From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media 2000 to 2005 Timeline

A massive denial-of-service attack is launched against major websites, including Yahoo!, Amazon and ebay.

There are 3,200,000 new printed book titles listed for sale in the United States. The number of book titles in print in the world may be about 8,000,000. The world market for printed books (pBooks) is estimated at $25 billion. At this time the world market for eBooks is estimated at $100 million.

There are 72,398,092 Internet hosts and 9,950,491 websites.

Web size estimates by Inktomi at this time surpassed 1 billion pages that could be indexed.

How much information?, a project at the University of California at Berkeley by Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian, attempts to measure the amount of information produced in the world each year.

"Heavy information overload: the world’s total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage. This is the equivalent of 250 megabytes per person for each man, woman, and child on earth.”

“Printed documents of all kinds comprise only .003% of the total. Magnetic storage is by far the largest medium for storing information and is the most rapidly growing, with shipped hard drive capacity doubling every year. Magnetic storage is rapidly becoming the universal medium for information storage.”

“Approximately 240 terabytes (compressed) of unique data are recorded on printed media worldwide each year.” The website provides a chart breaking down the printed media into categories.

The National Digital Library Program sponsored by the Library of Congress has digitized and made available online over 5,000,000 items.

The Library of Congress initiates a prototype system called Minerva (Mapping the Internet the Electronic Resources Virtual Archive) to collect and preserve open-access Web resources.

Andrew Hoyem founds The Grabhorn Institute in San Francisco “for the purpose of preserving and continuing the use of one of the last integrated typefoundry, letterpress printing, and bookbinding facilities, and operating it as a living museum and educational and cultural center.”

Lawrence Lessig publishes Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, in which he argues:

"that cyberspace changes not only the technology of copying but also the power of law to protect against illegal copying (125-127). He explores the notion that computer code may regulate conduct in much the same way that legal codes do. He goes so far as to argue that code displaces the balance in copyright law and doctrines such as fair use (135). If it becomes possible to license every aspect of use (by means of trusted systems created by code), then no aspect of use would have the protection of fair use(136). The importance of this side of the story is generally underestimated and, as the examples will show, very often, code is even (only) considered as an extra tool to fight against 'unlimited copying'."

"Although the history of science and ideas is not my field, I could not  imagine adopting Alfred North Whitehead's opinion that every science, in order to avoid stagnation, must forget its founders. To the contrary, it seems to me that the ignorance displayed by most scientists with regard to the history of their discipline, far from being a source of dynamism, acts as a brake on their creativity. To assign the history of science a role separate from that of research itself therefore seems to me mistaken. Science, like philosophy, needs to look back over its past from time to time, to inquire into its origins and to take a fresh look at models, ideas, and paths of  investigation that had previously been explored but then for one reason or another were abandoned, great though the promise was. Many examples could be cited that confirm the usefulness of consulting history and, conversely, the wasted opportunities to which a neglect of history often leads. Thus we have witnessed in recent years, in the form of the theory of deterministic chaos, the rediscovery of Poincaré's dazzling intuitions and early results concerning nonlinear dynamics; the retum to macroscopic physics, and the study of fluid dynamics and disordered systems, when previously only the infinitely small and the infinitely large had seemed worthy of the attention of physicists; the revival of interest in embryology, ethology, and ecology, casting off the leaden cloak that molecular biology had placed over the study of living things; the renewed appreciation of Keynes's profound insights into the role of individual and collective expectations in market regulation, buried for almost fifty years by the tide of vidgar Keynesianism; and, last but not least, since it is one of the main themes of this book, the rediscovery by cognitive science of the cybernetic model devised by McCulloch and Pitts, known now by the name of 'neoconnectionism' or 'neural networks,' after several decades of domination by the cognitivist model' " (Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science, trans. M. B. DeBevoise [2000], p. x.)

John D. Leckenby of The University of Texas at Austin and Hairong Li of Michigan State University found the Journal of Interactive Advertising (JIAD).

The inaugural issue of the journal

"defined Interactive Advertising as the 'paid and unpaid presentation and promotion of products, services and ideas by an identified sponsor through mediated means involving mutual action between consumers and producers.' This is most commonly performed through the Internet as a medium" (Wikipedia article on Interactive advertising, accessed 04-22-2009).

By about this time prepress became, for all printing processes except traditional letterpress, an entirely digital process.

Prepress entails the processes and procedures that occur between the procurement of a manuscript and original artwork, and the manufacture of a printing plate, image carrier, or, in letterpress, forme, ready for mounting on a printing press.

When a photopolymer printing plate replaces the forme in letterpress that prepress may also be considered a digital process.

Over 10,000,000 domain names have been registered.

Using money from the dot.com Bomis, American entrepeneur Jimmy Wales founds the web-encyclopedia, Nupedia, hiring philosopher Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief.

"Unlike Wikipedia, Nupedia was not a wiki; it was instead characterized by an extensive peer-review process, designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias. Nupedia wanted scholars to volunteer content for free. Before it ceased operating, Nupedia produced 24 articles that completed its review process (three articles also existed in two versions of different lengths), and 74 more articles were in progress.

"In June 2008, CNET hailed Nupedia as one of the greatest defunct websites in history" (Wikipedia article on Nupedia, accessed 05-23-2009).

The dot-com bubble, thought to have begun with the IPO of Netscape on August 9, 1995, reaches its climax on March 10, 2000 with the NASDAQ peaking at 5132.52.

After this date the dot-com bubble began to burst.

The Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED Online) becomes available to subscribers.

Steven Pendergast and Mindwise Media LLC, owned by Scott Pendergast, found Fictionwise.com.

Fictionwise.com became one of the largest distributors of ebooks in North America, and was acquired by Barnes & Noble in March 2009.

"Celera Genomics announced the first complete assembly of the human genome. Using whole genome shotgun sequencing, Celera began sequencing in September 1999 and finished in December. Assembly of the 3.12 billion base pairs of DNA, over the next six months, required some 500 million trillion sequence comparisons, and represented the most extensive computation ever undertaken in biology.

“The Human Genome Project reported it had finished a “working draft” of the genome, stating that the project had fully sequenced 85 percent of the genome. Five major institutions in the United States and Great Britain performed the bulk of sequencing, together with contributions from institutes in China, France, and Germany” (Genome News Network, Genetics and Genomics Timeline 2000, accessed 05-24-2009).

The ASCI White supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is operational. An IBM system, it covers a space the size of two basketball courts and weighs 106 tons. It contains six trillion bytes (TB) of memory, almost 50,000 times greater than the average personal computer, and has more than 160 TB of Serial Disk System storage capacity—enough to hold six times the information stored in the 29 million books in the Library of Congress.

IBM forms a Life Sciences Solutions division, incorporating its Computational Biology Center.

There are 20,000,000 websites on the Internet; the number has doubled since February of this year.

"Google Launches Self-Service Advertising Program

"Google's AdWords Program Offers Every Business a Fully Automated, Comprehensive and Quick Way to Start an Online Advertising Campaign /

"MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - October 23, 2000 - Google Inc., developer of the award-winning Google search engine, today announced the immediate availability of AdWords(TM), a new program that enables any advertiser to purchase individualized and affordable keyword advertising that appears instantly on the google.com search results page. The AdWords program is an extension of Google's premium sponsorship program announced in August. The expanded service is available on Google's homepage or at the AdWords link at http://adwords.google.com, where users will find all the necessary design and reporting tools to get an online advertising campaign started" (http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/pressrelease39.html, accessed 06-09-2009).

Credit Default Swaps,  invented in 1997 by a team working for JPMorgan Chase, become legal, and illegal to regulate, with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. The Senate and House versions of this bill are introduced and rushed through congress on the last day before the Christmas holiday. The 11,000 pages long bill is never debated in the House or the Senate. Less than a week after it is passed by congress, President Clinton signs it into Public Law (106-554) on December 21, 2000. (adapted from the Wikipedia article on Credit Default Swap).

The U.S. Congress appropriates $99,800,000 for the planning and implementation of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). It is a collaborative initiative of the Library of Congress.

The 19th Session of the National People's Congress of China adopts the Decision of the Standing Committee of NPC Regarding the Safeguarding of Internet Security.

Lawrence Lessig publishes The Future of Ideas: The fate of commons in a connected world, in which he argues that while

" copyright helps artists get rewarded for their work, . . .a copyright regime that is too strict and grants copyright for too long a period of time (i.e. the current US legal climate) can destroy innovation, as the future movements by corporate interests to promote longer and tighter protection ofintellectual property in three layers: the code layer, the content layer, and the physical layer. . . .In the end, he stresses the importance of existing works entering the public domain in a reasonably short period of time, as the founding fathers intended."

The Internet Archive, founded in 1996, makes its data available through the Wayback Machine.

Edwin Black issues IBM and the Holocaust.

This book documents

"how IBM's New York headquarters and CEO Thomas J. Watson acted through its overseas subsidiaries to provide the Third Reich with punch card machines that could help the Nazis to track down the European Jewry (especially in newly conquered territory). The book quotes extensively from numerous IBM and government memos and letters that describe how IBM in New York, IBM's Geneva office and Dehomag, its German subsidiary, were intimately involved in supporting Nazi oppression. The book also includes IBM's internal reports that admit that these machines made the Nazis much more efficient in their efforts. Several documentaries, including the 2003 film The Corporation Screened, C-SPAN broadcast and The Times, the Village Voice, the JTA and numerous other publications published close-ups of several documents demonstrating IBM's involvement in the Holocaust. These included IBM code sheets for concentration camps taken from the files of the National Archives. For example, IBM's Prisoner Code listed 8 for a Jew and Code 11 for a Gypsy. Camp Code 001 was Auschwitz, Code 002 was Buchenwald. Status Code 5 was executed by order, code 6 was gas chamber. One extensively quoted IBM report written by the company's European manager during WWII declared “in Germany a campaign started for, what has been termed … ‘organization of the second front.’ ” The memo added, “In military literature and in newspapers, the importance and necessity of having in all phases of life, behind the front, an organization which would remain intact and would function with ‘Blitzkrieg’ efficiency … was brought out. What we had been preaching in vain for years all at once began to be realized.”

"The book documents IBM's CEO Thomas J. Watson as being an active Nazi supporter. Watson made numerous statements in numerous venues that the international community ought to give Nazi Germany a break from the economic sanctions. As head of the International Chamber of Commerce, Watson engineered an annual meeting to be held in Berlin, where he was witnessed to publicly give a Nazi salute to Hitler in the infamous "Seig, Heil" fashion. Watson traveled to Germany numerous times after the Nazis took power in 1933, but it was on the Commerce trip that he received an honor medal from Hitler himself. Watson also dined privately with Hitler, and attended lavish dinners with many infamous Nazi officials at the same time that Jews were being officially robbed and driven from their homes.

"There was an IBM customer site, the Hollerith Abteilung, in almost every concentration camp, that either ran machines, sorted cards or prepared documents for IBM processing. The Auschwitz tattoo began as an IBM number.

"Although IBM actively worked with the Hitler regime from its inception in 1933 to its demise in 1945, IBM has asserted that since their German subsidiary came under temporary receivership by the Nazi authorities from 1941 to 1945, the main company was not responsible for its role in the latter years of the holocaust. Shortly after the war, the company worked aggressively to recover the profits made from the many Hollerith departments in the concentration camps, the printing of millions of punchcards used to keep track of the prisoners, the custom-built punchcard systems, and its servicing of the Extermination through labour program. The company also paid its employees special bonuses based on high sales volume to the Nazis and collaborator regimes. As in many corporate cases, when the US entered the war, the Third Reich left in place the original IBM managers who continued their contacts via Geneva, thus company activities continued without interruption" (Wikipedia article on IBM and the Holocaust, accessed 05-23-2009).

American director, screen writer and film producer Steven Spielberg directs, co-authors and produces the science fiction film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, telling the story of David, an android robot child programmed with the ability to love and to dream. The film explores the hopes and fears involved with efforts to simulate human thought processes, and the social consequences of creating robots that may be better than people at specialized tasks.

The film was a 1970s project of Stanley Kubrick, who eventually turned it over to Spielberg. The project languished in development hell for nearly three decades before technology advanced sufficiently for a successful production. The film required enormously complex puppetry, computer graphics, and make-up prosthetics, which are well-described and explained in the supplementary material in the two-disc special edition of the film issued on DVD in 2002.

The Digital Preservation Coalition is established in the United Kingdom "to foster join action to address the urgent challenges of securing the preservation of digital resources in the UK and to work with others internationally to secure our global digital memory and knowledge base."

The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) issues Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS).

"An OAIS is an archive, consisting of an organization of people and systems, that has accepted the responsibility to preserve information and make it available for a Designated Community. It meets a set of such responsibilities as defined in this document and this allows an OAIS archive to be distinguished from other uses of the term ‘archive’. The model provides a framework for the understanding and increased awareness of archival concepts needed for long-term digital information preservation and access, and for describing and comparing architectures and operations of existing and future archives. It also guides the identification and production of OAIS related standards." ISO Number : 1472

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).

"Seven months after the ceremony at the White House marking the completion of the human genome sequence, highlights from two draft sequences and analyses of the data were published in Science and Nature. Scientists at Celera Genomics and the publicly funded Human Genome Project independently found that humans have approximately 30,000 genes that carry within them the instructions for making the body's diverse collection of proteins.

"The findings cast new doubt on the old paradigm that one gene makes one protein. Rather, it appears that one gene can direct the synthesis of many proteins through mechanisms that include 'alternative splicing.' "It seems to be a matter of five or six proteins, on average, from one gene," said Victor A. McKusick of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who was a co-author of the Science paper.

"The finding that one gene makes many proteins suggests that biomedical research in the future will rely heavily on an integration of genomics and proteomics, the word coined to describe the study of proteins and their biological interactions. Proteins are markers of the early onset of disease, and are vital to prognosis and treatment; most drugs and other therapeutic agents target proteins. A detailed understanding of proteins and the genes from which they come is the next frontier.

"One of the questions raised by the sequencing of the human genome is this: Whose genome is it anyway? The answer turns out to be that it doesn't really matter. As scientists have long suspected, human beings are all very much alike when it comes to our genes. The paper in Science reported that the DNA of human beings is 99.9 percent alike—a powerful statement about the relatedness of all humankind" (Genome News Network, Genetics and Genomics Timeline 2001, accessed 05-24-2009)

References:

Venter, J.C. et al. "The sequence of the human genome," Science 291, 1304-1351 (February 16, 2001).

Lander, E.S. et al. The Genome International Sequencing Consortium. "Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome," Nature 409, 860-921 (February 15, 2001).

Google acquires Deja.com's (formerly Deja News Research Service) Usenet archive dating back to 1995, including 500,000,000 messages.

In its press release announcing the acquisition Google states that it is performing 70,000,000 searches per day.

The Ninth Circuit Court issues an injunction ordering Napster to prevent the trading of copyrighted music on its network..

American writer Nicholson Baker publishes Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.  An excerpt appeared in the July 24, 2000 issue of The New Yorker, under the title "Deadline: The Author's Desperate Bid to Save America's Past."

This exhaustively researched polemic detailed Baker's quest to expose the fate of thousands of books and newspapers that were replaced and often destroyed during the microfilming boom of the 1980s and '90s.

"The term 'double fold' refers to the test used by many librarians and preservation administrators to determine the brittleness and 'usability' of paper. The test consists of folding down the corner of a page of a book or newspaper, then folding it back in the opposite direction—one double fold. The action is then repeated until the paper breaks or is about to break. The more folds the page can withstand, the more durable it is. (In the late 1960s, preservation founding father William Barrow was fond of using a machine-run fold tester to back up his claims about the number of endangered books.) This experiment was used by library officials to identify their institution's brittle books, and, in some case, to justify withdrawing items from the shelves or replacing them with another format (most often microfilm). Baker's take on the double-fold test? '...utter horseshit and craziness. A leaf of a book is a semi-pliant mechanism. It was made for non-acute curves, not for origami.' (p. 157)"

"In 1999, Baker took matters into his own hands and founded the American Newspaper Repository in order to save some of the collections being auctioned off by the British Library. A year later he became the owner of thousands of volumes of old newspapers, including various runs of the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York World. In May 2004 the entire collection was moved to Duke University, where it is stored on climate-controlled shelves and looked after by the Rare Books and Special Collections division. As part of the gift agreement between the American Newspaper Repository and Duke, the collection will kept together in perpetuity, and no disbinding or experimental deacidification will be allowed.

"Baker makes four recommendations in Double Fold's epilogue: that libraries should be required to publish lists of discarded holdings on their websites, that the Library of Congress should fund a building that will serve as a storage repository for publications and documents not housed on-site, that some U.S. libraries should be designated with saving newspapers in bound form, and that both the U.S. Newspaper and the Brittle Books Programs should be abolished, unless they can promise that all conservation procedures will be non-destructive and that originals will be saved" (Wikipedia article on Double Fold, accessed 07-28-2009).

At the meeting of the San Francisco chapter of the Women's National Book Association, David Spiselman predicts that ebooks will be a 3.1 billion dollar business by 2004. He also predicts that by 2004 "screen quality will be superior to paper."

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, a computer animated science fiction film by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy series of role-playing games, is released in the United States by Columbia Pictures.

This was the first attempt to make a photorealistic rendered 3D feature film.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within received mixed reviews and despite aggressive promotion, it became a huge box office bomb.

"Roger Ebert was a strong advocate of the film; he gave the film 3 1/2 stars out of 4, praising it as a "technical milestone" while conceding that its 'nuts and bolts' story lacked 'the intelligence and daring of, say, Steven Spielberg's A.I.'. He also expressed a desire for the film to succeed in hopes of seeing more films made in its image, though he was skeptical of its ability to be accepted" (Wikipedia article on Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, accessed 05-05-2009).

XM Radio, having launched its two broadcast satellites "Rock" and "Roll" in the spring, initiates the first U.S. digital satellite radio service in Dallas/Ft. Worth and San Diego. Within two months service will extend across the U.S. "The initial lineup includes 71 music channels and 29 other channels consisting of sports, talk, children's programming, entertainment and news." (quoted from Wikipedia article on XM Satellite Radio.) The original launch date of September 12 is pushed back after the 9/11 attacks.

NTT DoCoMo in Japan launches the first 3G (Third Generation) cellular network.

"3G networks enable network operators to offer users a wider range of more advanced services while achieving greater network capacity through improved spectral efficiency. Services include wide-area wireless voice telephony, video calls, and broadband wireless data, all in a mobile environment. Additional features also include HSPA data transmission capabilities able to deliver speeds up to 14.4 Mbit/s on the downlink and 5.8 Mbit/s on the uplink" (Wikipedia article on 3G, accessed 04-11-2009).

Apple launches the iPod line of portable media players.

The Council on Library and Information Resources issues Evidence in Hand: Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections by Stephen G. Nichols and Abby Smith. exploring the tension between physical and digital artifacts.

Microsoft launches the Xbox game console, its first entry into the gaming console market.

"According to the book Smartbomb, by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby, the remarkable success of the upstart Sony PlayStation worried Microsoft in late 1990s. The growing video game market seemed to threaten the PC market which Microsoft had dominated and relied upon for most of its revenues. Additionally, a venture into the gaming console market would diversify Microsoft's product line, which up to that time had been heavily concentrated on software."

Douglas R. Stewart receives U.S. Patent 6,319,530 for a "Method of photocopying an image onto an edible web for decorating iced baked goods."

This invention enables printing a food-grade color photograph on the surface of a birthday cake, or other iced baked goods, using a dedicated inkjet printer and edible inks. 

Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, designed between 1847 and 1849, but never previously built, is completed and fully operational at the Science Museum, London. Built from Babbage’s engineering drawings roughly 150 years after it was originally designed, the finished machine weighs 5 tons and consists of 8000 machined parts, equally divided between the calculating and automatic printing and stereotyping apparatus. It is operated by turning hand-cranks.

At this time there are 147,344,723 Internet hosts and 36,689,008 websites (Cisco). The estimated number of Internet users worldwide is about 600,000,000.

Diana Hook and the author/editor of this database, Jeremy Norman, issue as a limited edition an annotated, descriptive bibliography entitled Origins of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking, and Telecommunications. It was the first annotated descriptive bibliography on these subjects.

In spite of the immense loss of information over the centuries, there are about 45,000 Egyptian papyri, including fragments, in six institutional libraries and museums in the United States. (Athena Review, 2, no. 2). The main U.S. holders of papyri are Duke University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Michigan, Columbia, Yale, and Princeton. It has been estimated that there are about 500,000 unpublished papyri preserved elsewhere. Other major institutional collections with websites are the University of Heidelberg, Oxford, University of Lecce, and the University of Copenhagen.

The world's smallest book printed on paper, an edition of Chekhov's Chameleon, is published. It measures just .9 by .9 millimeters, not much larger than a grain of salt, and has 30 pages and three color illustrations. The print cannot be read by the naked eye.The edition is limited to 50 copies in English and 50 copies in Russian.

Jim Sterne founds the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit.This began as a web analytics conference but expanded into onlline marketing optimization.

In 2009 the series currently reached audiences throughout the year in Toronto, Munich, San Jose, London, Madrid, Sao Paulo, Stockholm, Washington D.C. and Mexico City.

Steven Spielberg directs the science fiction film Minority Report, loosely based on the short story, "The Minority Report" by Philip K. Dick.

"It is set primarily in Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia in the year 2054, where "Precrime", a specialized police department, apprehends criminals based on foreknowledge provided by three psychics called 'precogs'. The cast includes Tom Cruise as Precrime officer John Anderton, Colin Farrell as Department of Justice agent Danny Witwer, Samantha Morton as the senior precog Agatha, and Max von Sydow as Anderton's superior Lamar Burgess. The film has a distinctive look, featuring desaturated colors that make it almost resemble a black-and-white film, yet the blacks and shadows have a high contrast, resembling film noir."

"Some of the technologies depicted in the film were later developed in the real world – for example, multi-touch interfaces are similar to the glove-controlled interface used by Anderton. Conversely, while arguing against the lack of physical contact in touch screen phones, PC Magazine's Sascha Segan argued in February 2009, 'This is one of the reasons why we don't yet have the famous Minority Report information interface. In that movie, Tom Cruise donned special gloves to interact with an awesome PC interface where you literally grab windows and toss them around the screen. But that interface is impractical without the proper feedback—without actually being able to feel where the edges of the windows are' " (Wikipedia article on Minority Report [film] accessed 05-25-2009).

The two-disc special edition of the film issued on DVD in 2002 contains excellent supplementary material on the special digital effects.

Paul Marino founds the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences in New York.

"So, what is Machinima?

"Machinima (muh-sheen-eh-mah) is filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies.  

"In an expanded definition, it is the convergence of filmmaking, animation and game development. Machinima is real-world filmmaking techniques applied within an interactive virtual space where characters and events can be either controlled by humans, scripts or artificial intelligence. By combining the techniques of filmmaking, animation production and the technology of real-time 3D game engines, Machinima makes for a very cost- and time-efficient way to produce films, with a large amount of creative control" (http://www.machinima.org/machinima-faq.html, accessed 02-25-2010).

RLG and OCLC issue the report, Trusted Digital Repositories: Attributes and Responsibilities.

David Margolese launches Sirius Satellite Radio on a pay for service subscription basis.

Physicist and software developer Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Paul Needham, Librarian of the Scheide Library at Princeton University, working on original editions in the Scheide Library, use high resolution scans of individual characters printed by Gutenberg, and image processing algorithms, to locate and compare variants of the same characters printed by Gutenberg. From this research it appears that the method of producing moveable type attributed to Gutenberg developed in phases rather than as a complete system, and that Gutenberg's technique of type casting was a precursor to the definitive process developed in the 1470s.

"We may now surmise that the method of manufacture of type with steel punches and matrices, which became the standard for more than four centuries of typography, was introduced a few years later by Nicolas Jenson, who from early days on was praised as a co-inventor. Jenson's contribution was apparently based on the early part of his career at the Mint in Paris, where striking medals with elaborate lettering would have given him specialized expertise. Jenson became one of the most influential type designers of all ages -- as well as an excellent printer --when he worked in the 1470s in Venice, but this may have been preceded by an interlude in Mainz, where he probably made a type, first used in 1459, which unlike Gutenberg's types, was able to withstand many years of intensive use" (Lotte Hellinga, "The Gutenberg Revolutions" in Eliot & Rose (eds) A Companion to the History of the Book [2007] 208).

"The irregularities in Gutenberg's type, particularly in simple characters such as the hyphen, made it clear that the variations could not have come from either ink smear or from wear and damage on the pieces of metal on the types themselves. While some identical types are clearly used on other pages, other variations, subjected to detailed image analysis, made for only one conclusion: that they could not have been produced from the same matrix. Transmitted light pictures of the page also revealed substructures in the type that could not arise from punchcutting techniques. They [Agüera y Arcas and Needham] hypothesized that the method involved impressing simple shapes to create alphabets in "cuneiform" style in a mould like sand. Casting the type would destroy the mould, and the alphabet would need to be recreated to make additional type. This would explain the non-identical type, as well as the substructures observed in the printed type. Thus, they feel that "the decisive factor for the birth of typography", the use of reusable moulds for casting type, might have been a more progressive process than was previously thought. They suggest that the additional step of using the punch to create a mould that could be reused many times was not taken until twenty years later, in the 1470s. " (Summary from the Wikipedia article on Johannes Gutenberg, accessed 02-08-2209).

References:

Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Paul Needham, "Computational analytical bibliography," Proceedings Bibliopolis Conference The future history of the book', The Hague: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, (November 2002).

Agüera y Arcas, "Temporary Matrices and Elemental Punches in Gutenberg's DK type", in: Jensen (ed) Incunabula and Their Readers. Printing , Selling, and Using Books in the Fifteenth Century (2003) 1-12.

Creative Commons, founded in 2001, releases as its first project, a set of copyright licenses free for public use.

"Taking inspiration in part from the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), Creative Commons has developed a Web application that helps people dedicate their creative works to the public domain — or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. Unlike the GNU GPL, Creative Commons licenses are not designed for software, but rather for other kinds of creative works: websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc. We hope to build upon and complement the work of others who have created public licenses for a variety of creative works. Our aim is not only to increase the sum of raw source material online, but also to make access to that material cheaper and easier. To this end, we have also developed metadata that can be used to associate creative works with their public domain or license status in a machine-readable way. We hope this will enable people to use our search application and other online applications to find, for example, photographs that are free to use provided that the original photographer is credited, or songs that may be copied, distributed, or sampled with no restrictions whatsoever. We hope that the ease of use fostered by machine- readable licenses will further reduce barriers to creativity."

How much information 2003: The research project first published on the web in 2000 updates its findings. Strikingly it is estimated that each person in the U.S. generates 800 MB of recorded information. This is more than three times the data that the same research project calculated was being produced in 2000. The remaining data in this frame of the timeline is quoted from the 2003 website:

"How much new information is created each year? Newly created information is stored in four physical media -- print, film, magnetic and optical --and seen or heard in four information flows through electronic channels -- telephone, radio and TV, and the Internet. This study of information storage and flows analyzes the year 2002 in order to estimate the annual size of the stock of new information recorded in storage media, and heard or seen each year in information flows. Where reliable data was available we have compared the 2002 findings to those of our 2000 study (which used 1999 data) in order to describe a few trends in the growth rate of information.

1. Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.
   • How big is five exabytes? If digitized with full formatting, the seventeen million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections.
   • Hard disks store most new information. Ninety-two percent of new information is stored on magnetic media, primarily hard disks. Film represents 7% of the total, paper 0.01%, and optical media 0.002%.
   • The United States produces about 40% of the world's new stored information, including 33% of the world's new printed information, 30% of the world's new film titles, 40% of the world's information stored on optical media, and about 50% of the information stored on magnetic media.
   • How much new information per person? According to the Population Reference Bureau, the world population is 6.3 billion, thus almost 800 MB of recorded information is produced per person each year. It would take about 30 feet of books to store the equivalent of 800 MB of information on paper.
2. We estimate that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years.
   • Information explosion? We estimate that new stored information grew about 30% a year between 1999 and 2002.
   • Paperless society? The amount of information printed on paper is still increasing, but the vast majority of original information on paper is produced by individuals in office documents and postal mail, not in formally published titles such as books, newspapers and journals.
3. Information flows through electronic channels -- telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet -- contained almost 18 exabytes of new information in 2002, three and a half times more than is recorded in storage media. Ninety eight percent of this total is the information sent and received in telephone calls - including both voice and data on both fixed lines and wireless.
   • Telephone calls worldwide � on both landlines and mobile phones � contained 17.3 exabytes of new information if stored in digital form; this represents 98% of the total of all information transmitted in electronic information flows, most of it person to person.
   • Most radio and TV broadcast content is not new information. About 70 million hours (3,500 terabytes) of the 320 million hours of radio broadcasting is original programming. TV worldwide produces about 31 million hours of original programming (70,000 terabytes) out of 123 million total hours of broadcasting.
   • The World Wide Web contains about 170 terabytes of information on its surface; in volume this is seventeen times the size of the Library of Congress print collections.
   • Instant messaging generates five billion messages a day (750GB), or 274 Terabytes a year.
   • Email generates about 400,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide.
   • P2P file exchange on the Internet is growing rapidly. Seven percent of users provide files for sharing, while 93% of P2P users only download files. The largest files exchanged are video files larger than 100 MB, but the most frequently exchanged files contain music (MP3 files).
   • How we use information. Published studies on media use say that the average American adult uses the telephone 16.17 hours a month, listens to radio 90 hours a month, and watches TV 131 hours a month. About 53% of the U.S. population uses the Internet, averaging 25 hours and 25 minutes a month at home, and 74 hours and 26 minutes a month at work � about 13% of the time."

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

The United States Internal Revenue Service begins programming and development of CADE (Customer Account Data Engine), first discussed in the IRS Modernization Plan of 2000.

"The original operational date was set at Nov 1st 2006. Programming and development began in 2003 but actual processing on the system was delayed until 2005. The system initially processed only 1040EZ tax returns, the simplest type of electronic tax returns. In 2006 the capacity was increased for the system to begin processing a limited number of more complex 1040 forms and other support forms. In 2007 the system began to process Schedule C forms and other more complex tax forms.

"Because the system is still unable to handle the full load of IRS tax returns, a hybrid approach is used by the IRS with the overwhelming majority of tax returns still being processed with the old system. Current processing loads and returns done by CADE are used for testing purposes to determine the systems functionality.

"The system, although beset by regular set backs due to funding, is expected to be fully operational by 2012" (Wikipedia article on Customer Account Data Engine, accessed 12-27-2008).

Under the  pen name  "Yoshi," a Tokyo man publishes the first cell phone novel,  Deep Love— the story of a teenage prostitute in Tokyo.

Deep Love

"became so popular that it was published as an actual book, with 2.6 million copies sold in Japan, then spun off into a television series, a manga, and a movie. The cell phone novel became a hit mainly through word of mouth and gradually started to gain traction in China and South Korea among young adults. In Japan, several sites offer large prizes to authors (up to $100,000 US) and purchase the publishing rights to the novel."

"Cell phone or mobile phone novels called keitai shousetsu in Japanese, are the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age via text messaging. Phone novels started out primarily read and authored by young Japanese women, on the subject of romantic fiction such as relationships, lovers, rape, love triangles, and pregnancy. However, mobile phone novels are trickling their way to a worldwide popularity on all subjects. Japanese ethos of the Internet regarding mobile phone novels are dominated by false names and forged identities. Therefore, identities of the Japanese authors of mobile phone novels are rarely disclosed. 'Net transvestites' are of the most extreme play actors of the sort. Differing from regular novels, mobile phone novels may be structured according to the author's preference. If a couple is fighting in the story, the author may choose to have the lines closely spaced and crowded. On the contrary, if the author writes a calm or soothing poem the line spacing may be further apart than normal. Overall, the line spacing of phone novels contains enough blank space for an easy read. Phone novels are meant to be read in 1,000 to 2,000-word (in China) or 70-word (in Japan) chapters via text message on mobile phones. They are downloaded in short installments and run on handsets as Java-based applications on a mobile phone. Cell phone novels often appear in three different formats: WMLD, JAVA and TXT. Maho i-Land is the largest cell phone novel site that carries more than a million titles, mainly novice writers, all which are available for free. Maho iLand provides templates for blogs and homepages. It is visited 3.5 billion times each month. In 2007 98 cell phone novels were published into books. "Love Sky" is a popular phone novel with approximately 12 million views on-line, written by "Mika", that was not only published but turned into a movie. www.textnovel.com is another popular mobile phone novel site, however, in English."

"Five out of the ten best selling novels in Japan in 2007 were originally cell phone novels" (Wikipedia article on Cell phone novel, accessed 08-23-2009).

According to Bowker, as cited by Robert Darton in Publisher's Weekly, 859,000 new book titles were published worldwide in 2003. This represented a significant increase over the 700,000 titles published in 1998.

A Federal regulatory clearinghouse, Regulations.gov, is launched as the first milestone of the Federal "E-Government eRulemaking" Initiative.

"This U.S. Government Web site encourages public participation in the federal decision-making by allowing you to view and submit comments and documents concerning federal regulations, adjudication, and other actions. Regulations.gov provides one-stop, online access to every rule published and open for comment, from more than 160 different Federal agencies.

"Regulations.gov has created universal access to the Federal regulatory process by removing barriers that previously made it difficult for the public to navigate the expanse of Federal regulatory activities. Regulations.gov is the first one-stop Internet site for the public to submit comments on all Federal rulemakings. It is also the first site that allows the public to submit comments via the Internet to virtually all Federal Agencies.

"The new generation of Regulations.gov, the eRulemaking Initiative's Federal Docket Management System (FDMS), launched in the fall of 2005, enabled the public to access entire rulemaking dockets from participating Federal Departments and Agencies. FDMS is a full-featured electronic docket management system that builds upon the capabilities of the original Regulations.gov and gives Federal rule writers and docket managers the ability to better manage their rulemaking and non-rulemaking activities. With this system, Federal Departments and Agencies can post Federal Register documents, supporting materials, and public comments on the Internet. The public can search, view, and download these documents on FDMS' public side, Regulations.gov."

Michael Day of UKOLN publishes a comprehensive review of worldwide projects for preservation of web data: Collecting and Preserving the World Wide Web.

The National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, looses an estimated 15,000 artifacts, including priceless relics of Mesopotamian civilization, to looters in the days after Baghdad falls to U.S. forces in the Iraq War. Of the objects looted, about 5,000 are still missing, 4,000 were returned and 6,000 were recovered, according to Lawrence Rothfield, author of Antiquities Under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection After the Iraq War (2008).''

Lotfi Belkhir (formerly of the Venture Lab at Xerox) introduces the Kirtas BookScan 1200 produced by Kirtas Technologies at the AIIM Exhibition in New York City.

The BookScan 1200 was the first automatic, page-turning scanner for the conversion of bound volumes to digital files. The manufacturers claimed that it could scan volumes at up to 1200 pages per hour. The motto of the company was "Moving knowledge from Books to Bytes."

The Privacy Rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) goes into effect.

"The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1996. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) website, Title I of HIPAA protects health insurance coverage for workers and their families when they change or lose their jobs. Title II of HIPAA, known as the Administrative Simplification (AS) provisions, requires the establishment of national standards for electronic health care transactions and national identifiers for providers, health insurance plans, and employers. It helps people keep their information private.

"The Administration Simplification provisions also address the security and privacy of health data. The standards are meant to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the nation's health care system by encouraging the widespread use of electronic data interchange in the U.S. health care system."

"The HIPAA Privacy Rule regulates the use and disclosure of certain information held by 'covered entities' (generally, health care clearinghouses, employer sponsored health plans, health insurers, and medical service providers that engage in certain transactions.)  It establishes regulations for the use and disclosure of Protected Health Information (PHI). PHI is any information held by a covered entity which concerns health status, provision of health care, or payment for health care that can be linked to an individual. This is interpreted rather broadly and includes any part of an individual's medical record or payment history.

"Covered entities must disclose PHI to the individual within 30 days upon request. They also must disclose PHI when required to do so by law, such as reporting suspected child abuse to state child welfare agencies.

"A covered entity may disclose PHI to facilitate treatment, payment, or health care operations, or if the covered entity has obtained authorization from the individual. However, when a covered entity discloses any PHI, it must make a reasonable effort to disclose only the minimum necessary information required to achieve its purpose.

"The Privacy Rule gives individuals the right to request that a covered entity correct any inaccurate PHI. It also requires covered entities to take reasonable steps to ensure the confidentiality of communications with individuals. . . .

"The Privacy Rule requires covered entities to notify individuals of uses of their PHI. Covered entities must also keep track of disclosures of PHI and document privacy policies and procedures. They must appoint a Privacy Official and a contact person responsible for receiving complaints and train all members of their workforce in procedures regarding PHI.

"An individual who believes that the Privacy Rule is not being upheld can file a complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR). However, according to the Wall Street Journal, the OCR has a long backlog and ignores most complaints. 'Complaints of privacy violations have been piling up at the Department of Health and Human Services. Between April 2003 and Nov. 30, the agency fielded 23,896 complaints related to medical-privacy rules, but it has not yet taken any enforcement actions against hospitals, doctors, insurers or anyone else for rule violations. A spokesman for the agency says it has closed three-quarters of the complaints, typically because it found no violation or after it provided informal guidance to the parties involved' " (Wikipedia article on Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, accessed 08-05-2009).

Apple opens the software based, online iTunes Store.

Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin found the group blog Grand Text Auto. It is
"about computer mediated and computer generated works of many forms: interactive fiction, net.art, electronic poetry, interactive drama, hypertext fiction, computer games of all sorts, shared virtual environments, and more."

The International Internet Preservation Consortium  (IIPC,) netpreserve.org, is founded.

"In July 2003 the national libraries of Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, The British Library (UK), The Library of Congress (USA) and the Internet Archive (USA) acknowledged the importance of international collaboration for preserving Internet content for future generations. This group of 12 institutions chartered the IIPC to fund and participate in projects and working groups to accomplish the Consortium’s goals. The initial agreement was in effect for three years, during which time the membership was limited to the charter institutions. Since then, membership has expanded to include additional libraries, archives, museums and cultural heritage institutions involved in Web archiving.

"The goals of the consortium are:

" * To enable the collection, preservation and long-term access of a rich body of Internet content from around the world.

" * To foster the development and use of common tools, techniques and standards for the creation of international archives.

" * To be a strong international advocate for initiatives and legislation that encourage the collection, preservation and access to Internet content.

" * To encourage and support libraries, archives, museums and cultural heritage institutions everywhere to address Internet content collecting and preservation."

Brad Greenspan and eUniverse found MySpace.

Niklas Zennström, Janus Friis, and the Estonians Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu launch the peer-to-peer voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) telephony service, Skype. The name of the company evolved from "Sky peer-to-peer" or "Skyper." However some of the domain names associated with "Skyper" were already taken, so the final "r" was dropped leaving "Skype," for which domain names were available. Skype was sold to eBay in September 2005.

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.

At the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Umberto Eco delivered a lecture entitled Vegetal and Mineral Memory: The Future of Books.

I quote from the beginning of the lecture:

"WE HAVE THREE TYPES OF MEMORY. The first one is organic, which is the memory made of flesh and blood and the one administrated by our brain. The second is mineral, and in this sense mankind has known two kinds of mineral memory: millennia ago, this was the memory represented by clay tablets and obelisks, pretty well known in this country, on which people carved their texts.

"However, this second type is also the electronic memory of today's computers, based upon silicon. We have also known another kind of memory, the vegetal one, the one represented by the first papyruses, again well known in this country, and then on books, made of paper. Let me disregard the fact that at a certain moment the vellum of the first codices were of an organic origin, and the fact that the first paper was made with rugs and not with wood. Let me speak for the sake of simplicity of vegetal memory in order to designate books.  

"This place has been in the past and will be in the future devoted to the conservation of books; thus, it is and will be a temple of vegetal memory. Libraries, over the centuries, have been the most important way of keeping our collective wisdom. They were and still are a sort of universal brain where we can retrieve what we have forgotten and what we still do not know.

"If you will allow me to use such a metaphor, a library is the best possible imitation, by human beings, of a divine mind, where the whole universe is viewed and understood at the same time. A person able to store in his or her mind the information provided by a great library would emulate in some way the mind of God. In other words, we have invented libraries because we know that we do not have divine powers, but we try to do our best to imitate them. To build, or better to rebuild, today one of the greatest libraries of the world might sound like a challenge, or a provocation. It happens frequently that in newspaper articles or academic papers some authors, facing the new computer and internet era, speak of the possible "death of books". However, if books are to disappear, as did the obelisks or the clay tablets of ancient civilisations, this would not be a good reason to abolish libraries. On the contrary, they should survive as museums conserving the finds of the past, in the same way as we conserve the Rosetta Stone in a museum because we are no longer accustomed to carving our documents on mineral surfaces.  

"Yet, my praise for libraries will be a little more optimistic. I belong to the people who still believe that printed books have a future and that all fears à propos of their disappearance are only the last example of other fears, or of milleniaristic terrors about the end of something, the world included. . . ."

Michael Hawley, a scientist at MIT, creates the world's largest book-- Bhutan: a Visual Odyssey Across the Kingdom. The work, which is also one of the most beautiful books ever published, was undertaken as a philanthrophic endeavor. It has 112 pages and weighs 133 pounds on an included custom-built aluminum stand. It's page openings are 7 x 5 feet. The work was initially offered in exchange for a $10,000 contribution. In November 2008 Amazon.com was offering copies for sale for $30,000 each.

A more practical and affordable way to appreciate this spectacular volume may be the trade edition published in 2004. In February 2009 this was offered for sale by Amazon.com for $100.00. In my opinion this is one of the finest and most spectacular trade books designed, printed and bound in America, though my aging eyes are not entirely comfortable reading white text against a black background. The clothbound volume, with an unusual dust jacket printed on both sides, measures 15¼ x 12¼ inches (39 x 31 cm).

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) convenes its first meeting.

"The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (15 U.S.C. 7701, et seq., Public Law No. 108-187, was S.877 of the 108th United States Congress), signed into law by President George W. Bush establishes the United States' first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail and requires the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce its provisions.

"The acronym CAN-SPAM derives from the bill's full name: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003. This is also a play on the usual term for unsolicited email of this type, spam. The bill was sponsored in Congress by Senators Conrad Burns and Ron Wyden.

"The CAN-SPAM Act is commonly referred to as the "You-Can-Spam" Act because the bill explicitly legalizes most e-mail spam. In particular, it does not require e-mailers to get permission before they send marketing messages. It also prevents states from enacting stronger anti-spam protections, and prohibits individuals who receive spam from suing spammers. The Act has been largely unenforced, despite a letter to the FTC from Senator Burns, who noted that "Enforcement is key regarding the CAN-SPAM legislation." In 2004 less than 1% of spam complied with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

"The law required the FTC to report back to Congress within 24 months of the effectiveness of the act.[4] No changes were recommended. It also requires the FTC to promulgate rules to shield consumers from unwanted mobile phone spam. On December 20, 2005 the FTC reported that the volume of spam has begun to level off, and due to enhanced anti-spam technologies, less was reaching consumer inboxes. A significant decrease in sexually-explicit e-mail was also reported.

"Later modifications changed the original CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 by (1) Adding a definition of the term "person"; (2) Modifying the term "sender"; (3) Clarifying that a sender may comply with the act by including a post office box or private mailbox and (4) Clarifying that to submit a valid opt-out request, a recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her email address and opt-out preferences, or take any other steps other than sending a reply email message or visiting a single page on an Internet website" (Wikipedia article on CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, accessed 01-19-2010).

At this time OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) serves more than 50,540 libraries of all types in the U.S. and 84 countries and territories around the world. OCLC WorldCat contains 56 million catalogue records, representing 894 million holdings.

Thomson-Gales announces Eighteenth Century Collections Online.  Providing fully searchable digital texts for the 150,000 titles published in England during the 18th century, the publishers perhaps over-enthusiastically characterize the project as

"the most ambitious single digitization project ever undertaken. It delivers every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas." The project is expected to include the searchable texts of 26,000,000 pages.

800,000,000 people in the world are using the Internet.

The Library of Congress, contains 130,000,000 physical items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 29 million books and other printed materials, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 58 million manuscripts

This year 1,200,000 unique book titles are sold. According to an article in the New York Times, only two percent sell more than 5000 copies.

According to R.R. Bowker, publisher of Books in Print, 375,000 new unique books are published in English during 2004.

According to Sloan-C, A Consortium of Institutions and Organizations Committed to Quality Online Education, 2.35 million students are enrolled in online learning in the United States during this year.

Bob Stein, pioneering commercial multi-media publisher and co-founder of the Voyager Company and The Criterion Collection, co-founds The Institute for the Future of the Book.

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. 

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress found the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). " Ultimately over a period of approximately 20 years, NDNP will create a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all the states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922. This searchable database will be permanently maintained at the Library of Congress (LC) and be freely accessible via the Internet. An accompanying national newspaper directory of bibliographic and holdings information on the website will direct users to newspaper titles available in all types of formats."

There are 50,000,000 websites on the Internet.

The Index-Catalogue of the Surgeon-General's Office, a 61 volume bibliographical resource for the history of medicine and science, which began publication in 1870 under the direction of John Shaw Billings, is made available online by the National Library of Medicine.

This was the culmination of a data conversion project which began in 1996.

Archaeologists announce the finding what they believe to be the remains of the building site of the ancient Library of Alexandria.

The 13 lecture halls at the building site could have housed as many as 5000 students, raising the possibility that the Library of Alexandria might have been the world's first university.

The Journal of Cell Biology screens digital images submitted with electronic manuscripts to determine whether these images have been manipulated in ways that misrepresent experimental results. The image-screening system that checks for image manipulation takes 30 minutes per paper.

Programmer Bram Cohen, author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol, and entrepeneur Ashwin Navin found BitTorrent, Inc. in San Francisco.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair Google announces the Google Print project to scan and make searchable on the Internet the texts of more than ten million books from the collections of the New York Public Library, and the libraries of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard and Oxford Universities.

The project was renamed Google Books in December 2005.

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."

"Current thinking about long-term memory in the cortex is focused on changes in the strengths of connections between neurons. But ongoing structural plasticity in the adult brain, including synapse formation/elimination and remodelling of axons and dendrites, suggests that memory could also depend on learning-induced changes in the cortical ‘wiring diagram’. Given that the cortex is sparsely connected, wiring plasticity could provide a substantial boost in storage capacity, although at a cost of more elaborate biological machinery and slower learning."

"The human brain consists of 10 to the 11th power neurons connected by 10 to the 15 power synapses. This awesome network has a remarkable capacity to translate experiences into vast numbers of memories, some of which can last an entire lifetime. These long-term memories survive surgical anaesthesia and epileptic episodes, and thus must involve modifications of neural circuits, most likely at synapses" (Chklovskii, Mel & K. Svoboda, "Cortical Rewiring and Information Storage," Nature, Vol. 431, 782-88).

The NASA supercomputer, Project Columbia, a cluster of 20 computers with a total of 10,240 processors, built by Silicon Graphics and Intel at NASA’s Ames Research Center, achieves sustained performance of 42.7 trillion calculations per second or teraflops.

“If you could do one calculation per second by hand, it would take you a million years to do what this machine does in a single second.” (NY Times).

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 8,000,000 American adults say they have created blogs.