Essential reading for technophiles
My junior high school maths teacher, Nancy Rosenberg, often talked about her desire to illustrate basic principles of geometry via animated cartoons. She thought explaining points, lines, and angles would be more direct and intuitive if you could just show, for example, a line approaching, intersecting and then retreating from a circle.
In the early to mid 1990s it was fashionable to compare the unformed, open spaces of the internet to the 19th century American West: the 'electronic frontier'. Tabloid journalists liked to call the internet lawless and uncontrolled; pioneers preferred to call it uncontrollable.
It's almost humorous to remember now how terrified everyone seemed to be in the early 1990s of the mostly harmless 'dark-side hackers' of the era. The most famous of these was undoubtedly Kevin Mitnick, whose 1995 capture formed the basis of no less than three books.
Anywhere is big. Really big. You just won't believe how mind-bogglingly big it is.
Every decade (which means every two or three years in internet time) has its internet rethinker. This year it's virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier and You Are Not a Gadget.
I have a recurring dream that goes like this: I am running somewhere — anywhere — and I never run out of breath or get tired. It feels wonderful.
The city of Topeka — the capital of Kansas — has renamed itself 'Google' for the month of March 2010, hoping to draw the company's notice so it will be chosen for fibre optics trials that Google has said it will start soon. This event had not, of course, happened when New Yorker business writer Ken Auletta finished work on Googled, but it's a sign of the times that even the home of the Wizard of Oz can't escape the playschool-coloured arm of the white-paged search giant.
You'd have thought there couldn't possibly be anything sufficiently complicated about typing 140-character messages to warrant writing a book about how to do it, but at least three people think you're wrong.Tim O'Reilly (http://twitter.
If we want the internet to stay open and free, we need users to be as active and engaged as in the early days, rather than passive consumers, says Jonathan Zittrain.