From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media Social Media / Wikis Timeline

The British Government sanctions Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, to produce each year a set of navigational tables, to be called the Nautical Almanac.

This was the first permanent table-making project in the world.

Known as the "Seaman's Bible," the Nautical Almanacs greatly improved the accuracy of navigation. However, the accuracy of the tables in the Nautical Almanacs was dependent upon the accuracy of the human computers producing them—human computers who worked by hand, and were separated geographically. During the time of Charles Babbage these tables became notorious for their errors, providing Babbage the incentive to develop mechanical systems, which he called calculating engines, to improve their accuracy.

Gaspard Riche de Prony completes two manuscript sets of massive logarithmic and trigonometric tables calculated by employing systematic division of mental labor, including the use of mathematically untrained hairdressers unemployed after the French Revolution.

The method of production of the tables inspired Charles Babbage in the design of his Difference Engine No. 1 in 1822.

Portions of de Prony's tables were published for the first time in 1891.

The logarithmic and trigonometric tables of Gaspard Riche de Prony, compiled in 19 volumes of manuscript, mostly by hairdressers unemployed after the French Revolution, are finally published in an abbreviated form in one volume. They are the most monumental work of calculation ever carried out by human computers.

Lewis Fry Richardson, an early advocate of the team approach to the solution of large-scale computing problems, publishes Weather Forecasting by Numerical Process, in which he describes a fantasy weather forecast “factory” of sixty-four thousand human computers working in “a large hall like a theatre,” calculating the world’s weather forecasts from meteorological data supplied by weather balloons spaced two hundred kilometers apart around the globe.

In Class and Committees in a Norwegian Island Parish, "Human Relations," J. A. Barnes coins the phrase, "Social Network."

Probably the world's first online community begins to emerge through online forums, and the message board called PLATO Notes developed by David Woolley, in the PLATO IV system evolving at the University of Illinois at Urbana.

Starr Roxanne Hiltz, a sociologist, and Murray Turoff, a professor of computer science, show how "computer-mediated communication" could develop social networking in their book The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer.

Ray Ozzie leaves Lotus Development Corporation to found Iris Associates, the purpose of which is to develop groupware, or collaborative software called "Notes."

[In 2004 nearing the 20th anniversary of the founding of Iris Associates, IBM reported that Notes had over 110 million users.]

Lotus introduces Lotus Notes developed by Ray Ozzie at Iris Associates.

Notes was the first commercial networked-based communications and collaboration, or groupware, program. Ozzie derived the Notes concept from his experience working with PLATO Notes at the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [PLATO Notes is noticed in this database.]

Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, writes the Linux kernel.  

This was the origin of a software development project that brought the open-source movement into the mainstream. Torvalds started with a task switcher in Intel 80386 assembly language and a terminal driver. Then, on August 26, 1991, he posted the following to comp.os.minix, a newsgroup on Usenet:

"Hello everybody out there using minix-

"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

"I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)

Linus (torva...@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

"PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(."

After that, many people contributed code to the project. By September 1991, Linux version 0.01 was released. It had 10,239 lines of code.

Gary Kremen and Peng T. Ong start the online dating site Match.com.

"The initial business scope developed by this team included a possible subscription model, now common among personals services, and inclusion of diverse communities with high first trial and market leaders status, including women, technology professionals and the GLBT community. Fran Maier joined in late 1994 to lead the Match.com business unit where she significantly bolstered the strategy to make Match.com friendly and accessible to women (the men would then follow)" (Wikipedia article on Match.com).

Jerry Yang and David Filo, Electrical Engineering graduate students at Stanford,  change the name of "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" to "Yahoo!", for which the official expansion is "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". Filo and Yang select the name because they like the word's general definition, which comes from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Its URL is akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo. They will create the Yahoo! domain on January 18, 1995.

Randy Conrads founds Classmates.com. It may be the first for-profit social networking website.

Feeling isolated after having recently moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and having observed people helping one another online at The Well and Usenet, Craig Naymark founds craigslist, as a bulletin board for social events.  It will evolve into a "central network of online communities, featuring free online classified advertisements – with jobs, internships, housing, personals, erotic services, for sale/barter/wanted, services, community, gigs, resume, and pets categories – and forums on various topics." Craigslist will eventually make a profit by charging under-market fees for job ads in ten cities and for brokered apartment listings in New York City.

Ward Cunningham establishes the first wiki, the WikiWikiWeb on the c2.com domain for Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc.

Wiki "was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the 'Wiki Wiki' shuttle bus that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham, 'I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web.' Cunningham was in part inspired by Apple's HyperCard. Apple had designed a system allowing users to create virtual 'card stacks' supporting links among the various cards. Cunningham developed Vannevar Bush's ideas by allowing users to 'comment on and change one another's text' (Wikipedia article on Wiki, accessed 12-29-2009).

♦ You can watch a video of an interview of Ward Cunningham with John Gage at the Computer History Museum in 2006 at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx6nNqSASGo

SixDegrees.com, an early social networking website, is founded.

The MyFamily.com website is launched. with additional free sites beginning in March, 1999. The site generated 1 million registered users within its first 140 days. The company raised more than $90 million in venture capital from investors and changed its name on November 17, 1999 from Ancestry.com, Inc., to MyFamily.com, Inc. Its three Internet genealogy sites were then called Ancestry.com, MyFamily.com, and FamilyHistory.com.

Reference: http://www.paulallen.net/my-companies, accessed 12-18-2008.

Database consultant Hank Estrin creates and makes operational Where's George?, a website that tracks the natural geographic circulation of American paper money.

"A hit is when a bill registered with Where's George? is re-entered into the database. Where's George? does not have specific goals other than tracking currency movements, but many users like to collect interesting patterns of hits, called bingos. The most common bingo involves getting at least one hit in all 50 states (called "50 State Bingo"). Another Bingo, FRB Bingo, is when a user gets hits on bills from all 12 Federal Reserve Banks.

"Most bills do not receive any responses, or hits, but many bills receive two or more hits. The average hit rate is slightly over 11.1%. Double- and triple-hitters are common, and bills with 4 or 5 hits are not unheard of. Almost daily a bill receives its 6th hit. The site record is held by a $1 bill with 15 entries.

"To increase the chance of having a bill reported, users (called "Georgers") may write or stamp text on the bills encouraging bill finders to visit www.wheresgeorge.com and track the bill's travels. Bills that are entered into the database, but not marked, are known as stealths" (Wikipedia article on Where's George, accessed 05-04-2009).

American entrepeneur Jimmy Wales, American philosopher Larry Sanger, and others found Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, as an English language project.

"In its first year, Wikipedia generated 20,000 articles, and had acquired 200 regular volunteers working to add more (this compares with the 55,000 articles in the Columbia [Encyclopedia], all subject to rigorous standards of editing and fact-checking, though this in itself was a small-scale enterprise compared to the behemoths of the industry like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, whose 1989 edition covered 400,000 different topics). By the end of 2002, the number of entries on Wikipedia had more than doubled. But it was only in 2003, once it became apparent that there was nothing to stop it continuing to double in size (which is what it did), that Wikipedia started to attract attention outside the small tech-community that had noticed its launch. In early 2004, there were 188,000 articles; by 2006, 895,000. In 2007 there were signs that the pace of growth might start to level off, and only in 2008 did it begin to look like the numbers might be stabilising. The English-language version of Wikipedia currently has more than 2,870,000 entries, a number that has increased by 500,000 over the last 12 months. However, the English-language version is only one of more than 250 different versions in other languages. German, French, Italian, Polish, Dutch and Japanese Wikipedia all have more than half a million entries each, with plenty of room to add. Xhosa Wikipedia currently has 110. Meanwhile, the Encyclopaedia Britannica had managed to increase the number of its entries from 400,000 in 1989 to 700,000 by 2007" (Runciman, "Like Boiling a Frog," Review of "The Wikipedia Revolution" by Andrew Lih, London Review of Books, 28 May 2009, accessed 05-23-2009).

Linden Lab makes publicly available the privately owned, partly subscription-based, virtual world, Second Life.

Brad Greenspan and eUniverse found MySpace.

Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo found Metblogs.com. In May 2009 the Metroblogging website characterized this as the world's largest "network of city-focused blogs, covering local issues in more than fifty cities around the world."  On May 24, 2009 there were 57 city-specific cities and more than 700 bloggers involved in Metroblogging, representing, among other things, a kind of news-gathering and broadcasting network.

Flickr, the photo and video sharing and photo and video social networking site, is launched. Its organization tools allow photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means.

While a student at Harvard Mark Zuckerberg founds Thefacebook.com.

The name of the site was later simplified to Facebook. Membership was initially limited to Harvard students. but then expanded to other colleges in the Ivy League. Facebook expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. 

Chris Anderson publishes "The Long Tail" in Wired magazine.

In this article he described "the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities. Anderson elaborated the Long Tail concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.

"A frequency distribution with a long tail — the concept at the root of Anderson's coinage — has been studied by statisticians since at least 1946. The distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group that purchases a large number of "non-hit" items is the demographic called the Long Tail.

"Given a large enough availability of choice, a large population of customers, and negligible stocking and distribution costs, the selection and buying pattern of the population results in a power law distribution curve, or Pareto distribution. This suggests that a market with a high freedom of choice will create a certain degree of inequality by favoring the upper 20% of the items ("hits" or "head") against the other 80% ("non-hits" or "long tail"). This is known as the Pareto principle or 80–20 rule.

"The Long Tail concept has found a broad ground for application, research and experimentation. It is a common term in online business and the mass media, but also of importance in micro-finance (Grameen Bank, for example), user-driven innovation (Eric von Hippel), social network mechanisms (e.g., crowdsourcing, crowdcasting, Peer-to-peer), economic models, and marketing (viral marketing)" (Wikipedia article on The Long Tail, accessed 04-19-2009).

The first Web 2.0 Conference is held in San Francisco.

"Web 2.0 is a term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and its hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. The term became notable after the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web. . . .

Some technology experts, notably Tim Berners-Lee, have questioned whether one can use the term in any meaningful way, since many of the technology components of "Web 2.0" have existed since the early days of the Web."

"With the vision of connecting people to information that makes a difference in their lives," Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman found Kosmix.com.

Three former employees of Paypal -- Steven Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim -- found the video sharing website, YouTube.

Lawrence Lessig launches Code 2.2 wiki:

"Lawrence Lessig first published Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace in 1999. After five years in print and five years of changes in law, technology, and the context in which they reside, Code needs an update. But rather than do this alone, Professor Lessig is using this wiki to open the editing process to all, to draw upon the creativity and knowledge of the community. This is an online, collaborative book update; a first of its kind.

"Once the project nears completion, Professor Lessig will take the contents of this wiki and ready it for publication. The resulting book, Code v.2, will be published in late 2005 by Basic Books. All royalties, including the book advance, will be donated to Creative Commons."

In the wake of the July 7, 2005 London bombings and the Buncefield oil depot fire, the British Broadcast Corporation (BBC) expands its user-generated content team, established in April 2005. After the Buncefield disaster the BBC received over 5,000 photos from viewers. This may be the beginning of adoption of citizen-generated journalism by mainstream industrial media.

Beth Noveck, director of New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, issues “Peer to Patent” (PtoP): A Modest Proposal in her blog. The proposal "would shift the patent-application process away from individual examiners to an internet-based, peer-review method."

Wikimania 2005: The First International Wikimedia Conference is held in Frankfurt am Main.

 Tim Spalding makes LibraryThing operational. It is a social cataloging web application for storing and sharing personal library catalogs and book lists.

"By its one-year anniversary in August 2006, LibraryThing had attracted more than 73,000 registered users who had cataloged 5.1 million individual books, representing nearly 1.2 million unique works; in May 2008 they reached over 400,000 users and 27 million books" (Wikipedia article on LibraryThing, accessed 12-15-2008).

Every day during this month 1,500 new articles are added to the Wikipedia.

Alluding to Wolfgang von Kempelen's eighteenth-century automaton, The Turk, which purported to automate chessplaying when this was impossible, Amazon.com launches the Amazon Mechanical Turk:

"a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do."

This was  the first business application using Collaborative Human Interpreter, a programming language "designed for collecting and making use of human intelligence in a computer program. One typical usage is implementing impossible-to-automate functions."

At the UC Berkeley School of Information Mitchell Kapor delivers an address entitled Content Creation by Massively Distributed Collaboration.

"The sudden and unexpected importance of the Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia created by tens of thousands of volunteers and coordinated in a deeply decentralized fashion, represents a radical new modality of content creation by massively distributed collaboration. This talk will discuss the unique principles and values which have enabled the Wikipedia community to succeed and will examine the intriguing prospects for application of these methods to a broad spectrum of intellectual endeavors."

At this time the Wikipedia contains about 3,700,000 articles in 200 languages.

Ali and Hadi Partovi found the social music discovery service site iLike.

In an article published in Wired Jeff Howe coins the term Crowdsourcing "for the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine an algorithm or help analyze large amounts of data."

MySpace, founded in August 2003, has 100,000,000 users.

The journal Nature announces that it is opening the peer review process to comments online in the form of a blog.

The start-up company Obvious launches the social networking and micro-blogging service Twitter: What are you doing?. Twitter "allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length." This is under the 160 character limit of the SMS communication protocol for mobile phones.

Time Magazine names "You" as the Person of the Year:

"The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that 'the history of the world is but the biography of great men.' He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

"To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.

"But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes."

MediaCommons [.futureofthebook.org] a digital scholarly network, announces itself in its blog:

"MediaCommons, a project-in-development with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book (part of the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC) and the National Endowment for the Humanities, is a network in which scholars, students, and other interested members of the public can help to shift the focus of scholarship back to the circulation of discourse. This network is community-driven, responding flexibly to the needs and desires of its users. It will also be multi-nodal, providing access to a wide range of intellectual writing and media production, including forms such as blogs, wikis, and journals, as well as digitally networked scholarly monographs. Larger-scale publishing projects are being developed with an editorial board that will also function as stewards of the larger network. What you see here now is an early stage along the way toward that network. Our most successful feature to date is In Media Res, but we have also now opened blogging to any registered user, and we are soliciting proposals for our future large-scale projects. Our hope is that the interpenetration of the different forms of discourse will not simply shift the locus of publishing from print to screen, but will actually transform what it means to "publish," allowing the author, the publisher, and the reader all to make the process of such discourse just as visible as its product. In so doing, new communities will be able to get involved in academic discourse, and new processes and products will emerge, leading to new forms of digital scholarship and pedagogy. For this reason, we want our readers and our writers intimately involved in MediaCommons not just after its fuller realization, but in its preliminary stages of development" (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/about-mediacommons, accessed 08-24-2010)

On his main website, barackobama.com Presidential candidate Barack Obama launches my.barackobama.com. It is a social networking site that will build an online community of over a million members before the presidential election.

In a real-world announcement, Carl Bildt, Foreign Minister of Sweden, opens the Second House of Sweden, an embassy in the virtual world of Second Life. A replica of the Swedish Embassy to the United States, it is the first embassy of a real country in a virtual world.

According to an article in LeMonde.fr the virtual reality site, Second Life, is being used for teaching foreign languages.

MySpace has over 200,000,000 accounts. Within approximately one year it has gained 100,000,000 new accounts.

Encyclopaedia Brittanica, first published in 3 volumes in 1771, announces in its blog that it will include wiki-style collaboration from users in it's online edition. At Britannica,

“readers and users will also be invited into an online community where they can work and publish at Britannica’s site under their own names.”

The core encyclopedia itself

"will continue to be edited according to the most rigorous standards and will bear the imprimatur ‘Britannica Checked’ to distinguish it from material on the site for which Britannica editors are not responsible.”

Alliance Library System, in cooperation with LearningTimes, offers a one-day conference exploring the possibilities of using virtual worlds to teach literature and to promote its appreciation for people of all ages. The conference, titled “Stepping into Literature: Bringing New Life to Books through Virtual Worlds” is held entirely in the virtual world of Second Life.

“Books have been with us for millenia, from Homer to Beowulf to Harry Potter” notes John Howard, conference director and Special Projects Coordinator for Alliance. 'Great literature doesn’t change, but our ways of interacting with it do. What possibilities do virtual worlds offer us in sharing a love of literature? Is there value in building worlds that previously existed only in print, or in our imaginations? How can we use 3-D experiences to enhance our experience of literature?

"The conference will not be solely lecture-based, according to Howard. Instead, participants will take take part in a virtual book discussion, and take field trips into literature-based locations that have been created in Second Life. Participants may find themselves in an Edgar Allen Poe poem, visiting a “secret garden” or learning about gothic literature in an authentically spooky Gothic mansion. 'They may even fall down a rabbit hole!' notes Howard. The conference will also feature one or more authors who have used virtual worlds to create, refine or promote their works. The day will conclude with a panel discussion including experts from a number of disciplines, and a social event.

“By doing this conference in Second Life, we can do more than just talk about ways to promote a love of literature in virtual worlds,” says Howard. 'We can see and interact with some creative and educational applications in person.' "

Founded in 1995, craigslist, the leading classified advertising service in any medium, provides free local classifieds and forums for more than 550 cities in over 50 countries, generating more than 12 billion page views per month, used by more than 50 million people each month. Craigslist users self-publish more than 30 million new classified ads each month and more than 2 million new job listings each month. Each month craigslist also posts more than 100 million user postings in more than 100 topical forms. All of this it does with only 25 employees.

Because craigslist does not charge for classified advertising it has replaced a large portion of the classified advertising that historically was placed in print newspapers. By doing so it has substantially reduced the significant revenue that print newspapers historically generated from classified advertising. This has contributed to an overall reduction of profits for many print newspapers. Similarly, craigslist's policy of charging below-market rates for job listings has impacted that traditional source of newspaper revenue, and has impacted profits at physical employment agencies, and the more expensive online employment agencies.

Facebook, founded in February 2004, has more than 110 million active users worldwide.

"This morning, the Obama-Biden campaign announced that has launched Facebook Connect integration at My.BarackObama.com, the grassroots organizing social network set up by the Obama campaign many months ago. The integration will allow users to find their Facebook friends who are also on the site, and will automatically publish users’ activity on the site (like signing up for a campaign event or to make phone calls) on their Facebook wall feed. In some ways it comes as no surprise that the Obama campaign would launch Facebook Connect support early on, as Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes now runs many of Obama’s social media efforts. It will be interesting to see how much of an impact the integration will have in the final 2 weeks of the campaign season, and potentially beyond" (InsideFacebook.com).

The Wikipedia currently attracts at least 684 million visitors annually. 

"There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 250 languages. As of today, there are 2,603,373 articles in English; every day hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to enhance the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia."

Flickr, the photo and video sharing and photo and video social networking site founded in December 2004, claims to to host more than three billion images.

Apart from the historic election of Barack Obama, the first African American President of the United States, from the standpoint of the history of information and media, one element of this election and the campaign that preceded it was the blending of its coverage by broadcast media and the rapidly evolving interactive media on the Internet. Television networks repeatedly referred viewers to their websites for interactive news stories and additional information. While we watched the election on television or listened to radio we received information in emails, from websites, and from blogging and microblogging sites like Twitter. Within minutes after the election was decided I received an email from the Obama campaign signed by Barack Obama. Online newspapers updated election results in real time. Perhaps most remarkably, even the Wikipedia article on the United States presidential election 2008 was updated in real time on the web as election results were available. This I learned from reading a blog in The New York Times online—an online newspaper blogging about an article in an online encyclopedia. From the standpoint of the history of media this represents a blurring or blending of the historic distinctions that evolved over centuries between news media writing about the moment, and traditionally more static works of reference such as encyclopedias.

An email from info@barackobama.com received 10-04-08 8:18PM PST, 18 minutes after polls closed on the West coast and news media computers declared an Obama victory. Presumbably this email was sent to the millions of people who donated to Obama's campaign:

"Jeremy --

I'm about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first.
We just made history.
And I don't want you to forget how we did it.
You made history every single day during this campaign -- every day you knocked on doors, made a donation, or talked to your family, friends, and neighbors about why you believe it's time for change.
I want to thank all of you who gave your time, talent, and passion to this campaign.
We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I'll be in touch soon about what comes next.
But I want to be very clear about one thing...
All of this happened because of you.
Thank you,

Barack"

The day after the presdidential election President-Elect Barack Obama launches the website, Change.gov to communicate details of the transition to the presidency.

In 2008 the Wikipedia attracted "at least 684 million visitors yearly."

"There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages. As of today, there are 2,674,551 articles in English. Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to augment the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia. (See also: Wikipedia:Statistics)" (Wikipedia:About, accessed 12-28-2008).

The YouTube Symphony Orchesta, under the direction of San Francisco Symphony conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, debuts at Carnegie Hall in New York. Considered the first collaborative online orchestra, promoted on YouTube, auditioned entirely through YouTube videos, and sponsored by Google, the owner of YouTube, "The YouTube Symphony Orchestra's show features soloists, chamber groups, chamber orchestra, large orchestra, electronica and multi-media, and samples diverse periods and styles of classical music, including works by Gabrieli, Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Villa-Lobos, John Cage and Tan Dun’s Internet Symphony No. 1 'Eroica.'

"It could be described as something between a summit conference, scout jamboree or musical get-together. It'll be the first time that people from so many different countries will have had a chance to discover one another online and then actually meet up and make music together." - Michael Tilson Thomas on NPR’s All Things Considered" (Carnegie Hall website, accessed 04-11-2009).

At the Google IO Developers Conference in San Francisco Google demonstrates Google Wave, "an ambitious, if incomplete, attempt to reinvent email and Internet communication in general" developed by Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who previously developed Google Maps.  The opensource program will be available to developers worldwide.

The Google Wave demonstration is available on a 1.5 hour video available on YouTube. When I accessed the video on June 1, 2009 it had already been downloaded 1,173,600 times and had already received 3,225 ratings.

"At one time, authoritarian regimes could draw a shroud around the events in their countries by simply snipping the long-distance phone lines and restricting a few foreigners. But this is the new arena of censorship in the 21st century, a world where cellphone cameras, Twitter accounts and all the trappings of the World Wide Web have changed the ancient calculus of how much power governments actually have to sequester their nations from the eyes of the world and make it difficult for their own people to gather, dissent and rebel.

"Iran’s sometimes faltering attempts to come to grips with this new reality are providing a laboratory for what can and cannot be done in this new media age — and providing lessons to other governments, watching with calculated interest from afar, about what they may be able to get away with should their own citizens take to the streets.

"One early lesson is that it is easier for Iranian authorities to limit images and information within their own country than it is to stop them from spreading rapidly to the outside world. While Iran has severely restricted Internet access, a loose worldwide network of sympathizers has risen up to help keep activists and spontaneous filmmakers connected.

"The pervasiveness of the Web makes censorship 'a much more complicated job,' said John Palfrey, a co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

"The Berkman Center estimates that about three dozen governments — as widely disparate as China, Cuba and Uzbekistan — extensively control their citizens’ access to the Internet. Of those, Iran is one of the most aggressive. Mr. Palfrey said the trend during this decade has been toward more, not less, censorship. 'It’s almost impossible for the censor to win in an Internet world, but they’re putting up a good fight,' he said.

"Since the advent of the digital age, governments and rebels have dueled over attempts to censor communications. Text messaging was used to rally supporters in a popular political uprising in Ukraine in 2004 and to threaten activists in Belarus in 2006. When Myanmar sought to silence demonstrators in 2007, it switched off the country’s Internet network for six weeks. Earlier this month, China blocked sites like YouTube to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

"In Iran, the censorship has been more sophisticated, amounting to an extraordinary cyberduel. It feels at times as if communications within the country are being strained through a sieve, as the government slows down Web access and uses the latest spying technology to pinpoint opponents. But at least in limited ways, users are still able to send Twitter messages, or tweets, and transmit video to one another and to a world of online spectators.

"Because of the determination of those users, hundreds of amateur videos from Tehran and other cities have been uploaded to YouTube in recent days, providing television networks with hours of raw — but unverified — video from the protests. 

"The Internet has 'certainly broken 30 years of state control over what is seen and is unseen, what is visible versus invisible,'  said Navtej Dhillon, an analyst with the Brookings Institution" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/middleeast/23censor.html?hp).

The death of American entertainer Michael Jackson had a remarkably dramatic impact on the Internet:

"The news of Jackson's death spread quickly online, causing websites to crash and slow down from user overload. Both TMZ and the Los Angeles Times, two websites that were the first to confirm the news, suffered outages. Google believed the millions of people searching 'Michael Jackson' meant it was under attack. Twitter reported a crash, as did Wikipedia at 3:15 PDT. The Wikimedia Foundation reported nearly one million visitors to the article Michael Jackson within one hour, which they said may be the most visitors in a one-hour period to any article in Wikipedia's history. AOL Instant Messenger collapsed for 40 minutes. AOL called it a seminal moment in Internet history,' adding, 'We've never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth.' Around 15 percent of Twitter posts (or 5,000 tweets per minute) mentioned Jackson when the news broke, compared to topics such as the 2009 Iranian election and swine flu, which never rose above 5 percent of total tweets. Overall, web traffic was 11 percent higher than normal" (Wikipedia article on Death of Michael Jackson, accessed 07-04-2009).

MySpace, a division of Fox Interactive Media, announces that it will acquire the "social music discovery service" iLike.

More than 100,000 apps are now available for download from Apple's App Store, making it the largest such retailer in the world.

"The App Store launched in July 2008 with just 500 applications. The store is now available in 77 countries, which has contributed to what Apple said Wednesday is well over 2 billion downloads" (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10390454-37.html)

"First, we're introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we'll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.  

Try searching for your favorite TV show, sporting event or the latest development on a recent government bill. Whether it's an eyewitness tweet, a breaking news story or a fresh blog post, you can find it on Google right after it's published on the web. . .

Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it's happening, even if it's not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn't know about it beforehand. For example, in the screen shot, the big story was about GM's stabilizing car sales, which shows under "News results." Nonetheless, thanks to our powerful real-time algorithms, the 'Latest results' feature surfaces another important story breaking just seconds before: GM's CEO stepped down.

Click on 'Latest results' or select 'Latest' from the search options menu to view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other web content scrolling right on Google. You can also filter your results to see only 'Updates' from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others. Latest results and the new search options are also designed for iPhone and Android devices when you need them on the go, be it a quick glance at changing information like ski conditions or opening night chatter about a new movie — right when you're in line to buy tickets.  

And, as part of our launch of real-time on Google search, we've added 'hot topics' to Google Trends to show the most common topics people are publishing to the web in real-time. With this improvement and a series of other interface enhancements, Google Trends is graduating from Labs.  

"Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we're announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/relevance-meets-real-time-web.html, accessed 05-06-2010).

Barry Collins, news, features, and online editor of PCPro writes in PCPro.co.uk "Whatever Happened to Second Life?"

"Three years ago, I underwent one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life – and I barely even left the office.  

"I spent a week virtually living and breathing inside Second Life: the massively multiplayer online world that contains everything from lottery games to libraries, penthouses to pubs, skyscrapers to surrogacy clinics.

"Oh, and an awful lot of virtual sex.  

"Back then, the world and his dog were falling over themselves to “be a part of it”. Rock stars were queuing up to play virtual gigs, Microsoft and IBM were setting up elaborate pixellated offices to host staff training seminars, Reuters even despatched a correspondent to report back on the latest in-world developments.

"At its peak, the Second Life economy had more money swilling about than several third-world countries. It had even produced its own millionaire, Anshe Chung, who made a very real fortune from buying and selling property that existed only on Second Life servers.  

"Three years on, and the hype has been extinguished. Second Life has seen its status as the web wonderchild supplanted by Facebook and Twitter. The newspapers have forgotten about it, the Reuters correspondent has long since cleared his virtual desk, and you can walk confidently around tech trade shows without a ponytailed “Web 2.0 Consultant” offering to put your company on the Second Life map for the price of a company car.  "

"But what has happened to Second Life? Have the hundreds of thousands of registered players logged off and found a real life? Has the Second Life economy collapsed? And what’s become of the extroverts, entrepreneurs and evangelists I encountered on my first visit? There’s only one way to find out. I’m going back in."

"Has Second Life become a digital ghost town? Not according to its makers, Linden Labs. 'In total, users around the world have spent more than one billion hours in Second Life,' the company claimed in September 

"And it isn’t just using that big figure to distract attention from a slowing interest in the online world: 'user hours grew 33% year-on-year to an all-time high of 126 million in Q2 2009,' Linden insists."

"A little research soon reveals why Second Life seems a lot quieter than the numbers suggest. In June, the company opened Zindra – Second Life’s 'adult continent', a huge plot of the virtual universe dedicated to content rated as 'mature', 'adult' or even 'PG'.  

"Given that sex and gambling accounted for the majority of the 'most popular places' when I first visited, it was suddenly apparent why I was as lonely as a cloud in the parts of the Second Life universe that wouldn’t upset the clergy.  

"So why did Linden establish its very own red-light district? It seems the company decided it was time to clean up its act. In 2008, a management shake-up saw founder and CEO Philip Rosedale move into the role of chairman; his replacement was Mark Kingdon, a man who spent 12 years as a partner at PriceWaterhouseCoopers – about as far from Linden’s 'anything goes' culture as you could possibly get."

"Kingdon apparently realised that companies such as IBM (which has more than 50 in-game properties) and Microsoft don’t want their reputations sullied by being part of a virtual world where XXX DANA’S NAUGHTY PLAYHOUSE XXX is the star attraction.

"So instead of bulldozing the sex shops and brothels, Linden decided to relocate them to their own dedicated island. Now Big Blue and the blue-movie theatres can both comfortably entertain their clients, and never the twain shall meet.

"Other vices were quashed a little less amicably. In 2007, Linden caused enormous upset after shutting down casinos and other in-world gambling dens overnight, following an FBI investigation into whether the site was breaking the US ban on online gambling. People who’d invested enormous amounts of time and hard cash into developing their own casinos found they’d literally been wiped off the map, without compensation" (http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/354457/whatever-happened-to-second-life/1, accessed 01-27-2010).

After the disastrous earthquake in Haiti you could send aid money by text message on your cell phone, and $10 was put on your cell phone bill. In the case of the Red Cross you could "send a $10 Donation by Texting ‘Haiti’ to 90999", or you could donate by phone or by credit card on the Red Cross website, or through social networking sites.

Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics at YouTube, interviews President Barack Obama on YouTube's, CitizenTube.com:

"The President responded to your questions in a live YouTube interview at the White House on Monday, February 1st.

"You submitted over 11,000 questions and cast over 667,000 votes after the President's State of the Union address last week. We collected the top questions, ensuring we covered a range of issues, minimized duplicate questions, and included both video and text submissions" (http://www.youtube.com/user/citizentube#p/c/EB843ABAF59735FD, accessed 02-02-2010).

This was the first time that a sitting president was interviewed by social media rather than broadcast news media.

On the sixth anniversary of the founding of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg announces that it has 400,000,000 users:

"Today we're celebrating our sixth birthday, and this week there will be 400 million people on Facebook. Just one year ago we served less than half as many people, and thanks to you we've made great progress over the last year towards making the world more open and connected.  

"Facebook began six years ago today as a product that my roommates and I built to help people around us connect easily, share information and understand one another better. We hoped Facebook would improve people's lives in important ways. So it's rewarding to see that as Facebook has grown, people around the world are using the service to share information about events big and small and to stay connected to everyone they care about.  

"For me personally, this has meant being able to remain close and connected to schoolmates, family and colleagues while working hard at building Facebook over the past six years. It has also been especially meaningful to me and to everyone at Facebook to see people using Facebook to seek help, share news and lend support during crises. 

"Whether in times of tragedy or joy, people want to share and help one another. This human need is what inspires us to continue to innovate and build things that allow people to connect easily and share their lives with one another.  

"So to celebrate six years of Facebook and the 400 million people on the service, we're doing what we like doing most—building and launching products for people. Tonight we'll host a celebration at Facebook headquarters, and we'll release a handful of new things that will improve people's Facebook experience, including a couple that people have requested a lot. We'll post more details to our blog in a few hours.  

"After the launch we're going to celebrate with a Hackathon—an event where all of us stay up all night coding and building out our new ideas for our next wave of products for you" (http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=287542162130, accessed 02-10-2010).

Twitter announces in its blog that it will donate its archive of 10,000,000,000 text messages (tweets) accumulated since the founding of the company in October 2006:

"The Library of Congress is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States and it is the largest library in the world. The Library's primary mission is research and it receives copies of every book, pamphlet, map, print, and piece of music registered in the United States. Recently, the Library of Congress signaled to us that the public tweets we have all been creating over the years are important and worthy of preservation.

"Since Twitter began, billions of tweets have been created. Today, fifty-five million tweets a day are sent to Twitter and that number is climbing sharply. A tiny percentage of accounts are protected but most of these tweets are created with the intent that they will be publicly available. Over the years, tweets have become part of significant global events around the world—from historic elections to devastating disasters.  

"It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It's very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history. It should be noted that there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.

"The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. This is something we firmly believe and it has driven many of our decisions regarding openness. Today we are also excited to share the news that Google has created a wonderful new way to revisit tweets related to historic events. They call it Google Replay because it lets you relive a real time search from specific moments in time.  

"Google Replay currently only goes back a few months but eventually it will reach back to the very first Tweets ever created. Feel free to give Replay a try—if you want to understand the popular contemporaneous reaction to the retirement of Justice Stevens, the health care bill, or Justin Bieber's latest album, you can virtually time travel and replay the Tweets. The future seems bright for innovation on the Twitter platform and so it seems, does the past!"

"Since we first introduced real-time search last December, we’ve added content from MySpace, Facebook and Buzz, expanded to 40 languages and added a top links feature to help you find the most relevant content shared on updates services like Twitter. Today, we’re introducing a new feature to help you search and explore the public archive of tweets.  

"With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there’s a constant onlineconversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local. Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful.  

"Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and 'replay' what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click 'Show options' on the search results page, then select 'Updates.' The first page will show you the familiar latest and greatest short-form updates from a comprehensive set of sources, but now there’s a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period. . . ." (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/replay-it-google-search-across-twitter.html, accessed 05-06-2010).

Gary Wolf publishes "The Data-Driven Life" in The New York Times Magazine.

". . . . Another person I’m friendly with, Mark Carranza — he also makes his living with computers — has been keeping a detailed, searchable archive of all the ideas he has had since he was 21. That was in 1984. I realize that this seems impossible. But I have seen his archive, with its million plus entries, and observed him using it. He navigates smoothly between an interaction with somebody in the present moment and his digital record, bringing in associations to conversations that took place years earlier. Most thoughts are tagged with date, time and location. What for other people is an inchoate flow of mental life is broken up into elements and cross-referenced.  

"These men all know that their behavior is abnormal. They are outliers. Geeks. But why does what they are doing seem so strange? In other contexts, it is normal to seek data. A fetish for numbers is the defining trait of the modern manager. Corporate executives facing down hostile shareholders load their pockets full of numbers. So do politicians on the hustings, doctors counseling patients and fans abusing their local sports franchise on talk radio. Charles Dickens was already making fun of this obsession in 1854, with his sketch of the fact-mad schoolmaster Gradgrind, who blasted his students with memorized trivia. But Dickens’s great caricature only proved the durability of the type. For another century and a half, it got worse.

"Or, by another standard, you could say it got better. We tolerate the pathologies of quantification — a dry, abstract, mechanical type of knowledge — because the results are so powerful. Numbering things allows tests, comparisons, experiments. Numbers make problems less resonant emotionally but more tractable intellectually. In science, in business and in the more reasonable sectors of government, numbers have won fair and square. For a long time, only one area of human activity appeared to be immune. In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The techniques of analysis that had proved so effective were left behind at the office at the end of the day and picked up again the next morning. The imposition, on oneself or one’s family, of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. A journal was respectable. A spreadsheet was creepy.  

"And yet, almost imperceptibly, numbers are infiltrating the last redoubts of the personal. Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed. On MedHelp, one of the largest Internet forums for health information, more than 30,000 new personal tracking projects are started by users every month. Foursquare, a geo-tracking application with about one million users, keeps a running tally of how many times players “check in” at every locale, automatically building a detailed diary of movements and habits; many users publish these data widely. Nintendo’s Wii Fit, a device that allows players to stand on a platform, play physical games, measure their body weight and compare their stats, has sold more than 28 million units.  

"Two years ago, as I noticed that the daily habits of millions of people were starting to edge uncannily close to the experiments of the most extreme experimenters, I started a Web site called the Quantified Self with my colleague Kevin Kelly. We began holding regular meetings for people running interesting personal data projects. I had recently written a long article about a trend among Silicon Valley types who time their days in increments as small as two minutes, and I suspected that the self-tracking explosion was simply the logical outcome of this obsession with efficiency. We use numbers when we want to tune up a car, analyze a chemical reaction, predict the outcome of an election. We use numbers to optimize an assembly line. Why not use numbers on ourselves?  

"But I soon realized that an emphasis on efficiency missed something important. Efficiency implies rapid progress toward a known goal. For many self-trackers, the goal is unknown. Although they may take up tracking with a specific question in mind, they continue because they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask.

"Ubiquitous self-tracking is a dream of engineers. For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves. A hundred years ago, a bold researcher fascinated by the riddle of human personality might have grabbed onto new psychoanalytic concepts like repression and the unconscious. These ideas were invented by people who loved language. Even as therapeutic concepts of the self spread widely in simplified, easily accessible form, they retained something of the prolix, literary humanism of their inventors. From the languor of the analyst’s couch to the chatty inquisitiveness of a self-help questionnaire, the dominant forms of self-exploration assume that the road to knowledge lies through words. Trackers are exploring an alternate route. Instead of interrogating their inner worlds through talking and writing, they are using numbers. They are constructing a quantified self.  

"UNTIL A FEW YEARS ago it would have been pointless to seek self-knowledge through numbers. Although sociologists could survey us in aggregate, and laboratory psychologists could do clever experiments with volunteer subjects, the real way we ate, played, talked and loved left only the faintest measurable trace. Our only method of tracking ourselves was to notice what we were doing and write it down. But even this written record couldn’t be analyzed objectively without laborious processing and analysis.  "Then four things changed. First, electronic sensors got smaller and better. Second, people started carrying powerful computing devices, typically disguised as mobile phones. Third, social media made it seem normal to share everything. And fourth, we began to get an inkling of the rise of a global superintelligence known as the cloud.

"Millions of us track ourselves all the time. We step on a scale and record our weight. We balance a checkbook. We count calories. But when the familiar pen-and-paper methods of self-analysis are enhanced by sensors that monitor our behavior automatically, the process of self-tracking becomes both more alluring and more meaningful. Automated sensors do more than give us facts; they also remind us that our ordinary behavior contains obscure quantitative signals that can be used to inform our behavior, once we learn to read them."

". . . . Adler’s idea that we can — and should — defend ourselves against the imposed generalities of official knowledge is typical of pioneering self-trackers, and it shows how closely the dream of a quantified self resembles therapeutic ideas of self-actualization, even as its methods are startlingly different. Trackers focused on their health want to ensure that their medical practitioners don’t miss the particulars of their condition; trackers who record their mental states are often trying to find their own way to personal fulfillment amid the seductions of marketing and the errors of common opinion; fitness trackers are trying to tune their training regimes to their own body types and competitive goals, but they are also looking to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to uncover potential they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of optimization but of discovery, and if tracking regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becoming normal, one of the most interesting effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “normal” means" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html?pagewanted=7&ref=magazine, accessed 05-07-2010).

The New York Times publishes "When History is Compiled 140 Characters at a Time" from which I quote:

“ 'Twitter is tens of millions of active users. There is no archive with tens of millions of diaries,' said Daniel J. Cohen, an associate professor of history at George Mason University and co-author of a 2006 book, 'Digital History.' What’s more, he said, 'Twitter is of the moment; it’s where people are the most honest.'  

"Last month, Twitter announced that it would donate its archive of public messages to the Library of Congress, and supply it with continuous updates.  

"Several historians said the bequest had tremendous potential. 'My initial reaction was, ‘When you look at it Tweet by Tweet, it looks like junk,’ said Amy Murrell Taylor, an associate professor of history at the State University of New York, Albany. 'But it could be really valuable if looked through collectively.' Ms. Taylor is working on a book about slave runaways during the Civil War; the project involves mountains of paper documents. 'I don’t have a search engine to sift through it,' she said.  

"The Twitter archive, which was 'born digital,' as archivists say, will be easily searchable by machine — unlike family letters and diaries gathering dust in attics.  

"As a written record, Tweets are very close to the originating thoughts. 'Most of our sources are written after the fact, mediated by memory — sometimes false memory,' Ms. Taylor said. 'And newspapers are mediated by editors. Tweets take you right into the moment in a way that no other sources do. That’s what is so exciting.'  

"Twitter messages preserve witness accounts of an extraordinary variety of events all over the planet. 'In the past, some people were able on site to write about, or sketch, as a witness to an event like the hanging of John Brown,' said William G. Thomas III, a professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 'But that’s a very rare, exceptional historical record.'  

"Ten billion Twitter messages take up little storage space: about five terabytes of data. (A two-terabyte hard drive can be found for less than $150.) And Twitter says the archive will be a bit smaller when it is sent to the library. Before transferring it, the company will remove the messages of users who opted to designate their account 'protected,' so that only people who obtain their explicit permission can follow them.

"A Twitter user can also elect to use a pseudonym and not share any personally identifying information. Twitter does not add identity tags that match its users to real people.  

"Each message is accompanied by some tidbits of supplemental information, like the number of followers that the author had at the time and how many users the author was following. While Mr. Cohen said it would be useful for a historian to know who the followers and the followed are, this information is not included in the Tweet itself.  

"But there’s nothing private about who follows whom among users of Twitter’s unprotected, public accounts. This information is displayed both at Twitter’s own site and in applications developed by third parties whom Twitter welcomes to tap its database.  

"Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel, said, 'From the beginning, Twitter has been a public and open service.' Twitter’s privacy policy states: 'Our services are primarily designed to help you share information with the world. Most of the information you provide to us is information you are asking us to make public.  

"Mr. Macgillivray added, 'That’s why, when we were revising our privacy policy, we toyed with the idea of calling it our ‘public policy.’ ' He said the company would have done so but California law required that it have a 'privacy policy' labeled as such.  

"Even though public Tweets were always intended for everyone’s eyes, the Library of Congress is skittish about stepping anywhere in the vicinity of a controversy. Martha Anderson, director of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the library, said, 'There’s concern about privacy issues in the near term and we’re sensitive to these concerns.'  

"The library will embargo messages for six months after their original transmission. If that is not enough to put privacy issues to rest, she said, 'We may have to filter certain things or wait longer to make them available.' The library plans to dole out its access to its Twitter archive only to those whom Ms. Anderson called “qualified researchers.”  

"BUT the library’ s restrictions on access will not matter. Mr. Macgillivray at Twitter said his company would be turning over copies of its public archive to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, too. These companies already receive instantaneously the stream of current Twitter messages. When the archive of older Tweets is added to their data storehouses, they will have a complete, constantly updated, set, and users won’t encounter a six-month embargo.  

"Google already offers its users Replay, the option of restricting a keyword search only to Tweets and to particular periods. It’s quickly reached from a search results page. (Click on 'Show options,' then 'Updates,' then a particular place on the timeline.)  

"A tool like Google Replay is helpful in focusing on one topic. But it displays only 10 Tweets at a time. To browse 10 billion — let’s see, figuring six seconds for a quick scan of each screen — would require about 190 sleepless years.  

"Mr. Cohen encourages historians to find new tools and methods for mining the 'staggeringly large historical record' of Tweets. This will require a different approach, he said, one that lets go of straightforward 'anecdotal history.' " (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/business/02digi.html?scp=1&sq=twitter%20+%20history&st=cse, accessed 05-06-2010).

According to the "Facebook Factsheet" in the Press Room of Facebook, as accessed on 05-16-2010) Facebook has "Over 400 million active (users who have returned to the site in the last 30 days)."

"Five years ago, after months of late nights, testing and preparation, YouTube’s founders launched the first beta version of YouTube.com in May, with a simple mission: give anyone a place to easily upload their videos and share them with the world. Whether you were an aspiring filmmaker, a politician, a proud parent, or someone who just wanted to connect with something bigger, YouTube became the place where you could broadcast yourself.  

"Over time, these aspirations have created a vibrant and inspiring community that helped transform a murmur of interest into something far greater than any of us ever could have imagined. Today, thanks to you, our site has crossed another milestone: YouTube exceeds over two billion views a day. That’s nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined.  

"What started as a site for bedroom vloggers and viral videos has evolved into a global platform that supports HD and 3D, broadcasts entire sports seasons live to 200+ countries. We bring feature films from Hollywood studios and independent filmmakers to far-flung audiences. Activists document social unrest seeking to transform societies, and leading civic and political figures stream interviews to the world" (http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/, accessed 05-17-2010).

The "popular highlights" feature of the Amazon Kindle ebook reader enables readers to see which portions of books other readers consider noteworthy. It also suggests that Amazon may be collecting this information as possible marketing information for publishers. This feature may be disabled by Kindle users.

For its special issue, "Shakespeare and the New Media" the scholarly humanities journal Shakespeare Quarterly published by the Folger Shakespeare Library offered contributors the chance to take part in a partially open peer-review process conducted by MediaCommonspress.  

"Authors could opt to post drafts of their articles online, open them up for anyone to comment on, and then revise accordingly. The editors would make the final call about what to publish (hence the "partially open" label). As far as the editors know, it's the first time a traditional humanities journal has tried out a version of crowd-sourcing in lieu of double-blind review" (http://chronicle.com/article/Leading-Humanities-Journal/123696/, accessed 08-24-2010).

Ethan Bloch, founder of Flowtown.com, creates the 2010 Social Networking Map.

This was intended as a tribute to XKCD’s ‘Map of Online Communities’ published in 2007. The differences between the two maps, reflective of extremely rapid changing in the social network world, are dramatic!