Peter sent me a link to this Google in 2001 site where you can search the Google index as it was in 2001 and “View old version on the Internet Archive” where it is available.
Google has also put up a timeline of their history. All this is to celebrate their 10th anniversary of incorporation.
Stan pointed me to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research which has a number of fine articles.
If we wish to reach deeply into the “nature†of “space itself†then, I believe we must allow into it, as it were, a substance of some sort: not the æther of nineteenth-century science perhaps, but a registering, tracing, questioning, remembering substance, spread as thinly as we can imagine, but present nonetheless, and definitive of here versus there because of how it pools, how it vibrates, how it scatters difference, différance. (p. 2)
That substance is information. As he puts it later, “ultimately, the space in information and the information in space are one.” (p. 15)
These two pieces make an interesting contrast since Benedikt focuses on space and Bell manages to define virtual worlds without any reference to space. Benedikt calls for architects to engage in the design of virtual spaces while Bell focuses on the network of avatars – or the people within the space (and persistent time.)
Ever since the Gartner press release saying that “80 Percent of Active Internet Users Will Have A “Second Life” in the Virtual World by the End of 2011″ there has been a renewed interest in virtual worlds. My sense is that the 1990s interest in virtual reality was overblown and ultimately wrong in that people predicted we would be manipulating information inside virtual worlds with VR interfaces, data-gloves, headsets and so on. What has emerged instead is the proliferation of massive multiplayer online environments from games like World of Warcraft to social/creative spaces like Second Life. The headsets and torture apparatus of Lawnmower Man are gone, thank you!
So … what is next? I’ve just finished Halting State by Charles Stross which is a near-future detective story set in Edinburgh where players can move their avatars from game to game in the Zone (something actually proposed by Linden Labs and IBM – see Lohr Free the Avatars – this reference is from the Messinger, Stroulia and Lyons article “A Typology of Virtual Worlds” in the JCWR.) What is more interesting is the way Stross imagines the overlay of virtual and real worlds. Everyone, including cops, wear glasses that provide augmented reality views on the world they walk through, including the ability to see people in their in-game avatar representation while, for example, at a trade fair. Stross does a imaginative job or weaving the virtual into everyday life. (If you like this book you should also read Accelerando – a great accelerating run through the artificial life as it leaves meat behind.)
Being on the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research council my attention was drawn to the issue of what happens to theses. In my day you bound a bunch of copies and one went off to Libraries and Archives Canada where it was indexed, but could not be read online. Since 1997 it looks like they have been digitizing the theses working with contractors. Now they ask graduate students to sign a non-exclusive license that gives LAC remarkable rights. See the page for graduate students, What you should know – at the bottom is the link to the PDF of the license they have to sign which includes the following language:
[I] hereby grant a non-exclusive, for the full term of copyright protection, royalty free license to Library and Archives Canada:
(a) to reproduce, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, communicate to the public by telecommunication or on the Internet, loan, distribute and sell my thesis (the title of which is set forth above) worldwide, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, in microform, paper, electronic and/or any other formats;
(b) to authorize, sub-license, sub-contract or procure any of the acts mentioned in paragraph (a).
I find this language too broad. I can understand why Theses Canada wants these rights in order to be able to run a genuinely useful service that makes Canadian research accessible, but this license is just too broad, especially when enforced by universities that require all graduate students to sign it. There is provision on the Theses Canada site for graduates delaying submission (if they want to register patents, for example) and I’m guessing that most universities would respect a student’s wish to not sign the license.
There is a separate issue around copyright. Part of the License includes this:
If third-party copyrighted material was included in my thesis, I have obtained written copyright permission from the copyright owners to do the acts mentioned in paragraph (a) above for the full term of copyright protection.
I wonder if the accessibility of theses online and the terms of the License might change the willingness of other copyright owners to grant permissions to graduate students.
Alex Sévingy drew my attention to an article by Linda Diebel for the Toronto Star, Web outrage marks shift in Canadian politics (Sept. 12, 2008) that argues that Green leader Elizabeth May owes here inclusion in the upcoming debates to rapid voter reaction over the Internet.
Suddenly, in a very public way, ordinary citizens were empowered through their blogs, vlogs (videos) and online comment to the mainstream media, and they got what they wanted.
Alex himself is quoted in the article suggesting that it was Stephane Dion who broke the impasse.
“For the first time in Canadian election history, a grassroots activism influenced a leader to take a stand against the others,” he said. “As a result, the traditional media regulators had to concede that the populist approach was right.”
Adds Sévigny: “An authority figure opened the door. But, in my view, this is one of the last times the blogosphere needs validation of someone in authority.”
Given how short Canadian elections are one wonders if the speed of the Internet is the only way for voters to participate in the process, rather than just the vote.
Once I notice one comic being used to introduce computing issues I’m told of another. Google commissioned the Chrome comic, Gordon Duncan of Appropriation Art has released an interactive comic book 51st State that is about copyright reform in Canada and freedom of expression. It appropriates images and words from the internet and has links back out to information. A remarkable demonstration of how graphic arts can be political and provocative.
Thanks to Erika for this.
The blog, Google Blogoscoped has a scan of Scott McCloud’s comic book to explain the new Google Browser called Chrome, see Google on Google Chrome – comic book or Google’s version. It is interesting that Google used the comic book format to explain what is special about Chrome (see Scott’s FAQ), but Chrome itself, and how it is being presented, is also important. A few random thoughts:
I got an announcement about a A Workshop on Humanities Applications for the World Community Grid (WCG) being hosted by IBM. The WCG is a volunteer grid that uses the BOINC platform and is “powered” by IBM. These volunteer projects fascinate me – they are not our father’s computing where the danger was computers getting smarter than us and taking over and the paradigm was AI. Now the symbiosis of humans and computing is on a social scale – grids of processors and teams of people. Here is what the WCG says about their project:
World Community Grid’s mission is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. Our work is built on the belief that technological innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can change our world for the better. Our success depends on individuals – like you – collectively contributing their unused computer time to this not-for-profit endeavor.
What sorts of humanities problems could we run on a grid like this? Do humanities projects “benefit humanity” or is medicine (curing cancer) the last human research left? My instinct tells me we could do internet mining for concepts where we gather, clean and analyze large numbers of documents on concepts like “dialogue”. Perhaps someone wants to submit a proposal with me.
The New York Times has a disturbing story, Before the Gunfire, Cyberattacks that suggests the Russians may have practiced cyberattack techniques against Georgia before the surface attack in what is the first case of a “known cyberattack had coincided with a shooting war.”
the attacks against Georgia’s Internet infrastructure began as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests — known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks — that overloaded and effectively shut down Georgian servers.
Georgia, however, doesn’t seem to have noticed as they don’t have that many internet sites and don’t use it much in everyday life/business. One wonders how a successful shutdown of the Internet in Canada would affect us … what would break down?
The Digital Humanities Summer Institute this summer took a number of us aside and asked us to answer four questions about the digital humanities on video. The collection of streaming video clips makes interesting viewing as they chose a representative sample of people from myself to a software architect. You can stack the rows of video clips and compare different answers, which is nice.
According to the Canadian Internet Registry Authority there are now over one million dot CA domains registered. I helped registering humanisti.ca (which is another great domain looking for a use.)