Link Banana

Google Blogscoped shares (of all things) a comic book explaining Google new browser initiative. I wasn’t expecting much from the book, but it’s really quite good. It offers plain-spoken explications of all that they’ve tried to do with browser. Now I just want to try it out.

UPDATE (9/2/08): It’s now available for Windows XP and Vista. I’m using it to write this update and have to say that it’s pretty smooth. It seems faster than Firefox 3, but then it’s also not been running with 20 tabs open for three days. Oh, and there is, as promised, (at least) one system-visable process running for every open tab.

Andrew Simone points to a piece of internet history.

…on Wikipedia. And enjoyed it. An interesting story:

Why I was compelled to be the one to change it, I couldn’t tell you, but that’s what I did. I added a “2008” as an ending date on his tenure at the show. I changed everything else to the past tense. And I did so post-haste.

I don’t know if the impulse was the same as the one that compelled that NBC subcontractor to go out and kill Tim Russert on Wikipedia. But I can tell you that it didn’t stem from a desire to make sure that the public was well-informed.

No, it was more like the primal instinct that makes people shout “First!” on online forums, a recognition of the improbable act of stumbling across a special place at just the right time. After I had done my duty, dozens of others piled on, tweaking, retweaking, fixing and updating until my work was moot. But I got to that particular page first, and that left me ever-so-slightly chuffed.

(via Fimoculous)

I noticed two interesting things on Google today, so I thought I’d share.

• Google has a new favicon. They’ve switched from the big G to the little one. I like it. (via DF)
• Maps on searches for country names and cities. Now when I want to know where Zambia is, I no longer have click through to Wikipedia to know.

Further proving that I’m a sucker for cool presentation of data that serve no practical purpose: another in a recursive series about mapping the blogosphere. The coolest visuals are at the bottom, some analysis is here.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

This is rather silly, but I like it.

It appears that the few-commercials honeymoon that TV-on-the-internet has enjoyed is closer to ending:

“Disney-ABC Television Group will begin conducting research next week on inserting multiple commercials into ad breaks for primetime series on its broadband player,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. “Upping the ad load would amount to the most aggressive move yet from ABC.com in its quest to draw as much ad revenue.”

Clay Shirky’s pedaling some of the most interesting ideas about the internet and collaboration I’ve ever heard. This speech/essay is probably nearly as good as his Bloggingheads appearance.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some fancy sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message — I can do that, too — is a big change.

EDIT (4/28/2008): If video’s more your thing, Blip.tv now has that.

I’ve heard a lot in the last year about how the growing distribution of video and other big files over the internet will effectively kill the thing. The Economist’s Tech.view columnist is not sold on the idea:

While neither the DSL nor the cable companies have beefed up their local connections as fast as the internet backbone operators have boosted their capacity, there’s still enough bandwidth over the last mile for current traffic. And soon there will be a whole lot more—at least for Verizon, Sprint and even Comcast.

The latest episode of Bloggingheads, a conversations between Will Wilkerson and Clay Shirky — author of the recent Here Comes Everybody — is fascinating. Truly the most interesting thing I’ve seen in well over a week.

I enjoy a piece of technology forecasting from time to time, and Joel Johnson offered an interesting one:

I never want to touch a piece of proprietary hardware to access content again. There’s no need! We’ll be able to stream HD content soon enough; in the interim, even these browser-based solutions could pre-fetch and cache it. The only reason companies like Blockbuster and Vudu want dedicated hardware is because it locks you into their service. They’re recreating the Blu-ray/HD DVD format war for streaming digital media. How silly is that?

Wake Up Later put together a sequence of what a number of high profile websites used to look like. It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but I’m a real sucker for this stuff.

(via kottke)

Related: Ben Tesch’s Magnetbox is nine today, and has a compilation of how it used to look.

I know there’ve been a lot of times when I thought this would be useful, and now it exists. A site to tell you if the problem with a certain website is on your end or their’s.

(via Daring Fireball)

kottke.org is ten today. I really enjoyed a look into it’s history, maybe you will too.

This argument’s been made thousands of times, but every once in a while I appreciate seeing it. Amy Goldwasser’s defense of the internet (and teenagers):

Kids today — we’re telling you! — don’t read, don’t write, don’t care about anything farther in front of them than their iPods. The Internet, according to 88-year-old Lessing (whose specialty is sturdy typewriters, or perhaps pens), has “seduced a whole generation into its inanities.”

Or is it the older generation that the Internet has seduced — into the inanities of leveling charges based on fear, ignorance and old-media, multiple-choice testing? So much so that we can’t see that the Internet is only a means of communication, and one that has created a generation, perhaps the first, of writers, activists, storytellers? When the world worked in hard copy, no parent or teacher ever begrudged teenagers who disappeared into their rooms to write letters to friends — or a movie review, or an editorial for the school paper on the first president they’ll vote for. Even 15-year-old boys are sharing some part of their feelings with someone out there.

This is very neat little video about how the internet began, and how it’s changed the nature of information. Well worth a look.

(via Gems Sty)

Catherine Price sets out to hide in plain sight for an entire week and found it far harder than you might think.

He laid out my basic tasks: Pay for everything in cash. Don’t use my regular cellphone, landline or e-mail account. Use an anonymizing service to mask my Web surfing. Stay away from government buildings and airports (too many surveillance cameras), and wear a hat and sunglasses to foil cameras I can’t avoid. Don’t use automatic toll lanes. Get a confetti-cut paper shredder for sensitive documents and junk mail. Sign up for the national do-not-call registry (ignoring, if you can, the irony of revealing your phone number and e-mail address to prevent people from contacting you), and opt out of prescreened credit offers. Don’t buy a plane ticket, rent a car, get married, have a baby, purchase land, start a business, go to a casino, use a supermarket loyalty card, or buy nasal decongestant. By the time I left Hoofnagle’s office, a week was beginning to sound like a very long time.

(via brijit)

The Economist — using the World Bank’s recent study — takes an interesting look at the way that technologies are adopted in developing counties, finding that they often arrive and are adopted by the elite, but rarely penetrate down to the majority of the citizenry. They also found that though cell phone have shown that some technology can jump in and leapfrog over infrastructure inadequacies, this is the exception not some new norm. But they do end on a hopeful note:

Yet it would be wrong to be gloomy about the technological outlook of emerging economies. The channels of technology transfer have widened enormously over the past ten years. Technological literacy has risen, especially among the young. But all this has helped emerging economies mainly in the first stage: absorption. The second stage—diffusion—has so far proved much more testing.

The Economist examines all the conspiracy theories surrounding the recent broken internet cables and decides that they probably don’t amount to more than a hill of beans.

It may be rare for several cables to go down in a week, but it can happen. Global Marine Systems, a firm that repairs marine cables, says more than 50 cables were cut or damaged in the Atlantic last year; big oceans are criss-crossed by so many cables that a single break has little impact. What was unusual about the damage in the Suez canal was that it took place at a point where two continents’ traffic is borne along only three cables. More are being laid. For the moment, there is only one fair conclusion: the internet is vulnerable, in places, but getting more robust.

This story was all over the blogs when I logged on this morning, but usually with knee-jerk reactions. As usual The Economist is more considered and more comprehensive.

Microsoft is desperate to grab a bigger share of the online-advertising market because many of its software products are being challenged by free, advertising-supported services offered by Google. The company is also worried that Google’s dominance in search and advertising allows it to dictate terms to advertisers, and gives it an unfair advantage over its smaller rivals. This is a bit rich coming from Microsoft, a convicted monopolist in operating-system software, which has also been known to squeeze out smaller competitors, but its anger that it has had to endure years of scrutiny by regulators, while Google has been left alone, is genuine.