China and cyber dissidents

The Globe and Mail has a story about how Cyber dissidents rattle China’s thought police. The story features the “Stainless Steel Mouse”, a 24-year-old woman Liu Di who was jailed for a year for her online activities. What is scary is how many people China purportedly has monitoring the net. It is also scary how technology companies have worked with the government to develop online surveillance tools. China may prove the Internet is as easy to patrol as the streets. The story is by Rod Mickleburgh, Friday, Oct. 29, 2004, Page A16.

Web advertising begins to pay

A story in the Guardian Unlimited title, Online cashes in at last by Own Gibson (Oct. 18, 2004) reports on new UK data that shows that internet advertising has risen past Cinema to challenge radio.

According to research due to be unveiled today by Microsoft’s internet arm MSN, confidence is higher than ever among sales staff at major sites such as MSN, AOL and Yahoo! and the agencies that buy space on them. After years of trying, and in some cases under-delivering, it looks as if the internet’s accountability, measurability and targeting is finally making an impression on the big brands. In certain sectors, notably cars and finance, online ads are now an integral part of any big campaign, rather than an afterthought.

I wonder what percentage of this is Google ads?

Canada High-Speed

Globetechnology has a story on “The world’s most connected place” by Dave Ebner from Sept. 16, 2004. Canada is the second most connected country in terms of percentage of households with high-speed Internet connections after South Korea. And, massive on-line gaming is one reason Koreans are getting high-speed. (Apparently Korea is also dense and urban, which makes it easier to wire.)
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h2g2: BBC’s unconventional Guide to Life, the Universe and Everything

The BBC took over, in 2001, the h2g2 server which is the site for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It is a community generated encyclopedia with an attitude. This Douglas Adams inspired reference tool is where I found a page about l33t speak.
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The next thing in internet search?

Matt Patey pointed out to me a story in the Economist.com computer section with the title, From factoids to facts, Aug 26th, 2004. The story is about “Ask MSR” (MSR = Microsoft Research) a search engine that tries to answer factual questions using information on web pages through text manipulation.

WHAT is the next stage in the evolution of internet search engines? AltaVista demonstrated that indexing the entire world wide web was feasible. Google’s success stems from its uncanny ability to sort useful web pages from dross. But the real prize will surely go to whoever can use the web to deliver a straight answer to a straight question. And Eric Brill, a researcher at Microsoft, intends that his firm will be the first to do that.

Text analysis in bulk – it just goes to show that the internet and web are really just large concording projects.

Wired Styles

Two stories in Wired News A Matter of (Wired News) Style and It’s Just the ‘internet’ Now are about the style guidelines of Wired and changes. Tom Long, the author of both and the Wired News’ copy chief, set standards that have an effect. That the internet and web are now lower case says something about their perception as generic rather than named entities. The e-mail article, however, is more interesting, because Tony talks about the shift in style as the web became commercial, main stream and then dropped. Style reflects attitude and community. This is courtesy of StÈfan Sinclair.
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Budapest Open Access Initiative

The Budapest Open Access Initiative meeting in 2002 was the start of the open access movement according to Jean Claude Guedon. For something to qualify as open access it has to be licensed to the user in an open fashion and it must be archived. (See the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing or my previous entry on the Berlin Declaration..) The Creative Commons organization founded in 2001 provides language for open access licenses.