The Day I Nearly Dumped Firefox

I remember well the moment when the beta version of Netscape Navigator 0.9 was released in October 1994. It was so clearly superior to the main Mosaic browser I was running at the time, that there was no question about using anything else thereafter.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Crowdsourcing an Astronomy Commons

This is a fab use of pooled images combined with automation:

Flickr hosts a wide range of beautiful images, but a new project built on top of Flickr's API only focuses on photos of the night sky from amateur astronomers. The Astrometry.net project constantly scans the Astrometry Flickr group for new images to catalog and to add to its open-source sky survey. At the same time, this project also provides a more direct service to the amateur astronomers, as it also analyzes each image and returns a high-quality description of the photo's contents.

The Astrometry group currently has over 400 members, and as Christoper Stumm, a member of the Astrometry.net team, told the Flickr Code blog, the back-end software uses geometric hashing to exactly pinpoint and describe the objects in the images. When you submit an image to the Flickr pool, the robot will not just respond with a comment that contains an exact description of what you see in the image, but it will also annotate the image automatically.

What I'd like to see is something similar for terrestrial images, to build up a huge mosaic of everything, everywhere.

UK Government *Is* Experian

William Heath on the Experian scandal:

Experian has a “Mosaic” view of the world which involves grabbing as much data as possible and then crudely lumping people into blocks, rather like a fly looking at the world through compound eyes. The danger is they flog this to Whitehall departments and local authorities which rely on this computerised kaleidoscope to make decisions that affect people’s lives.

It's actually worse than that. The "mosaic" view is already deeply embedded within the UK government's mindset: that's why they keep on setting up these huge, unworkable database projects, and then propose linking them together.

It's not a matter of Labour peers allegedly being corrupted by Experian; the problem is that the UK government has gradually *become* Experian.

Open Source White Box Social Networks

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Netscape Story: From Mosaic to Mozilla

On Open Enterprise blog.

Second Life Opens up the Client

Fantastic news: Linden Lab has released the source code for the Second Life client under the GNU GPL v2. Nice historical context, too:

In 1993, NCSA released their liberally licensed, but proprietary, Mosaic 2.0 browser with support for inline images arguably heralding the start of the web as we know it today. In an act of either acceptance of the inevitable or simple desperation, Netscape Communications released the bulk of the Netscape Communicator code base to form the foundation of projects as Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird.

We are not desperate, and we welcome the inevitable with open arms.

Stepping up the development of the Second Life Grid to everyone interested, I am proud to announce the availability of the Second Life client source code for you to download, inspect, compile, modify, and use within the guidelines of the GNU GPL version 2.

This is a great move by the Lindens, and a major step towards an open, standards-based virtual world. It will be interesting to see what comes of this. Sad, though, to see the deeply ignorant comments on the Linden Lab blog post lamenting this move because of the increased griefing they claim it will cause - as if security by obscurity ever worked.

Coders of the (virtual) world, unite!

In Praise of Google Groups

Although people are rightly suspicous of Google's huge power these days, it is also important to remember those actions that are praiseworthy by any measure. One of them was acquiring a company originally called DejaNews, which had the biggest collection of Usenet postings, and making them freely available. Had Google not done so, it is quite possible that great swathes of Internet, computing and indeed modern history would have been lost forever.

To get some idea of the treasures this trove contains, take a look at the Usenet timeline that Google has put together. Highlights include:

* Stallman's announcement of the GNU project

* Tim Berners-Lee's announcement of the World Wide Web

* Linus's famous "Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?" posting, made exactly 15 years ago today.

* Marc Andreessen's announcement of Mosaic

* The first commercial spam (ah, I remember it well)

* The first mention of Google

and several hundred million more.

Google has just announced a beta version of its new Google Groups service, but the main interest will always be the old stuff. Thanks, Google.

Splog in a Box?

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away - well, in California, about 1994 - O'Reilly came out with something called "Internet in a Box". This wasn't quite the entire global interconnect of all networks in a handy cardboard container, but rather a kind of starter kit for Web newbies - and bear in mind that in those days, the only person who was not a newbie was Tim (not O'Reilly, the other one).

Two components of O'Reilly's Internet in a Box were particularly innovative. One was Spry Mosaic, a commercial version of the early graphical Web browser Mosaic that arguably began the process of turning the Web into a mass medium. Mosaic had two important offspring: Netscape Navigator, created by some of the original Mosaic team, and its nemesis, Internet Explorer. In fact, if you choose the "About Internet Explorer" option on the Help menu of any version of Microsoft's browser, you will see to this day the surprising words:

Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc.

So much for Bill Gates inventing the Internet....

The other novel component of "Internet in a Box" was the Global Network Navigator. This was practically the first commercial Web site, and certainly the first portal: it was actually launched before Mosaic 1.0, in August 1993. Unfortunately, this pioneering site was later sold to AOL, where it sank without trace (as most pioneers do when they are sold to AOL: anybody remember the amazing Internet search company WAIS? No, I thought not.)

Given this weight of history, it seems rather fitting that something called Boxxet should be announced at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, currently running in San Diego. New Scientist has the details:

A new tool offers to create websites on any subject, allowing web surfers to sit back, relax and watch a virtual space automatically fill up with relevant news stories, blog posts, maps and photos.

The website asks its users to come up with any subject they are interested in, such as a TV show, sports team or news topic, and to submit links to their five favourite news articles, blogs or photos on that subject. Working only from this data, the site then automatically creates a webpage on that topic, known as a Boxxet. The name derives from “box set”, which refers to a complete set CDs or DVDs from the same band or TV show.

As this indicates, Boxxet is a kind of instant blog - just add favourite links and water. It seems the perfect solution for a world where people are so crushed by ennui that most bloggers can't even be bothered posting for more than a few weeks. Luckily, that's what we have technology for: to spare us all those tiresome activities like posting to blogs, walking to the shops or changing television channels by getting up and doing it manually.

It's certainly a clever idea. But I just can't see myself going for this Blog in a Box approach. Perhaps I over-rate the specialness of my merely human blogging powers; perhaps I just need to wait until the Singularity arrives in a few years time, and computers are able to produce trans-humanly perfect blogs.

What I can see - alas - are several million spammers rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of a completely automatic way of generating spurious, self-updating blogs. Not so much Blog in a Box as Splog in a Box.