Why Digital Texts Need A New Library Of Alexandria -- With Physical Books

Amidst the growing enthusiasm for digital texts -- ebooks and scans of illustrated books -- it's easy to overlook some important drawbacks. First, that you don't really own ebooks, as various unhappy experiences with Amazon's Kindle have brought home. Secondly, that a scan of an illustrated book is only as good as the scanning technology that is available when it is made: there's no way to upgrade a scan to higher quality images without rescanning the whole thing. 

On Techdirt.

Yes, But What About the Uighurs?

I'm a big fan of all things Turkic, so I was interested in this post exploring the scale of Turkish online activity, especially in the world of social networking:

when you take a look at Alexa's ranking of Ning's biggest networks, you see that they are either adult-oriented or Turkish. So Ning is being nourished by Turkish traffic as well.

Last but not least, Turkey's high potential in social networking comes from its very young demographics. The number of young people in Turkey exceeds even the most populated countries in Europe. Moreover, the Internet penetration is quite high, and similar to Brazilians, Turkish people have very social characteristics; Turkey was the 2nd biggest market for Live Messenger, after all.

Just one question: what about the Uighurs?

Wayback: 85,898,456,616 and Counting

The Wayback Machine is one of the Internet's best-kept secrets:

A snapshot of the World Wide Web is taken every 2 months and donated to the Internet Archive by Alexa Internet. Further, librarians all over the world have helped curate deep and frequent crawls of sites that could be especially important to future researchers historians and scholars.

As web pages are changed or deleted every 100 days, on average, having a resource like this is important for the preservation of our emerging cultural heritage.

And even for someone like me, who uses it all the time, numbers like this still take the breath away:

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine now has 85,898,456,616 archived web objects in it

plus

The database contains over 1.5 petabytes of data that came from the web (that is 1.5 million gigabytes) which makes it one of the largest databases of any kind.

And a cyber-pearl beyond price. (Via Open Access News.)

MySQL: My, My, My

This post notes that the site www.mysql.com is now in the Alexa 500. Although Alexa is a deeply-flawed measure - it's biased against GNU/Linux systems for a start - it's a measure of sorts. But what is really fascinating is this comment:

Interestingly enough, there are tons of MySQL powered websites among the top 500 including Yahoo, Google, YouTube, WikiPedia, Amazon, Craigslist, AOL, Flickr, Mixi.jp, Friendster, The Facebook, LiveJournal, Digg, CNet, Weather.com, TypePad, Neopets, WebShots, Slashdot, GoDaddy, NetFlix, iStockPhoto, Travelocity, Lycos, PriceGrabber, FeedBurner, CitySearch, Evite and more.

It's not just Apache that's running the Web.

Half the Web 2.0 Story

Here's a clever idea: put together a list of the top 1000 or so Web 2.0 sites, ordered by traffic rank. What's included?

For our purposes, my definition is that most of these companies are, as the wikipedia says, sites that "let people collaborate and share information online in a new way." So, Google doesn't make the cut, because most of their traffic comes to their search engine. eBay is an "old" company, but the many-to-many nature of the site means that they do.

Sounds reasonable.

But what about the ranking the site uses? Well, that's according to Alexa traffic rank. Now, I'm a huge fan of Alexa, and even more of Mr. Alexa, Brewster Kahle.

But.

There's a big problem with Alexa's figures, in that they draw on the Alexa Toolbar, and the toolbar is only available for Internet Explorer (Alexa offers some alternatives for Firefox users, but they are not real substitutes). This means that the rankings are seriously skewed towards what the more conservative part of the online world does - precisely the last people you would ask about Web 2.0.

Only half the Web 2.0 story, then, but I suppose it's a start.