How the Internet looked back in the olden days

This is an actual image from the McDonald’s corporate website back in 1996

I find it quite odd talking to teenagers today since the are truly the internet generation. So much is it a part of our daily routine that it’s difficult to think back to BI – Before Internet.

I first “surfed” the internet back in 1994 during my university days. I was already familiar with computers and programs such as Word Perfect, but the internet was something new. The terminals at my school library were hooked up to the internet, but it was still text-based meaning no images, and a lot of tabbing and hitting “enter” since the mouse wasn’t all that useful. Most time in those days was spent on Usenet.

The following year our computers got an upgrade and the world wide web came alive. Images flashed on our screens, and always very slowly…..waiting for objects to load was par for the course. The search engine of choice was AltaVista (yes, this was pre-Google) and your website options were quite limited.

Here is a presentation of what the internet looked like in 1996. You’ll notice how primitive sites were and how aesthetically unappealing they could be. It’s a great collection courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

Digital Disinformation – a growing threat to us all

Disinformation, whether intentional or unintentional quickly spreads across the internet

The threat of tiny black holes slowly swallowing up Earth as the Large Hadron Collider was switched on last week led to many jokes across the internet involving dumb eggheads with a death wish. Not everyone was laughing. The man credited with inventing the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has expressed concern at how his creation allows for the lightning fast dissemination of disinformation across the globe. He particularly highlighted how the notion that our world is in jeopardy from the LHC spread so quickly through the media yet was demonstrated to be false.

In response to the danger of false information finding a safe home on the internet, Berners-Lee is launching a foundation:

The Foundation will brand sites that it has found to be trustworthy and reliable sources of information.

For those of us familiar with the internet and its ways, the elasticity of truth and its blurred lines with falsehood is no great surprise. To counter disinformation, companies like Reputation Hawk have sprung up, promising to fix your online reputation whether you’re a business or an individual:

If you or your company is getting bashed on the net – they can evidently ‘fix’ it. But they don’t contact the owners of the offending web sites which is what we immediately assumed, instead they focus on pushing the negative information off of the first few pages in Google. This new field is known as internet reputation management or online reputation management.

The free flow of information heralded by the internet age has had its drawbacks as we’ve noted already. Both Berners-Lee and Reputation Hawk consider vigilance to be the key to countering damaging information or disinfo that finds a very fertile atmosphere in the virtual world.

Hello, my name is ******* and I’m an internet addict

Why is this page taking sooooo long to f*****g load?!!!!!!

If you’re like me your hours spent in front of the television are pretty much down to zero….but that’s because you’re spending hours in front of the computer on the internet. With the days of dial-up internet and slow loading pages consigned to the electronic dustbin of history, easy access to entertainment, mass communication, and learning thanks to high speed broadband has left us addicted. Source for news? The internet. Source for music? The internet. Source for finding where that new flick is playing? Why, the internet of course!

Very cheap and very accessible, the internet has come to dominate our lives in a way simply not possible to understand two decades ago. Think back to university when researching and being forced to dig through moldy stacks of books for sources on an essay about the French Revolution. Think back to booking a vacation by visiting a travel agent and putting your trip in their hands. Think back about combing through the yellow pages to make a dinner reservation at a restaurant. The internet has made so many things so much easier by placing information at the tips of our worn fingers attached to our carpal-tunneled hands.

e-mail response time and what it says about you

how do you respond to e-mails?

In an age of instant communication many are accustomed to prompt response when sending a message to others. Unfortunately for some, a prompt response isn’t always a certainty.

How quickly do you respond to e-mails? Dr. Karen Renaud of the University of Glasgow tells us that people break down into three groups when replying to e-mails: relaxed, driven, and stressed.

Women, in particular, felt more pressure to respond quickly to a new email than men, she said.

‘The relaxed group don’t let email exert any pressure on their lives,’ Dr Renaud, an expert in computer science, said.

‘They treat it exactly the way that one would treat the mail: “I’ll fetch it, I’ll deal with it in my own time, but I’m not going to let it upset me”.

‘The second group felt “driven” to keep on top of email, but also felt that they could cope with it. The third group, however, reacted negatively to the pressure of email.

read the rest here

Why the Internet Makes Identity Theft So Easy

Identity theft is much easier than you might imagine

We humans being the most social of animals leads us to constantly talk about ourselves (some more than others, some much, much more) no matter how mundane or trivial the actual subject can be. New technology such as the internet has only facilitated this urge to speak about ourselves even more in the form of social networking sites.

In a previous post here at vodka/soda we discussed some of the dangers of social networking sites on the internet. One of the most costly dangers is identity theft, a theft made much easier by the amount of personal information available about ourselves and made available by ourselves (and websites) on the web.

Herbert H. Thompson, a professor of computer science and a software developer, shows us how easy it is to steal a person’s identity just by mining data on the internet in: How I Stole Someone’s Identity. Here’s a quote from the article:

I asked some of my acquaintances, people I know only casually, if with their permission and under their supervision I could break into their online banking accounts. After a few uncomfortable pauses, some agreed. The goal was simple: get into their online banking account by using information about them, their hobbies, their families and their lives freely available online. To be clear, this isn’t hacking or exploiting vulnerabilities, instead it’s mining the Internet for nuggets of personal data.

The Globalisation of Hip

“Hip” now moves faster and has more “sameness” thanks to globalisation

We can trot out cliches about globalisation like “the world is a global village” all day long, but in my opinion this current trend can be described as the “great leveler”. Globalisation has seen money move to places where the quickest profits can be made only to see it abandon those places once they found a more profitable location elsewhere. In the meantime, the world is becoming more similar from location to location as people consume the same products, are wearing the same clothes, and are exposed to the same culture.

Globalisation is also affecting Hipster culture as trends now move more quickly and with more force than they once did. Previously what was cool in New York wasn’t necessarily cool in Helsinki….but now what’s cool in Paris can be what’s cool in Buenos Aires in a matter of weeks. Tim Walker explores the globalisation of hip in: Meet the Global Scenster. Here’s an excerpt:

“Trends aren’t transmitted hierarchically, as they used to be,” explains Martin Raymond, co-founder of The Future Laboratory, a trend forecasting company. “They’re now transmitted laterally and collaboratively via the internet. You once had a series of gatekeepers in the adoption of a trend: the innovator, the early adopter, the late adopter, the early mainstream, the late mainstream, and finally the conservative. But now it goes straight from the innovator to the mainstream.”

The global scenester stays on top of what’s cool worldwide by reading such urban culture despatches as The Cool Hunter, a blog begun in Sydney four years ago by Bill Tikos, which reports on the hippest fashion, furniture, and design culture. The Cool Hunter has more than 600,000 unique visitors per month, who pore over the contents of its licensed offshoots in the US, UK, Turkey, Italy, China, and Japan. Its global audience allows Tikos to homogenise cool worldwide.

4 Search Engines for a Better Wikipedia Experience

Wikipedia – the world’s most popular collaborative website

Are you a Wikipedia junkie like I am? I’ll spend hours bouncing from page to page never once completing a destination that I first intended but still having a great time throughout the entire journey. This site also uses wikipedia as a source for many of the hyperlinks that you find embedded throughout the posts.

I just came across a great article that lists four search engines for wikipedia. One of the links offered is Similpedia:

Similipedia is one of the best Wikipedia search engines available. Not only is it extremely accurate and effective, it has a completely different approach to search. Instead of typing in a query, e.g. computers, you are asked to copy and paste a URL or a paragraph containing at least 100 words. Just press “enter” and let it go to work.

I decided to try copying and pasting the first two paragraphs of Tina’s article on Adobe Reader. The result were articles on Wikipedia ranging from Adobe Acrobat, PDF, to a comparison of e-book formats – all of which were relevant. Similpedia just added a new widget to their website that allows you to add code to your website and Similpedia will automatically add relevant Wikipedia articles. They have other widgets that include: a Firefox add-on, bookmarklet, contextual RSS as well as a WordPress widget for similar content. I highly recommend trying them all out.

Read about the other three search engines at this link.

25 Internet Startups that didn’t make it

Big ideas with big money backing them couldn’t turn these sites into winners

It was only a little over a decade ago that we were told the internet would completely revolutionize how we would shop, read, interact, learn, invest, and smell. Maybe the order was a tall one and maybe the internet didn’t replace our traditional methods of doing all of these things, but it certainly has given us more options. The 1990s saw the proliferation of websites devoted to e-commerce of one sort or another as well as e-applications. These resulted in the dot.com boom that became a dot.com fizzle as everyone tried to tap into this new online market for their products and services. From Homer Simpson and his Compuglobalhypermeganet Systems to The Onion’s e-graters.com, everyone was taking a swipe at the hysteria.

Some sites have managed to survive and thrive, ebay.com and amazon.com being the two most notable.

The Business Pundit lists for us the top 25 Internet Startups that didn’t make it. All your favourites are there, including pets.com, etoys.com, and the spam-friendly lycos.com.

Speaking of which, whatever happened to these guys?

The Birth of Cuil

Cuil is ready to take google on head-to-head

Google.

A name which meant nothing several years ago is now not only a noun, but a verb as well. And it’s one that has transformed our daily lives. Books have been written about google and whether or not it’s making us smarter or turning us into attention-deficit dummies. Google has anchored itself atop the food chain of search engines on the internet and has been challenging Microsoft for some time now as the largest and most important IT company in the world.

However, google now has a challenger in the search engine sweepstakes: ladies and gentlemen, meet Cuil (pronounced “cool”). It was launched earlier today and boasts an incredible 120 billion plus websites in its index, thus outnumbering google who some time ago stopped publishing their index figures.

On Cuil:

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.

The end result is Cuil, pronounced “cool.” Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers – Russell Power and Louis Monier – searched for better ways to search.

Now, it’s boasting time.

For starters, Cuil’s search index spans 120 billion Web pages.

Patterson believes that’s at least three times the size of Google’s index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index’s breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.

Cuil won’t divulge the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web with far fewer computers than Google. And Google isn’t ceding the point: Spokeswoman Katie Watson said her company still believes its index is the largest.

It’s been a very bumpy day one for Cuil with problems like their servers not being able to handle the loads and with a lot of search results showing spam that any decent site would filter out. However, Rome wasn’t built in a day and google could use the competition.

Cyber-Nationalism: Fighting Wars Online

“No way man, the EU is waaaayyyy better than the USA!!!!”

Conflict amongst humans first arose on land. It quickly spread its way to sea. Several millenia later, it made it into the air above us thanks to the invention of the Wright Brothers. Less than a century after the successful takeoff at Kitty Hawk, conflict is being fought on the fourth frontier, the internet.

For those of us familiar with usenet back in the 1990s, warfare was being waged on all sorts of newsgroups as such soc.culture.israel and soc.culture.yugoslavia. Fast forward a few years and internet forums played host to conflicts not only current, but centuries old. The rise of web 2.0 has seen these battles move onto new battlefields, from YouTube to Facebook.

The Economist takes a look at this new battleground in: Cyber-nationalism – the brave new world of e-hatred.

A quick excerpt:

But e-arguments also led to hacking wars. Nobody is surprised to hear of Chinese assaults on American sites that promote the Tibetan cause; or of hacking contests between Serbs and Albanians, or Turks and Armenians. A darker development is the abuse of blogs, social networks, maps and video-sharing sites that make it easy to publish incendiary material and form hate groups. A study published in May by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human-rights group, found a 30% increase last year in the number of sites that foment hatred and violence; the total was around 8,000.

Social networks are particularly useful for self-organised nationalist communities that are decentralised and lack a clear structure. On Facebook alone one can join groups like “Belgium Doesn’t Exist”, “Abkhazia is not Georgia”, “Kosovo is Serbia” or “I Hate Pakistan”. Not all the news is bad; there are also groups for friendship between Greeks and Turks, or Israelis and Palestinians. But at the other extreme are niche networks, less well-known than Facebook, that unite the sort of extremists whose activities are restricted by many governments but hard to regulate when they go global. Podblanc, a sort of alternative YouTube for “white interests, white culture and white politics” offers plenty of material to keep a racist amused.

LivePlasma – a great free web application to find music and movies that you like

LivePlasma is incredibly user friendly search engine for music and movies

I’m pretty sure that you’re like me in the sense that all your media these days is in digital form, whether on CDs/DVDs or on external hard drives. It’s quite convenient from user space point of view especially when you live in a downtown condo, but the lack of tactility makes it difficult to keep a running list of what you have in your head, whether it be movies or music. And if you’re like me, you like to explore and find new music or new movies based on tastes that you already have. For instance, being a fan of Broken Social Scene led me to bands like Manitoba and TV on the Radio. However this process was a purely accidental one, resulting from luck.

I’ve recently come across a free web application called LivePlasma which takes the luck out of the equation and gives you results fast and free. All you need to do is go to the site (it doesn’t require registration) and type in the name of an artist or actor or movie and LivePlasma will automatically give you dozens of options of bands or films that fit within that genre. Let me show you:

Google: making our generation a dumb generation

Some claim that Google is killing our ability to concentrate by chronically distracting us

The internet was supposed to bring us libraries of knowledge at the first click of a mouse. It has, but many aren’t using it. Instead, we’re wasting our time on distractions such as social networks or throwaway video clips on YouTube. We might be bad, but teens are even worse:

But this isn’t the informational paradise dreamt of by Bill Gates and Google: 90% of sites visited by teenagers are social networks. They are immersed not in knowledge but in “gossip and social banter”.

“They don’t,” says Bauerlein, “grow up.” They are “living off the thrill of peer attention. Meanwhile, their intellects refuse the cultural and civic inheritance that has made us what we are now”.

As for us on the wrong side of 30, this new technology is affecting our ability to focus on simple tasks as we attempt to take on too much at the same time. Multitasking may be a myth. We are finding ourselves scanning and skimming, not taking time to absorb the information given to us.

Nicholas Carr asks the important question Is Google making us stupid? He has a very good point. Now, I’m off to read some texts on my blackberry :)