Category: NewsFeed

Posted on

Wherein Elmer Hunts for the Origin of Weblog

The first occurence of “weblog” on Scritping News: Dave searches for the first mention of the term weblog on his site and finds one from January 20, 1998. 

I thought, hey, sounds like a job for Google Groups.  An advanced search for weblog turns up this.  Early on weblog referred to those pesky streams of data written by http servers to some obscure spot on your hard drive. 

Then on March 24, 1997 this post from the Cyberspace Snow and Avalanche Center hit the rec.skiing and other outdoor newsgroups.  In the ‘Organizational’ section of the announcement it mentions “There is now a weblog available online so you can see what has been done lately. ”  Cool, an early weblog.  Next stop: the Way Back Machine.

The Way back Machine entry for CSAC is here.  Of interest is the Feb. 19, 1997 entry.
Near the bottom of the page under “Organizational Information” is this: “NEW:Check our web log to see what we’ve done on the site most recently.”  Alas, the web log is not included in the archive, but it certainly seems interesting.

The trail goes cold until Dec. 23, 1997 when Jorn Barger made this announcement to alt.society.neutopia:

After talking a lot about Frontier and Scripting News
(www.scripting.com), I decided to start my own webpage logging the best
stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis:

<URL:http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html>

This will cover any and everything that interests me, from net culture
to politics to literature etc.

j

And a couple of days later, Dec 25, 1997, on comp.infosystems.www.announce he posted this:

My latest webpage is a daily running log of the best webpages I visit:

<URL:http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html>

If your interests seem to overlap mine, even partially, bookmark this
link and check back every day or so for new discoveries.

I suspect that in a year there’ll be hundreds of people maintaining
pages like this, and that this will allow good URLs to spread much more
quickly… so I recommend that all enthusiastic surfers take a shot at
maintaining such a “weblog” (using the Frontier scripting environment, if you need to, for efficiency).

j

After that the rest is, as they say history. 

technorati tags: , , ,

Posted on

Yahoo! Adds del.icio.us to Its Portfolio

Joshua Schachter, the founder of Del.icio.us, confirmed a posting on the New York-based start-up’s site that the company had been acquired by Yahoo. Financial terms were not disclosed, he said.The acquisition of Del.icio.us marks the second major acquisition by Yahoo of a leading “social networking” site, following the Sunnyvale, California-based company’s purchase of popular photo sharing site Flickr earlier this year.

Yahoo Acquires Shared Bookmark Site Del.icio.us

This is huge.  Yahoo now has some very significant social networking assets.  Let’s hope they put them to good use.

technorati tags: ,

Posted on

Walmart Expands IT

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will add 250 new IT jobs during the next year, filling the majority of the positions with new college graduates rather than experienced IT veterans. The retail giant also plans to promote about 25% of the IT personnel already on board.

Wal-Mart to add 250 IT jobs, expand online presence – Computerworld

Of course you’ll need to relocte to Bentonville, Ark. since most of the jobs are at HQ and “salaries and housing costs are lower than in other parts of the country“.

technorati tags:

Posted on

Wikipedia Struggles for Credibility

Following two fairly high profile incidents regarding the anonymous editing of articles on the popular open-source online reference tool Wikipedia, the site said that it would make changes to how it operates to prevent future problems.

BetaNews | Wikipedia Changes Editing Rules

Only registered users will be able to create articles, but anonymous users will still be able to edit.  I just don’t see why Wikipedia can’t get a basic registration for both creators and editors.  If you are going to say soemthing for the world to hear, at least stand up let us know who you are.

Posted on

Audacity 1.3 Gets Podcast Friendly Features

Audacity: Audacity 1.3: Other features – The beta release of Audacity 1.3 brings a host of great features to this open source audio editor including FTP upload and speech-optimized batch processing.  These 2 features alone will make Audacity a key tool for podcasters.  I’ve been recommending Audcaity for those who want to record their Classcaster podcasts locally, and will certainly add these new features to that pitch.

technorati tags: , ,

Posted on

BitTorrent, MPAA Strike Accord

In a deal aimed at reducing illegal Internet traffic in pirated films, Hollywood reached an agreement Tuesday with the creator of the popular file-sharing software BitTorrent.
The agreement requires 30-year-old software designer Bram Cohen to prevent his Web site, bittorrent.com, from locating pirated versions of popular movies, effectively frustrating people who search for illegal copies of films.

Hollywood, BitTorrent Reach Agreement – Yahoo! News

Cohen will remove links to pirated films from the bittorrent.com search engine.  While this will certainly slow traffic in pirated films, it will hardly stop it.  Although BitTorrent has enough legit use to stop it from shut down like Napster or Grokster, it certainly lacks the resources to wage a lenghty legal battle against the MPAA.  I hope that Cohen’s decision here leads to a wider adoption of BitTorrent as a way to deliver properly licensed films.

Update: Seems Variety also thinks this move may signal the beginning of a better relationship between BitTorrent and the film inudustry.

technorati tags: ,