Published by rwatstein November 23rd, 2008
in social sites and history.
Ben Parr writes: “History tends to remember only pivotal moments in time, discarding the day-to-day struggles. Even when the occasional diary survives, it only archives what one person does—it doesn’t track his or her interactions with others. But with social media, that information is readily available and archives how we interact with others over time. For the first time in human history, the day-to-day interactions between people are being permanently recorded and formatted in easily organizable segments of information.”
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Published by rwatstein November 15th, 2008
in history.
According to state media, the Peruvian government will take legal action to recover thousands of Incan relics excavated by a US explorer at Machu Picchu.
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Published by rwatstein September 14th, 2008
in internet, search, Google and history.
I started using the Internet in the 1970s. It didn’t look anything like it does today, and our search tools were, well, awful. Still compared to what we started with, they were great. Before I ever turned my hand to writing, I put myself through graduate school by doing research on the very first online database systems: NASA RECON, Dialog, and OCLC. These systems, which are still around, are part of what’s called the Matrix, and, no, I don’t mean the movie. The Matrix, as defined by John S. Quarterman, is the superset of all interconnected networks. Now, unlike then, you can get to these networks over the Internet, but you’ll find yourself blocked from getting very deep into them without permission. As for the Internet itself, it didn’t really have search tools then. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that the Internet became searchable. For example, today, if you want to find a particular file, Google is your friend and sites like Mininova make finding BitTorrent files easy. When I started, we had to go through ftp file directories screen by screen and hope that the file was in there somewhere.
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Published by rwatstein January 20th, 2008
in Library of Congress and history.
The Library of Congress on unveiled three photographic negatives - long mislabeled - of the crowd that gathered at the U.S. Capitol for President Lincoln’s second inauguration on March 4, 1865. “It’s exciting to find additional images related to the Lincoln presidency,” said Carol Johnson, curator of photographs who specializes in 19th-century photography and who played sleuth to match the negatives to the correct event. “It was a wet, rainy day, most people have on long overcoats and hats … You can see some people’s expressions - some who seem to be cheering, one guy raising his hand.” A reader browsing through the Library of Congress’ online Civil War photographic negative collection noticed three glass negatives identified as taken during the administration of President Grant, either at his inauguration or at the Grand Review of the Armies. The reader, from Berthoud, Colo., alerted the Library that the labels appeared incorrect.
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