Netcraft has released their November 2006 Web Server Survey and “There are now more than 100 million web sites on the Internet, which gained 3.5 million sites last month to continue the dynamic growth seen throughout 2006.” According to Netcraft the Internet has doubled since May of 2004!
Category: Internet Culture and Technology
National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data
The National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data produced a final report (PDF is here) calling for a national research data “archive” called Data Canada. This report has a deja vu feel about it as I was on the National Data Archive Consultation (SSHRC and then National Archive project) that produced a Needs Assessment Report (PDF) in 2001 and then a Final Report (PDF) in 2002. Nothing happened as a result of these, so I think SSHRC is now working with the sciences and health to make the case across the disciplines. Why do we need the sciences to make our case?
We recommend the creation of a task force, dubbed Data Force, to prepare a full national implementation strategy, and mount a pilot project to show the value and impact of multi-person and multidisciplinary access to research data. Once such a national strategy is broadly supported and has obtained appropriate funding commitments, we propose the establishment of a dedicated national infrastructure, tentatively called Data Canada, to assume overall leadership in the development and execution of a strategic plan. The plan would encompass and presumably extend the NCASRD‚Äôs recommendations. (p. 3 of the “Executive Summary”)
Deja Vu: (re-)creating web history
Deja Vu: (re-)creating web history is a site that presents a timeline of browsing history emulations of different browser interfaces. It tries to give you a sense of evolution of the interface. Of course there is the Internet Archive if you want to see old site designs.
Walter Rafelsberger: Rhizome Navigation
Walter Rafelsberger sent me a note about a project similar to the Pathway project I blogged. His project is Rhizome Navigation lets one navigate a space of wiki page titles or blogs in 3d. It uses access logs so it can, I assume, show how users navigate. Very neat – try the demo.
digg labs
digg.com is a social networking site whose tools are showing up in more an more spots. They have some neat visualization tools in their digg labs, including Swarm (see picture to the left.) On their About page they describe digg thus:
Digg is a user driven social content website. Ok, so what the heck does that mean? Well, everything on digg is submitted by the digg user community (that would be you). After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of digg visitors to see.
What can you do as a digg user? Lots. Every digg user can digg (help promote), bury (help remove spam), and comment on stories… you can even digg and bury comments you like or dislike. Digg also allows you to track your friends’ activity throughout the site ‚Äî want to share a video or news story with a friend? Digg it!
Thanks to Matt for this.
Forking the Wikipedia
Larry Sanger forks the Wikipedia reports on an initiative by one of the founders of the Wikipedia to create an alternative by taking the content and setting up an editorial system with more control by expert editors. The alternative would be called the called the Citizendium.
The Wikipedia is an important example of a social knowledge network that has stirred up a lot of controversy this year. There is a literature now about the Wikipedia and its discontents. See, for example the Request for Comments (RFC) by Alan Liu about student use of the Wikipedia. He sees 2006 as a threshold year when students started using the Wikipedia like never before.
Is it a sign of maturity when web phenomena like the Wikipedia don’t just get reported with that “gee whiz, isn’t this neat” tone, but are being really debated?
Derrida: “The Word Processor”
A new freeing up of the flow can both let through anything at all, and also give air to critical possibilities that used to be limited or inhibited by the old mechanisms of legitimation – which are also, in their own way, word-processing mechanisms. (p. 32)
Paper Machine by Jacques Derrida and translated by Rachel Bowlby has an essay on “The Word Processor” that is one of the better discussions of how word processing is changing writing. Some quotes:
“But when we write ‘by hand’ we are not in the time before technology; there is already instrumentality, regular reproduction, mechanical iterability. So it is not legitimate to contrast writing by hand and ‘mechanical’ writing, like a pretechnological craft as opposed to technology.” (p. 20)
The machine remains a signal of separation, of severance, the official sign of emancipation and departure for the public sphere.” (p. 20)
As you know, the computer maintains the hallucination of an interlocutor (anonymous or otherwise), of another ‘subject’ (spontaneous and autonomous, automatic) who can occupy more than one place and play plenty of roles: face to face for one, but also withdrawn; in front of us, for another, but also invisible and faceless behind its screeen. Like a hidden god who’s half asleep, clever at hiding himself even when right opposite you. (p. 22)
With pens and typewriters, you think you know how it works, how ‘it responds.’ Whereas with computers, even if people know how to use them up to a point, they rarely know, intuitively and without thinking — at any rate, I don’t know — how the internal demon of the apparatus operates. … We know how to use them and what they are for, without knowing what goes on with them, in them, on their side; and this might give us plenty to think about with regard to our relationshi with technology today – to the historical newness of this experience. (p. 23)
Is it really new to use technologies without understanding?
For Derrida the age of the book is passing.
This is not the end but we are probably moving to another regime of conservation, commemoration, reproduction, and celebration. A great age is coming to an end.
For us, that can be frightening. We have to mourn what has been our fetish. (p. 31)
I like the French term for word processor, “traitement de texts” – seems more accurate to what is happening.
visualcomplexity.com | A visual exploration on mapping complex networks
VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field. (From the About page.)
I discovered this through the del.icio.us.discover project. We need a comparable collection of text visualization projects.
Tagliamonte: Instant messaging linguistics study
Instant messaging is not a spoiler of syntax in youth, U of T study suggests (Victoria Ahearn, Canadian Press, August 1, 2006) is a news story that is circulating about a study that Sali Tagliamonte and a student conducted about instant messaging. The good news is that we needn’t worry about IM.
Here’s a word to the wise (AWTTW): Instant messaging (IM), which is often riddled with acronyms like LOL (laugh out loud) and TTYL (talk to you later), is not the spoiler of syntax that some think it is but rather “an expansive new linguistic renaissance,” suggests a new study from the University of Toronto.
Here is the conclusion of an abstract submitted to the New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference in October of 2005:
These findings challenge the deleterious perceptions of IM and suggest that they have been over-blown in the media. Instead, IM is vibrant new medium of communication with its own unique style
(see also Herring 2003, 2004). We will elaborate an argument that IM is an illuminating reflection of
the dynamic ongoing, normal processes of linguistic change that are currently underway in the English
language. Moreover, we will suggest that it may well provide a ‘bellwether of future [socio linguistic]
trends’ (Schiano et al. 2002).
XFN – XHTML Friends Network
XFN – XHTML Friends Network is a way to tag relationships. Here is an example:
<a href="http://jeff.example.org" rel="friend met">...
The attribute “rel” uses a set of simple keywords to describe the relationship between the author of the page linking from to the person represented by the page (blog or home page) linking to. Interestingly, XFN was designed to only allow positive or neutral relationships.
What can you do with XFN? Well … in principle it will allow the graphing of relationships between people representative sites. rubhub.com is an XFN lookup engine to which you can add your page and then, once it has crawled your site you can see the relationships linking out or in.
I discovered this playing with Word Press which has incorporated it into its links/blogroll feature.