Robert Topolski, chief technologist of the Open Technology Initiativesuggests that but for a quirk of history we might all be using Gopher instead of Tim Berners-Lee‘s World Wide Web:
By the 1990s, there was just about enough power to allow access to text and image-based files via the internet, and Tim Berners-Lee‘s World Wide Web was born.
But network administrators at the time preferred a streamlined text-only internet service, says Topolski, using something called the Gopher protocol.
He suggested that if those administrators had had access to data filtering technology, like that becoming popular with companies and governments today, they would have used it to exclude Berners-Lee’s invention, and kill off the World Wide Web.
This month in Blasphemous Geometries: has the ‘Web 2.0’ phenomenon been a boon to science fiction fandom?
Or, asks Jonathan McCalmont, has it simply accentuated its slide from intelligent discussion into naked commercialism? And if so, how can we reverse the trend?
This is one of those awesome videos that really makes the internet amazing. Clay Shirky, author of ‘Here Comes Everybody’, talks at the Web 2.0 Conference earlier this month in the video above. You can also read a text version on his website. It’s been going around most of the blogs for good reason – it’s a brilliant analysis of how until recently we’ve been denying the free time modern life gives us with television and how the internet is beginning to use that untapped free time and mental creativity.
The phrase “jump the shark” has probably jumped the shark, but if I can be indulged in its use one last time, I’ll point out that social software has jumped the shark when you need a MySpace for people to talk about books. Or maybe I’m just cranky about the slickness factor: somehow LibraryThing doesn’t set my teeth on edge in the same way. [mefi]
Robert Topolski, chief technologist of the Open Technology Initiative suggests that but for a quirk of history we might all be using Gopher instead of Tim Berners-Lee‘s World Wide Web:
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