In his 2001 book, Mediated Discourse: The Nexus of Practice, Ron Scollon began an exposition of discourse as action in the same way he began numerous presentations and, no doubt, other conversations with scholars, students and friends: with a cup of coffee. But this was no un-ordinary cup of coffee; he discussed what was, in [...]

Here’s a very cool, animated history of the Internet:

My favorite comment on the video by a viewer:

I’m pretty sure Al Gore invented the Internet. I don’t know where these people got their information.

Heh.

If webpages could talk….

The best “404 Not Found” message. Ever.

The popular daily Hindustan Times carries a recent article on how patients in the major Indian metropolises are sending MMS’s (Multimedia Messaging Service) for diagnoses to their doctors. Money quote:

“It reflects the changing face of the doctor-patient interaction. I’ve been sent clips of the symptoms – a kid with stomach cramps bawling [...]

Softpedia reports on a study determining that the Internet will double in size every 5.32 years:

Moore’s Law was first used to predict the number of transistors that can fit on an integrated circuit, and argued that their number would grow exponentially over time. Indeed, current trends show that twice as many transistors can be [...]

Check out the headline of the top story (left column) from today’s CNN home page:

Twenty years ago this March, physicist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern), created a proposal that basically birthed the Internet.

Happy birthday to the Internet(s)!

Tomorrow night the Berkeley Center for New Media will host artist Ray Beldner for a talk called “Flickr, Flarfing and Babelfish: The Internet and Art Practice“, part of the long-time Art, Technology and Culture series. The talk/performance sounds intriguing, featuring how objects, databases, images, and other treasures ‘found’ on the web [...]

This fascinating video was linked to on a story in the Daily Kos recently. It’s a KRON (SF) news story on online newspapers from 1981, speculating on the future of newspapers if a culture of reading the news online ever took off…

“Western technology companies have misunderstood the linguistic landscape of India, where English is spoken proficiently by only about a tenth of the population and even many college-educated Indians prefer the contours of their native tongues for everyday speech,” according to Quillpad creator Ram Prakash, the New York Times reports today. In the last [...]

Ajit Balakrishnan, the CEO of Indian’s fifth largest web portal, Rediff.com, argued recently that data collected over the last decade suggests no evidence that Indian Internet users “want Indian languages.” He went on to state that “practically all of the 300 million young people who aspire to something in this country aspire [...]