The internet has survived the great SOPA blackout, and we’re still talking about the fallout. Apple made a major announcement of plans to support textbooks on iPads, but there are concerns about the implementation. But the first story this week is about a free service geared towards teaching people how to program with weekly lessons throughout 2012.
With Thursday Threads coming on a Thanksgiving Thursday, it seems appropriate to use a theme of what I’m thankful for. So, in this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads I’m offering three things: open source software, the internet, and public libraries. Reading this on Thanksgiving? Feel free to offer what you are thankful for in the comments.
This blog will be participating in the American Censorship Day awareness campaign on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 to show opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R.3261). There is an effort in the U.S. Congress to give power to the Department of Justice to disrupt the domain name service (DNS – the bit of internet infrastructure that makes human-readable things like “dltj.org” meaningful to machines) and order websites and search engines to remove links to targeted services (among other things). This legislation is supported in large part by the content creation industries to “address today’s gravest threat to the American film industry workforce: the illegal distribution of content online.”1
Mind-expanding topics this week. The threads start with a potentially morbid, but definitely intriguing, topic: what is to become of our personal digital legacies? If that isn’t enough to blow your mind, the next topic is an accounting of the amount of information processed in 2008. Still hanging in there? Then think about what could become of the book if we take advantage of its digital nature. You might not have much room to think big thoughts after those threads, but if you do the last one explores what could become of how our machines talk to each other.
Hickory, with true-to-life parting attitude (left) and Mittens
Last week in DLTJ Thursday Threads I posted an entry about running out of IP addresses. Since I posted that, I’ve run across a couple of other stories and websites that bring a little more context to the consequences of last week’s distribution of the last blocks of IP addresses from the world-wide pool of available addresses. The short version: channel any panic you might be feeling into making sure your systems are ready to communicate using both the existing network standard (IPv4) and the new network standard (IPv6).
It has been a long week, so for many of you this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads will actually be read on Friday. The spirit was willing, the topics were certainly out there in the past seven days, but the necessary distractions were numerous. Please enjoy this edition whenever you read it. As always, there is lots more on my FriendFeed aggregation page.
This week is a mostly Google edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads. Below is a high-level overview of Google’s Book Search algorithm, how Google is helping web servers improve the speed at which content loads, and how Google’s internet traffic is growing as a percentage of all internet traffic. But first, there is an uprising on the RDA test records in the WorldCat database.
I’m starting something new on DLTJ: Thursday Threads — summaries and pointers of stories, services, and other stuff that I found interesting in the previous seven days. This is culled from entries that I post to my FriendFeed lifestream through various channels (Google Reader shared items, citations shared in Zotero, Twitter posts, etc.), but since I know not everyone is using those services, it might be useful to post the best-of-the-selected here once a week. Why Thursday? Somewhere long ago I read that Thursday at 11am is the best time to put a post on a blog because Thursday lunch through Friday are the most active time for readers. I have no idea whether that is true or not, but lacking any evidence to the contrary, Thursday morning will do fine. (Obviously I’m a little late on this first one, but I’ll try to do better next time. Or not — maybe this will be a one-off weekly thing.)
Just as it turns 40, the internet comes of age. One day before of the anniversary of the first two computers connected together by a prototype network in 19691 — a move that foreshadowed the worldwide network of computers we know today — the U.S. Government announced that it was forever releasing direct control over a key governance organization that makes the internet run. Called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), that governance organization is what runs the top level domain name servers (DNS). And that is important because it is the DNS that translates human-friendly names such as “www.google.com” and “dltj.org” into network-friendly addresses.
