It’s been like 20 days I didn’t have any new article on this blog, well the reason I was in travel and I had lot of things to do between work and leisure stuff. I am preparing a full article about my trip which will be posted soon, but meanwhile I found this article from Outer Court interesting to share with you my readers.
MAY 12, 2017 - BUSINESSWIRE. Mountain View-based search giant Google Inc today announced they’ve acquired the internet for the astounding sum of $2,455.5 billion in cash. The deal had been rumored in various search blogs since the beginning of the year and was now confirmed by the company’s CEO. “This is in line with our vision to make information more accessible to end users,” says Eric Schmidt. “With the acquisition, we can increase the speed of indexing as everything will already be on our servers by the time it’s published.”
In a conference call earlier today, Larry Page explained the strategy behind the acquisition. “We realized it’s not very cost-effective to buy the internet in smaller portions.” During the past two decades, Google had acquired YouTube for $1.65, DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, AOL for $12.5 billion, and last year, Microsoft for the record sum of $120 billion.
Questioned on the first steps the company would take integrating the internet onto their servers, Eric Schmidt announced immediate plans to redirect Yahoo.com to Google’s own search engine. “From an end user perspective, having two search engines is just bad usability, and [causes confusion]. While we appreciate Yahoo’s recent advances in search technology, we felt this move is best aligned with the interests of our advertisers, users and shareholders.” Eric added, “By leveraging third-generation mobile platforms in sustainable verticals, new monetization opportunities can manifest into an improved web experience, greatly benefiting investors and digerati alike – a true paradigm change synergizing the Web 6.0 framework on the enterprise level.”
Accompanying Google’s acquisition revelation, privacy groups today released a paper criticizing the move. However, Larry Page argues that privacy is improved by Google’s acquisition, explaining that “[the] main privacy issues for users today are data leaks to third parties. By eliminating all third parties, we closed this hole.” Eric Schmidt adds that Google intends to replace their current privacy policy with a “privacy scale” which better balances necessary compromises. “When you can improve the privacy of a large group of people by violating the privacy rights of a small number of people, in the end this improves overall privacy.”
The Chinese government in the meantime congratulated Google Inc on their move. Regarding the potentials of expanded censorship, Sergey Brin told members of the press that Google would now drop all search results filtering and instead “address the root problem from a publisher perspective” by directly blocking certain keywords the time they are entered in Google-owned tools such as Blogger, Gmail, Page Creator, Yahoo 360 and MSN Spaces. Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders were not available for comment at this time due to temporary technical problems with their web-based email clients.
As you know I spend a lot of time on reading my RSS feeds news every day. Almost 4 hours of my daily life is reading what is going on here and there. Some of my blog posts are influenced from what I read and the many researches I do on a daily basis. Today I was reading on CNET news this article about the first blogger on the net, and that blogs turn 10… so I wanted to share it with you. Please know that the article below is brought to you by CNET news:
Someone, somewhere created the very first Web log. It’s just not quite clear who.
It may not be one of the Internet’s grandest accomplishments, but with the number of active bloggers hovering somewhere around 100 million, according to one estimate, there are some serious bragging rights to be claimed by the first person who provably laid fingers to keyboard in the traditional bloggy way.
Was the first blogger the irascible Dave Winer? The iconoclastic Jorn Barger? Or was the first blogger really Justin Hall, a Web diarist and online gaming expert whom The New York Times Magazine once called the “founding father of personal blogging”?
Or did all three merely make incremental improvements on earlier proto-blogs? The answer is most likely “yes” to all of the above. In truth, awarding the title “first blogger” is more than a little tricky because the definitions of blog and blogger are slippery. Any definition should probably include posts sorted by date, with the newest posts at the top and the rest archived for future use (criteria that would eliminate the Drudge Report, for instance).
Winer is a pioneer of Web syndication techniques and editor of Scripting News, which launched on April 1, 1997.
He boasts on his site that Scripting News “bootstrapped the blogging revolution” and that it is the “longest currently running Web log on the Internet.” A decade ago, however, Winer wasn’t actually using the term “Web log,” nor does he claim to have invented the term. Winer did not respond to repeated requests for comment from CNET News.com until after this article appeared. He replied in a post claiming “the first blogs were inspired” by Scripting News.
Barger, a programmer, futurist and James Joyce scholar, is not afraid to say, indeed, he’s the guy who invented the term “Web log.” In December 1997, he created RobotWisdom.com to feature entirely bloggy collections of links to articles about politics, culture, books and technology that he found interesting.
“Since I made up the word, I assume I get to define it,” Barger said in an e-mail message to CNET News.com on Monday. “And by my strictest definition Winer wasn’t quite a blog–he mixed up the reverse-chronological ordering too much. So–unsurprisingly–the first 100 percent Weblog would be mine.”
Barger said his site amounted to something of a day-to-day log of his reading and intellectual pursuits–and because it was online, he called it a “WebLog.” And thus a new term, which would soon be abbreviated and de-capitalized to “blog” by Peter Merholz of Peterme.com, was born.
“Winer called them ‘news pages,’ but I didn’t plan to do mainly news, but rather anything I found that I thought was worth reading or visiting,” Barger said in an e-mail. “So at the last minute I needed to come up with a title, and I used AltaVista to see whether various possibilities were already taken (with ‘log’ being the critical descriptive term). ‘Weblog’ was being used as a synonym for ’server log’ or ‘html log’ by site administrators, but since they had the other options I grabbed the more general one.”
Building on the .plan
But as any Internet graybeard will tell you, early Net denizens were just as active in sharing details of their personal lives and commenting on politics (though, perhaps, not the antics of their pet cats) as the latest generation of bloggers. They did it on mailing lists and through a now virtually forgotten technique called a “.plan” file that was invented in the early 1970s.
A .plan file was a publicly visible text file of any length that could be attached to each individual account on a Unix system and often used reverse-chronological blog-like ordering with newer items at the top. Internet users could edit their own .plan files to include details of their personal life, work projects or musings on the nature of reality.
Many did. One of the most famous .plan files was created by John Carmack, who co-founded Id Software and was the lead programmer on blockbuster video games including Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D. (Carmack’s .plan file has since been converted to a blog.)
