Internet
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“Marginalia” up-ranks sites that are text-heavy — with truly offbeat results. Call it “serendipity engineering”
Hey nerds: I recently stumbled across “Marginalia Search”. It’s a search engine with a fascinating design — rather than give you exactly what you’re looking for, it tries to surprise you.
How does it do this? By up-ranking web sites that are text-heavy, and downranking ones that are highly visual, loaded with modern web cruft, and SEO-optimized.
The upshot, as the creator suggests, is that you wind up with a lot of weird results very different from the usual fare coughed up by Google or Bing or even DuckDuckGo. Marginalia is doing …
… in a sense the opposite of…
Retrieving the great, big, migratory meta-community of digital nomads
One of things I really loved about the early net was how open and free it felt. Before the internet was even the internet, Al Gore was talking about the possibility of an “information superhighway” connecting educators and researchers with one another as well as one another’s work. We never thought in terms of destinations. It was more about the journey, the search, and the connections.
The “places” online, if you could even call them that, were just repositories of files. One of the first times I was on the net, I was looking for some song lyrics. I did…
It’s not just a virtual world that we can step into, but one we can embody ourselves
While billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos took their space-crafts for a spin into outer space, another billionaire focused on the challenge of competing in an entirely different universe. The driving ambition to expand and explore is driven by a primal urge to escape our origins and reach for the next frontier. For Mark Zuckerberg that next frontier is the metaverse.
Mark Zuckerberg is betting on the metaverse as the successor to today’s mobile internet. The Verge recently reported Zuckerberg’s announcement that Facebook would strive to build a metaverse — a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences, spanning social presence, office…
We are not the users of their network. We *are* the network.
Before the Internet (yes, I’m that old) “going online” meant calling my friend Phil’s computer from my own. I’d put a phone handset (there were only what we now call “landlines” back then) into a special cradle with two rubber cups — one for the mouthpiece and another for the earpiece. Then I would manually dial the phone number, wait for his computer to pick up and make a tone, and hit a key on my computer to initiate the handshake.
There wasn’t a lot to do. Phil had a few games on there. And there was a folder with…
The first and only Tribeca Technology Conference was an odd mix of Hollywood celebrities and internet startups reeling from the dot-com crash
In the fall of 2000, before we lost our innocence, before the towers came crashing down, before a Harvard dropout connected and upended the world, and when “binge” still meant wildly over-eating, Tribeca Films held a digital film and technology conference.
No, this wasn’t the nascent Tribeca Film Festival, which is running in Manhattan through June 20. There were no red carpets, no premiering films, just discussions about how technology and the Internet were changing film and entertainment. …
Internet Nostalgia
How do we handle sincerity on the internet?
Welcome to part 11 of our Internet Nostalgia series, which looks back at phenomena that captured the internet’s imagination and attention for a fleeting moment and then vanished as everyone moved on to something else. This series looks back at those olden times and what they told us about the internet and ourselves. If you have a suggested topic, email me at williamfleitch@yahoo.com. Last week, we looked at Boaty McBoatface. This week: the Double Rainbow guy.
Date: January 8, 2010.
The story: In 2010, Paul Vasquez had the good fortune of living just outside of Yosemite National Park. He was…
Internet Nostalgia
Did you know they switched boats on us?
Welcome to part 11 of our Internet Nostalgia series, which looks back at phenomena that captured the internet’s imagination and attention for a fleeting moment and then vanished as everyone moved on to something else. This series looks back at those olden times and what they told us about the internet and ourselves. If you have a suggested topic, email me at williamfleitch@yahoo.com. Last week, we looked at the Ice Bucket Challenge. This week: Boaty McBoatface.
Date: March 2016.
The story: The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) is a perfectly normal, rather boring U.K. organization that funds scientific endeavors and…
Hours after a baby is born, its internet presence begins — no matter what we try to do to stop it
The day after my wife delivered our first baby, a photographer knocked on the door of our hospital room and offered to take pictures. We were sleep-deprived, dazed from the realization that everything we once considered “normal” had just been smashed with a sledgehammer, and emotionally speaking, we were puddles of liquid. Of course, we let her in.
Later on, when I looked over the terms of service on the photographer’s company-issued iPad, I noticed that one of the default checked boxes authorized it to use the photos in online marketing materials. Without hesitating, I unchecked it and told the…
To mark the web’s 32nd birthday, Sir Tim Berners-Lee calls for internet access for all, a fight against abuse and misinformation, and more
Last year, we marked the web’s birthday just one day after the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 crisis a pandemic. In the 12 months since, the web — like so many of us — has been tested like never before. Today, as the web turns 32, it has proven to be a lifeline that allows us to adapt and carry on.
Now, as we repair and rebuild, we have an opportunity to reimagine our world and create something better. The web’s power to catalyze change can and must help shape the world we want.
Across the globe, young people…
Some rural residents, religious communities, and people who just like simple phones are still reliant on the vanishing network
Over the years, Mia Lipsit has innovated a number of tech workarounds to avoid buying a smartphone: She’s hacked her Kindle Fire to download Google Play (so she can use the Whole Foods app), listens to podcasts on an old iPod, and stays in touch with friends using a flip phone.
But in October, the fiftysomething New York City resident realized her days of smartphone-free living are coming to an end. That’s when Verizon customer service informed her that, beginning January 1, her simple cellphone would be rendered useless by the sunsetting of 3G.
“It’s the end of an era,”…
OneZero
The undercurrents of the future. A publication from Medium about technology and people.
