YouTube is now such a ubiquitous part of our daily lives and media consumption, it’s hard to believe the video site is only five years old. Wired looks at how the site became such a sensation.
The Internet
Mozilla: 30% of your browsers are belong to us
Mozilla has released a new quarterly analyst report, claiming the organisation’s open source Firefox browser is now used by 30% of internerds around the globe, including 6.7 million Australians. Download the full report for more interesting web stats.
Google explains the internet with a printed leaflet
As part of a goal to get all Britons online by 2012 Google has produced a handy paper leaflet to distribute explaining exactly what the internet is and does. So the future of the internet is actually in print?
www.jihad.ru: Russia’s internet mujahideen
Terrorism in Russia’s North Caucasus has “gone viral”, says Foreign Policy, with Muslim extremists becoming online celebrities. Yesterday’s Moscow bombings may be just he start of this deadly internet meme.
How spam filters damned The Beaver
Canadian history magazine The Beaver has been around for almost a century — but the unintentionally naughty name has been killing its web traffic.
Arrington: Reputation is dead
Your reputation has been ruined, says Michael Arrington: yep, yours and everyone else on the internet. Twitter and Facebook have made it too difficult to keep those skeletons in your closet, so quit fighting it and embrace a future of anti-anonymity.
Meet Kenya’s Chuck Norris
Kenya has its first internet meme — a kung-fu fighting Blaxploitation spoof superhero and bad-ass named Makmende, created by funk band Just a Band.
How blogs are becoming more like newspapers
Now that blogs and online news sites have become Serious Business, lax fact-checking, vague headlines and poor sub-editing just won’t cut it. To defeat newspapers, they have had to become them, says Ravi Somaiya.
Why the internet should win the Nobel Peace Prize
The internet has fundamentally changed our planet, allowing us to spread outpourings of empathy and altruism throughout the world like never before. Doesn’t that deserve a Nobel nod? asks neuroscientist Jamil Zaki.
Chatroulette: 89% male, 47% American, 13% pervert
Chatroulette is the latest internet phenom, where strangers are randomly paired up to have webchats. But who’s actually playing? According to new data: horny American men. Whodathunkit?
Death of the “instant book”
There has long been a lucrative market in “instant books” — hastily cobbled together tomes that pop up after major world events. But the real-time nature of the internet has made them obsolete, says Roger Donway.
graph pr0n Watch the internet take over the world
The BBC has created an interactive visualisation mapping of the internet’s growth from 1998 to today.
Why the internet really is “serious business”
Yale computer science professor David Gelernter explains why the internet is so much more than LOLcats and porn, and it’s time we started to think about it and plan for it, instead of just “letting it happen”.
The internet’s biggest threat? Fear mongering bureaucrats
The biggest threat to internet freedom isn’t China, hackers or spammers, says Ryan Singel: it’s the security and government propagandists spreading the myth that we’re engaged in a “cyberwar” in the first place.
Newsweek: How we got it really, really wrong on the internet
In 1995, scientist and author Clifford Stoll wrote an article for Newsweek declaring that the internet would never transform the way the media or government works. Oops.
graph pr0n VIDEO: The state of the Internet
With 234 million websites, 200 million spam emails per day and 27.3 million tweets per day, here’s a round-up by Jesse Thomas of all the nerdy facts and statistics about the interwebs told in lovely graphics.
Video chat with random strangers: is this really the future of the internet?
Chatroulette, a new addictive site where users chat to random strangers, is being touted as the Next Big Thing (even though it’s really a flashback to the internet chaos of old). But be warned, the constant rejection can be heart breaking.
Australia’s internet: not neutral, not cheap, not very good
“Net neutrality” is a hot issue in the States, where folks don’t want their access to online content limited or influenced by ISPs. But Aussies needn’t worry their pretty little heads about it: our internet hasn’t been neutral for years.
The internet’s Next Big Thing: a form guide
What will be the next Twitter, YouTube or Skype? Michael Wolff talks to big-name net nerds like Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, Chris Anderson and Jay Rosen, and makes a few predictions of his own.
Could the internet win a Nobel Peace Prize?
The internet (yes, the series of tubes), has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Ridiculous? Maybe, but the campaign has some pretty big-name backers, including the editor of Wired and, er, Giorgio Armani.
Why Chrome will be your next web browser
Firefox may be the fastest growing web browser right now, but it’s a bloated memory-hog, says Lance Ulanoff. Google’s Chrome browser offers a faster, more stable service and it just keeps getting better. Within five years, you’ll be using it, too.
Forbes‘ Web Celeb 25 list
Forbes names its annual list of the 25 biggest names in net nerd-dom. Nate Silver Steve Rubel. Perez Hilton predictably heads the pack for the third year running, but there are a few more controversial choices, too.
Has Australia really banned small breasts?
The internet is buzzing with outrage over claims the Australian Government has banned the depiction of naked A-cup breasts in films in case it encourages pedophilia. Never let the truth get in the way of a good trending Twitter topic.
The internet in ’09: the stats
Fascinating figures from the information superhighway last year: 90 trillion email (81% of which were spam), 126 million blogs, and 4.25 million people following Ashton Kutcher on Twitter.
Bill Gates joins Twitter
In this modern life: Bill Gates joins Twitter. We all watch as casually chats to American Idol host Ryan Seacrest. Utterly surreal.
