OMG! Goopy draws the internets!

“Waiting for a flight Thursday evening, I opened up my Powerbook to see if the Gods of Wireless Networking had yet talked some sense into the folks who run Washington’s National Airport. Alas, there weren’t any legit wifi signals available — I specify ‘legit’, though, because there were quite a few ad-hoc networks set up that looked to be trying to phish and scam their way into information from unsuspecting or naive flyers.”

“Last week, Michael Calore, posted his take on Web 2.0 Winners and Losers and while I agreed with some of his picks, there were a lot that I didn’t thing belong. I also wanted to go a bit more indepth as to why these sites have made the list. With that in mind I have put together my list of 10 Web 2.0 losers and winners…”

“More and more employers and universities are becoming aware of the amount of time their employees or students are spending using the Internet for personal reasons. Obviously employers want to discourage this behavior and may implement a number of different ways to do so… This guide discusses a way an employee or student can securely access the Internet while at work or school, and also get around some common firewall restrictions that prevent you from using most networked programs.”

“I decided to peruse the Wayback Machine’s earliest archives to see what the internet looked like in 1996, when I was 14 and evidently had much less free time than I do now. Much to my chagrin, few websites from these early years have been successfully archived, and many of the best preserved ones were created by fast food and soft drink corporations because they were some of the earliest adapters of the internet. They viewed the medium as a chance for inexpensive advertising and invested dozens upon dozens of dollars into it. The results are tremendously humiliating.” Thanks kottke.org!)

A video clip from a 1993 CBC news broadcast talking about a new thing called “Internet.” (Thanks kottke.org!)

“Most Americans believe that if you play fair and work hard, you’ll get ahead. But this notion is threatened by legislation passed Thursday night by the U.S. House of Representatives that would allow Internet service providers to play favorites among different Web sites.” (Mike McCurry presents an opposing viewpoint in an accompanying commentary.)

“Swarm shows you what websites people are visiting, right now. Swarm is a graphical map of hundreds of websites, all connecting to each other. It updates itself every second with where people are going and coming from. As sites become more popular, they move towards the center of the swarm and grow larger. Conversely, sites that lose traffic move away from the center and grow smaller.”

A simply-designed site that aggregates feeds from a variety of geeky sources, includuing digg, /., de.licio.us, Newsvine, Flickr and others…

“When the bubble burst, these same geniuses decided the web was of no interest at all. Funny, to me it was more interesting than ever. To me it was people and organizations publishing content that might not otherwise have seen light. It was small businesses with realistic goals delivering value and growing. It was traditional publishers finding their way into a new digital medium, helped by folks like you and me. It was new ways of talking and sharing and loving and selling and healing and being. Hardly dull.”

“We thought Yahoo! Inc.’s 10th birthday would be a great excuse to take a look back and think about how the Internet has developed over the last ten years, becoming an essential part of all of our daily lives. We’ve created a special site, Yahoo! Netrospective: 10 years, which celebrates the web’s history over the last decade. We hope the Yahoo! Netrospective will take you on a trip down memory lane, in a format we think is really cool… Yahoo! Netrospective: 10 Years was inspired by 10×10, an online artwork by Jonathan Harris. 10×10 automatically gathers the top 100 words and pictures in the world every hour, based on what’s happening in the news, and then displays these words and pictures in an interactive 10×10 grid.”

“Do you already use services like del.icio.us, flickr, blogger, typepad, etc? SuprGlu is a new way to gather all your content from those sites.”

“Any veteran of the software industry will tell you that version 2.0 of any product tends to be a shortlived staging post on the way to 3.0, which is where it finally hits the mark. Windows was a classic example. 1.0 was so buggy it was hardly worth using. 2.0 fixed some serious problems but still had a lot of shortcomings. 3.0, launched in May 1990, was an instant success, and the rest of the story, as they say, is history. Don’t be surprised, then, if Web 2.0 also turns out to be just a staging post on the way to a much more mature and durable Web 3.0 is going to deliver a new generation of business applicationsWeb 3.0 era.”

“First, a caveat. This is not a list of the 50 greatest web sites ever. Rather, it’s a tally of the best sites that launched — or piqued our interest in some way — since last year’s list. Think of it as our round-up of 50 nifty links we think you should check out.”

“In an office on the fourth floor (room 404), they placed the World Wide Web’s central database: any request for a file was routed to that office, where two or three people would manually locate the requested files and transfer them, over the network, to the person who made that request.”