Archive for internet
A Round of Links
Posted by: | CommentsI thought I’d share some of the stuff I read.
- Marketwatch has an insightful comparison between Reagan’s economic policies, which are largely still in place today, and the upcoming Obama economic policies. Fittingly, the title of the post is Obamanomics vs. Reaganomics
- The Progressive asks the obvious question: What Would King Tell Obama?
- Reason magazine looks at Barack Obama in the light of Executive sports history.
- Mental Floss has a Name All the Presidents Quiz in 8 Minutes quiz. Yes, Obama is on there (and I can do it in 2:05 and in order, top that!)
For those of you tired of the President:
- Cracked (yes I read Cracked), has an article on the 5 Most Terrifying Civilizations of All-Time. Take it with a grain of salt because it is Cracked Magazine, but they do provide links to academic sources to back them up.
If you’ve got good (read: not spam) links to share, post in the comments section below. And be sure to come back tomorrow for more stuff I read.
Why is Google called that?
Posted by: | Comments
This one is straight from the horse’s mouth:
Google is a play on the world “googol” which means 1 followed by 100 zeroes, or
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000. So why did founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page choose such a seemingly esoteric name? According to Google itself, “Google’s use of the term reflects our mission to organize the world’s immense (seemingly infinite) amount of information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
More Google facts, not all from the horse’s mouth:
- Co-founder Sergey Brin was born in the Soviet Union.
- According to web traffic analyzer Alexa, Google is the 2nd most popular website in the world behind Yahoo.
- Google released a new web browser in late 2008 called Google Chrome.
- Even though Google’s email service, GMail, has been available to the general public since February 2007, the service is still in beta.
- Google’s unofficial slogan is “Don’t be evil”
- Google modifies it’s logo on holidays and special occasions, and if you actually click on these modified logos, they will take you to a search results page explaining the day’s significance.
- Google has ranked for two straight years (2007 and 2008) as Fortune magazine’s best company to work for.
- Their stock symbol is GOOG.
What Google facts do you know?
The Origin of the Greatest Thing Nobody’s Using
Posted by: | Comments
Dave Winer: The Inventor of RSS (Courtesy of Joi / Flickr)
EverythingIsHistory.com provides two methods for subscribing to the articles on this site, RSS and email. The majority of the population is familiar with the latter, so let’s focus on the former. Depending on who you ask, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. Basically, RSS allows you to view updates to a website by viewing them in what’s called a feed reader, RSS reader, or aggregator. For more info on my favorite RSS Readers, visit these links: Feed Reader (Windows), Google Reader (web-based), or Vienna (Mac OS X).
The origins of RSS go back to the scriptingNews format which was created in 1997 by Dave Winer, who most people refer to as the original blogger. Then, in what became a busy year for web syndication development, 1999, Netscape designed RSS 0.90 for use with its own my.netscape.com, although it also supported the scriptingNews format. Over the course of the summer, a team at Netscape and Mr. Winer went back and forth with the different versions of their respective formats before Netscape finally integrated the scriptingNews format and Winer, satisfied with the effort, adopted the new RSS (version 0.91). While Netscape abandoned developmet after the adoption of RSS 0.91, Winer continued to work on improving the RSS standard. However, a man by the name of Rael Dornfest released a competing standard, known as RSS 1.0, which was not compatible with the preceding versions of RSS developed by Netscape and Winer. Thankfully, Winer released RSS 2.0, which in actuality is RSS 0.92, but just named RSS 2.0 so as to completely shut RSS 1.0 out of the picture and eliminate confusion.
Although some form of syndication has been in place for roughly the last 12 years, the RSS adoption rate is only at 11%, which in all likelihood is do to the prevalence and ease of access of email. So why should you consider using RSS? Because by subscribing via RSS, you can keep up with your favorite sites all in one location, while also protecting your privacy by not sharing your email address through newsletter sign-ups (although you don’t have to worry about that with EverythingIsHistory.com). You are welcome to subscribe to EverythingIsHistory.com (on your right) through any means that is convenient to you, but I would like to know, what’s your take on RSS?
