The History Commons

As someone who has been writing about the commons for many years, I am still amazed when new ones pop up. Here's another:

The History Commons website is an experiment in open-content civic journalism. It provides a space for people to conduct grassroots-level investigations on any issue, providing the public with a useful tool to conduct oversight of government and private sector entities. It is collaborative and thus allows individuals to build upon the work of others. Each investigation is organized as a “project,” which is made up of at least one timeline. You can contribute to a project by adding new events to the timeline associated with that project. All submissions are peer-reviewed by other users before being published. If you would like to participate in this effort, you will first need to create a user account. Once you have done that, you can begin adding events to any timeline.

(Via CommonsBlog.)

Google Enters the Fourth Dimension

It's a bit rudimentary at the moment, but Google's new Timeline view for searches is quite entertaining. (Via Vecosys.)

Distro Delight

Beautiful.

LWN's 2006 Linux and free software timeline

A lot has happened in the last year in the world of free software. That makes it hard (a) to remember who exactly did what and (b) to get the big picture. One invaluable tool for doing both is LWN's 2006 Linux and free software timeline, which offers all the main events with handy links to the original stories. They've also got other timelines going back to 1998, if you want to see an even bigger picture. Great stuff for a trip down free memory lane.

Update 1: And here's C|net's list of top stories in the same field.

Update 2: Meanwhile, here's Matthew Aslett's open source year in quotations.

Feast of the Behemoths

There's no doubt that the three giants of the online world are Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. What they get up to matters, so tracking what they're doing in terms of acquisitions, say - and who they're doing - is a fruitful activity. The problem, is keeping track. Enter this rather nice draggable timeline, which shows who did what, when and to whom. (Via John Battelle's Searchblog.)