April 2010
December 2009
Scott Brown on Why Some Memes Never Die | Magazine
Now, getting nostalgic for a fin de Netscape time-waster is a new and disturbing sensation for me: Web content is designed to dissolve in your brain like dopamine Certs. Yet my Homestar bar stool still feels warm: Firing up the old URL, knit cap in hand, I’m suddenly back in the early Aughts, watching Strong Bad answer his email, kick the Cheat, his rhomboid accomplice, and dream up such memorable mini-memes as the majestic dragon Trogdor the Burninator — a Trapper Keeper-quality pencil doodle with a catchy metal theme song. (It ended up name-checked in the Buffy finale and eventually landed in Guitar Hero II.)
November 2009
The dark side of the internet
Fourteen years ago, a pasty Irish teenager with a flair for inventions arrived at Edinburgh University to study artificial intelligence and computer science. For his thesis project, Ian Clarke created "a Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System", or, as a less precise person might put it, a revolutionary new way for people to use the internet without detection. By downloading Clarke's software, which he intended to distribute for free, anyone could chat online, or read or set up a website, or share files, with almost complete anonymity.
Top 10 Reasons Why the Closing of Geocities is Long Overdue - Nettuts+
Geocities is finally, after nearly fifteen years, bowing its head and closing its doors. While the first reactions of many, like myself, was, "it's about time;" others embraced the nostalgia of their first websites in the nineties - full of animated gifs, enormous counters, midi tunes, frames, tables, ... the list goes on and on. With that said, we can all agree on one thing if we're truly honest with ourselves: this closure is long overdue!
October 2009
Les Observateurs n°90 : Les mèmes
Les mèmes et lolcats... petites plaisanterie d'internaute avec Camille Paloque-Bergès
ASCII by Jason Scott / 4Chan: Sage Not Bump (For Now)
OK, so the upshot is that the 4chan archives I’ve acquired will not be going up to archive.org, or anywhere public, anytime soon.
Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter | Magazine
It’s easy to write off Twitter as a happy accident, a right-place, right-time fluke. But that misses the point. When Twitter’s creators designed the service, they made a series of crucial and deliberate decisions — ones that seem brilliant in retrospect — that created the conditions that allow users to innovate. The first was a commitment to simplicity. A little history: Williams’ previous company was a podcasting venture called Odeo. After Apple started distributing podcasts in June 2005, Odeo was pretty much redundant, so Williams started looking for a new idea. Jack Dorsey, one of his engineers, had one for him: status updates — specifically, brief reports that answered questions like: Where are you? What are you doing?
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
The launch years of today’s most popular websites | Royal Pingdom
How long have today’s most popular websites been around? This is a survey of when today’s top 50 websites began their lives. What we here at Pingdom wanted to discover when we made this survey was not just how old the most popular sites are, but to see if we could discover any interesting trends based on that, and we think we did.
February 2009
The Code of the Geeks v3.12
by 4 othersQuand on est geek, on doit pouvoir parler geek ou au moins décrire sa geekitude ! Ce code est là pour ça. Il permet de se décrire entièrement. GCS GCC+ W+++++
December 2008
Une petite histoire des blogs dans l'hebdo Vendredi : Le monde du Blog : le magazine du blogging
by 1 otherUne petite histoire des blogs.
A Brief History of Search Engines - webreference.com
Un résumé de l'histoire des moteurs de recherche.
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