies?

presents the original URL rather than taking you there (via a cookie pref).

on the events leading up to and the birth of the EFF

checks whether you have known vulnerabilities in your applications

"We're transferring our intelligence into the machine, and the machine is transferring its way of thinking into us." (also a good Kubrick observation)

reverse whois

the cloud is the belated arrival of massively parallel computing

finding out if your port forwarding is setup correctly or if your server applications are being blocked by a firewall

''Everyone thought that McLuhan was talking about TV, but what he was really talking about was the Internet -- two decades before it appeared,''

Someday some of the most important information on earth will be information that is NOT connected to the global internet.

excellent explanation!

a quick tour through some of the most fascinating archives on the web.

an extension to your Firefox browser that will keep trying to reach that website in the background while you continue surfing on other websites. When the website is accessible again, Mr Uptime will let you know. You can also use Mr Uptime when a website r

with Yoomba, every email address becomes a phone or messenger

If enough Internet users begin to prefer PCs and other devices designed along the locked-down lines of tethered appliances, that change will tip the balance in a long-standing tug of war from a generative system open to dramatic change to a more stable, l

With this service you can create a temporary e-mail address that will forward all incoming mail to your usual e-mail address.

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies

'The "well-informed citizenry" is in danger of becoming the "well-amused audience."' By Al Gore. "The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that re

a non-profit organization that has worked since the late 1980s to help develop and deploy networking technology in various projects throughout Asia/Pacific, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, and the New Independent States

"America is defined by a set of ideals: free speech, democratic deliberation and, after a too-long struggle, equality of all citizens. But power has made our nation different. The 20th century has seen a great concentration of power and control."

By going after someone for stealing your content, you are protecting the millions of others who let it slide.

increased connectivity in the 18th century - through scientific journals, postal mail, the advent of the encyclopedia and other reference works - is an increased connection between two different types of knowledge, “propositional” and “prescriptive

takes HTML pages normally viewed on a computer and translates them so that you can see them in mobile browsers

a better DNS, free to all. OpenDNS uses its distributed network of DNS servers to speed up your Internet experience, increase reliability, improve security and make DNS smarter for users all over the world.

call phones from your web browser (5 mins free, reg for 10 per day)

Tell me when that overloaded web page is available

(!!!REPLACE ALL CAPS "DOMAIN" AND "ORG"!!!) RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.DOMAIN\.ORG$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://DOMAIN.ORG/$1 [R=301,L]

Strait-laced, just deserts, shoo-in, fount of knowledge, free rein, sleight of hand, fazed by, buck naked, vocal cords

WebMon is a freeware web page update monitoring program - it saves you time and keeps you updated by automatically checking web pages to see if they have changed.