They agreed with [Tim] Bray that the number of pages is increasing dramatically, finding that the size of the Internet seemed to double between October and November, 1995, going from 1.3 million to 2.6 million HTML documents.

Tim also noticed that average page size had remained consistent at 6,500 bytes. (From “The Dublin Core and Warwick Framework: A Review of the Literature, March 1995 – September 1997″ by Harold Thiele.) [Tags: internet TimBray OpenText]

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Bostonians are supporting a bid to hold Wikimania — AKA Wikipediapalooza — in Boston next year. That would be just too much fun! [Tags: wikipedia boston]

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Web 2.0 is a fine idea, so long as it actually refers to something. I am increasingly hearing blogging mentioned as a Web 2.0 application. I beg to semi-differ.

As I understand it — and Tim O’Reilly’s seminal piece on Web 2.0 backs this up — blogging is a 2.0 app insofar as it enables the connecting of pieces in new ways. RSS is 2.0. Permalinks are 2.0 also, although not the best example.

But blogging as an enabler of individual voices talking together is (IMO) a great example of Web 1.0. The ability to talk in our own voice about what matters to us and to do so in conversation is exactly what got hundreds of millions of us onto the Web in the first place.

Why does this matter since Web 2.0 is just a made up term? Because if we get muddled and start talking about blogging-as-voice and blogging-as-conversation as 2.0 apps, we’ll misunderstand the great impulse behind the Web from the beginning. [Tags: web2.0 TimOReilly blogging rss]

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This is nuts.

Go to “personalize” your Google homepage. A left-hand pane opens. Selecct “Create a Section” and type in “politics.” It lists some feeds you might want: Slate, CNN, Joho, NYT Magazine…

Yes, you read that right. Joho occasionally fulminates about politics, but it’s not primarily about politics. And its traffic is orders of magnitude smaller than real political sites and blogs. Likewise for links in. (I don’t ever ever check these stats, btw; it’s bad for the soul. But just compare the number of comments I get…)

So, clearly Google is broken. I mean, I’m glad that it’s broken in my favor, but listing Joho in that company is a desperate cry for help. [Tags: google bugs politics rss]

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I’m in St. Louis for a Public Radio conference. The hotel charges$10 to connect to the Net, even though it’s free to jump into the much more expensive-to-maintain pool. So, I got to my room and checked out the available hotspots. Here are a couple of the un-WEPed SSID’s:

Suck my left nut
Get your own damn router
My other ride is yo mama Even so, I’m blogging to you now courtesy of My other ride is yo mama. [Tags: wifi]

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TopSpotOrNot lets you rate the satellite images of various spots, combining HotOrNot, Google Maps, Wikipedia and Google images. All it needs is Flickr and del.icio.us to be 100% Cool Site Compliant! (Thanks to wanagi for the link.)

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Irina Slutsky interviews Justin Ross, the person behind Boobs4BourbonSt, a site where men and women can donate topless photos of themselves and visitors can only see the girls/guys going wild if they forward proof that they’ve donated at least $5 to the Katrina relief effort. So far the site has raised over $13,000. Snippet:

Irina: …What kind of job you want after graduation?

Justin: I’m leaning toward something in government. Not necessarily a congressman or senator, but I think I’d really enjoy being an aide or assistant to one. Maybe work my way up to working in the president’s cabinet. Most of those positions aren’t really places for idealists, though.

Justin notes that “each boob picture has raised, on average, $213.” [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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Gary Lerphaut of Prodigem, a marketplace for Torrents (which I blogged about here), has put together the Prodigem Enclosure Puller ( which he blogs about here), an example of Prodigem’s new API. Give it a feed — say, the del.icio.us feed of popular videos — and it will create torrents of every enclosure it finds. As Gary points out, in this example the world (= del.icio.us users) chooses its favorite videos and PEP automatically makes them available as torrents. Again as Gary puts it, it’s Web 2.0 at work, stitching together new apps out of old. [Tags: prodigem delicious folksonomy web2.0 bittorrent]

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Google’s blog search engine (Goognorati?) is available in beta. There will be lots of questions that others will answer — how comprehensive? Is it paying special attention to tags? Will Google lower the google juice on blogs when searching its main index? — but one thing’s for sure: It’s a snappy performer. [Tags: google technorati blogs]

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The Berkman Tuesday lunchtime speaker was Glorianna Davenport from the MIT Media Lab. She wants to get more video and images on the Web. “I love to have a camera in my hands,” she says.

In 1986, she put 6 hours of video about New Orleans on disk. 250 scenes. 50 major characters. This required creating a random access editing system as well as thinking through hypertext issues. Now she’s been making a diary of her family for the past twelve years. And she’s trying to find ways to annotate video (she thinks of video, etc., as “collections” that tend to be quite large and on a particular topic), a daunting challenge because there are so many types of information in them.

She’s currently talking with a Cambridge school that wants to video just about everything, in part to see if they can find new ways of evaluating students. E.g., how about portfolios instead of tests? Q: What about this being the same as surveillance? A: It’s being discussed. (Students are involved in the discussion.)

She’s interested in “continuity” not in Hollywood’s sense of making sure the cigarette is dangling from the same side of the mouth from shot to shot but as a cognitive binding. Google is fabulous, she says, but not fabulous at showing ideas within their stories and “fabric.”

She has a vision of a society in which everyone provides the stories and information from which histories are written or gathered. We get that somewhat with blogs, she says, but it’s generally only text. Her vision is open access — “The Internet has clearly done a wonderful job but it has quite a ways to go” — that gets over the digital divide.

The discussion centers for a while around what having so many points of view does to our ability to have a shared history.

Would a flickr-like measurement of “interestingness” help people pull together pieces? Glorianna thinks not because interests are often highly individual and idiosyncratic.

“It’ll be a long long time, if ever, that a machine wil lbe able to look at the bits and tell what it’s about.”

Q: How about the legal issues? Now, the person who takes the video has legal rights over it.

A: We’re using Creative Commons. But, she says, it’s thorny. [Tags: berkman GloriannaDavenport multimedia blogs]

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