(empo-tymshft) A change in plan

I had a wonderful post that I wrote, and was preparing to post in the Empoprise-BI business blog on Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 5:00 am Pacific time.

But I changed my mind, and will be posting it somewhere else at 7:00 am Pacific time.

More later.

(empo-tuulwey) (empo-tymshft) Tomorrow's advance is the day after tomorrow's trash - On Linotype

Take a moment and think about the most futuristic prototype that you've seen recently.

Now think about the day when that miraculous item is a dusty relic.

On July 3, 2011, we celebrated the 150th anniversary of something that no longer exists:

On this date in 1886, the German clockmaker, Ottmar Mergenthaler demonstrated the first Linotype Type Casting Machine at the New York Tribune in New York City, USA. In front of a gathering of printers, newspaper men and reporters, the machine was first put in to production, casting lines of printable type for the Tribune.

At this demonstration, Mergenthaler sat at the machine and cast the first line of type. It is alleged that Whitelaw Reid, the owner of the Tribune, exclaimed "Ottmar! You've done it! A line of type!" A reporter asked what the new machine was called and Reid replied, "Why yes, we do have a name. We are going to call it the Linotype."

This ability to set type one line at a time revolutionized the information industry, enabling blazingly quick responses to events. This was symbolized by the boy standing on a streetcorner shouting "Extra!" to alert passersby that a new newspaper edition was available. This newspaper would recount something that happened mere hours ago!

Such a revolutionary tool had far-reaching effects.

Due to the speed and low cost of printing, literacy dramatically increased as more and more books and newspapers were published.

But a mere hundred years later:

Although these machines were revolutionary, technology began to supersede the Linotype and they were scrapped and melted-down by the thousands. Today, very few machines are still in existence.

And what of the fathers in the 1890s, or the 1920s, or the 1950s, telling their kids to become Linotype operators? Well, those jobs went away, and the knowledge is going away also.

The highly-skilled operators of the Linotype are in a battle against time. If their skills are not passed along to a new generation of operators, the machine will die completely. There is a small group of former operators that want to save the Linotype from the scrap yard, but some see this as a fruitless endeavor.

H/T Laughing Squid, which discussed the documentary Linotype: The Film.

"Linotype: The Film" Official Trailer from Linotype: The Film on Vimeo.

(empo-tymshft) Why Bad Predictions Happen (the "five computers" prediction)

Mark J. Fletcher wrote a recent blog post on bad technology positions. While the bulk of his post dealt with a bad prediction about E 911, he started off with a classic bad prediction from Thomas Watson the elder.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

Now some people like to look at bad predictions and laugh at how stupid the predicter was. In my case, I'd rather put myself back in the shoes of the person who made the bad prediction, and try to understand what motivated the person to think as he or she did.

I've even done this to myself, including the time in 2009 that I was forced to retract my prediction that Oracle and Sun would not collaborate until 2010 or 2011, or after final approval of the Oracle-Sun merger.

But let's look at the environment in which Thomas Watson made his oft-repeated prediction...if he made it. There's no evidence that Thomas Watson the elder actually said such a thing; perhaps the statement, or a similar statement, was made by Douglas Hartree or Howard Aiken or Thomas Watson Jr., and the statement might have been made not in 1943, but in 1951 or 1952 or 1953.

So let's assume that SOMEONE made a statement, perhaps in the early 1950s, claiming that a few computers could take care of the world's computing needs. How could someone have such a misguided conception?

Well, actually it was pretty easy. Remember that at the time, computers were big hunks of metal that were pretty much huge calculating machines. (Actually, the computers of today are also huge calculating machines; it's just that today's computers calculate Farmville crop yields instead of missile path projections.) These huge calculating machines were expensive, hard to maintain (all the bugs, you know), and required great effort to input data and receive the data output.

If this is the way in which a person of 1953 thought of the computer, then it would be extremely difficult to conceive of something radically different.

In that year of 1953, a young boy named Albert Gore, Jr. was five years old. Now even though Gore's father was a powerful man - he had just been elected to the U.S. Senate in 1952 - it's ludicrous to imagine Senator Gore getting a computer for his young son. Where would the Gore family put their computer? Where would they get someone to build the raised floor and the cooling system? How long would it take the kid to figure out how to input stuff into the computer? Where would the family find a machine-language coder to create programs for kid to run on the computer?

And, come to think of it, why would you want to create programs for a kid? Computers were good for doing complex military calculations, and for undertaking tasks such as compiling census data for the United States. Only an idiot would take the time to program a computer to play solitaire or something like that.

It wasn't until 1954 that computers were really seen outside of government circles. In December 1954, John Hancock (the life insurance people) got their hands on a state-of-the-art IBM 650 computer. Early IBM 650 computers were extremely powerful, and had memory capacities of 2,000 words (or 10,000 characters) - not enough for anyone to manage a simulated farm. And even if it had much more memory, the 22-33 operations per second speed meant that you couldn't do all that much.

Yet even the (by modern eyes) meager capabilities of the IBM 650 resulted in a revolution in computing that couldn't have been predicted back in 1953. By 1962, IBM 650 computers were flying off the shelves, and an amazing 2,000 computers had been sold.

And all of that happened before computers became more powerful, and much smaller, and much easier to use. By the time I used my first computer in the 1970s - a machine with a single-line display that was dedicated to running BASIC programs - computers were able to do all sorts of things that people in the early 1950s just could never envision.

And it just went on from there.

How could a person in 1953 have predicted that within 50 years, hundreds of millions of people would own "computers" that didn't require special cooling, a special room, or punched card entry. Could a person of 1953 have imagined a strange cross between a typewriter and a television - a COLOR television - with a display that looked like a piece of paper? And could the person in 1953 imagine that a computer user of 2003 would effortlessly combine text with pictures, send the result to another computer thousands of miles away, and enable a different person in a different location to see that text-picture combination within seconds?

In fact, the person of 1953 would probably say, "That's not a computer!" It's a...it's a...well, what is it?

Perhaps these little tiny things aren't computers, but computer terminals that tie into computers elsewhere which are the REAL computers. And as the pendulum swings toward cloud computing, John Battelle revisited the early prediction:

The march to cloud computing and the rush of companies building brands and services where both enterprises and consumers can park their compute needs is palpable. And over the next ten or so years, I wonder if perhaps the market won’t shake out in such a way that we have just a handful of “computers” – brands we trust to manage our personal and our work storage, processing, and creation tasks. We may access these brands through any number of interfaces, but the computation, in the manner Watson would have understood it, happens on massively parallel grids which are managed, competitively, by just a few companies.

Instead of having just a few computers at selected government agencies, we might just have computers at Facebook, Google, and a few other places. Battelle doesn't believe that Facebook will make the cut; he thinks that the five companies might be

...Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and...IBM.

But if he's wrong, I'm certainly not going to slam him for his inaccurate prediction.

(empo-tymshft) Clothes make the person, even on the 21st century west coast

I recently attended an all-day event at a southern California university. For the purposes of this post, I will refer to the institution as "Reindeer University." (Yes, it differs from the "Deer University" I have referenced in the past.) The university was hosting an event for transfer students, and some of the proceedings were organized by present-day students, many of whom were wearing black shirts.

But there were a rainbow of shirt colors there (Star Trek fans, no red shirts; sorry). During one of the sessions I got to talking to a woman in a blue shirt. She asked where I was from, and I replied that I was from Ontario, California.

"I went to the University of Redlands," the blue shirt replied. (Redlands is about 20 or so miles west of Ontario.)

Considering the event, I then asked, "Oh, were you a transfer student to Reindeer University also?"

The blue shirt then pleasantly informed me that she was not a transfer, and that she had completed her bachelor's degree at the University of Redlands. And she had also completed her Master's degree at the University of Redlands. It turned out she was was a director-level employee of Reindeer University, and not a student as I had assumed.

Someone at Reindeer University thought that it would be great to show the team nature of the institution by having various groups dress up in similar attire. But because the attire was casual, I was unable to perceive any difference between a high-ranking director who had made a career out of student services, and a student who had volunteered a couple of days of time to welcome new students to campus.

Something like this would have been less likely to happen in the past, or in other regions. If you have attended a similar function at an East Coast university in the 1960s, without question the staff of the University would have appeared in "professional attire." But the West Coast is more casual than the East Coast, and the 2010s are more casual than the 1950s. While the President of Reindeer University wasn't wearing a casual shirt, he wasn't wearing a tie, either.

But at the end of the day, I did encounter two people who were slightly more formally dressed. These two people, male faculty members, were both wearing ties.

Perhaps it was just a fluke - or perhaps these faculty members understood that in an educational environment, the professors who were teaching the students should comport themselves in a manner that demands respect. While Reindeer University clearly wants the students to be engaged - the phrase "learn how to learn" (a phrase I had heard in my college days) was repeated often - there was still the sense of a hierarchy, in which the people who were imparting the knowledge and challenging the students were, in a sense, on a higher level than the students themselves. After all, if professors and students are equal, then why bother to pay good money to go to college at all? Couldn't the students just gather together at a local library and teach each other?

Oh, wait a minute - that's an accepted educational method. For elementary school students.

The curriculum derives from a pedagogical philosophy that goes by several names—“Constructivist Math,” “New-New Math,” and, to its detractors, “Fuzzy Math.” I’ll stick with “Fuzzy Math,” since the critics are right. Nothing about Fuzzy Math makes much sense from a teaching standpoint.

One weakness is its emphasis on “cooperative learning.” Fuzzy Math belongs to a family of recent pedagogical innovations that imagine that kids possess innate wisdom and can teach each other while a self-effacing “facilitator” (the adult formerly known as a teacher) flutters over them. If the architects of Everyday Mathematics had their way, I would have placed my children in various groups, for the most part unsupervised, so that they could work on one elaborate activity after another, learning on their own.

Perhaps they could buy some brightly colored shirts for their self-education gatherings.

(empo-tymshft) Al Gore's initiative

Let's start with the famous quote, from an interview of then Vice President Al Gore by Wolf Blitzer:

BLITZER: I want to get to some of the substance of domestic and international issues in a minute, but let's just wrap up a little bit of the politics right now.

Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate? What do you have to bring to this that he doesn't necessarily bring to this process?

GORE: Well, I will be offering -- I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be.

But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

During a quarter century of public service, including most of it long before I came into my current job, I have worked to try to improve the quality of life in our country and in our world. And what I've seen during that experience is an emerging future that's very exciting, about which I'm very optimistic, and toward which I want to lead.

As we all know, Al Gore did not create the Internet, any more than Tim Berners-Lee did. But what did Gore do to advance the Internet?

Gore certainly has a long-standing interest in futurist issues. Gore, along with Newt Gingrich, was an early member of the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future, an organization which grew out of an Alvin Toffler conference. Of course, Gore had a number of interests:

Gore's passion for technological issues, from biomedical research and genetic engineering to the environmental impact of the "greenhouse effect," linked him with other technophiles on Capitol Hill known as "Atari Democrats."

By the late 1980s, the Internet was actively linking a number of agencies, but it was about as efficient as the U.S. road system in the 1940s. The parallel is significant - Gore's father had participated in the effort to create the U.S. Interstate Highway System, and now the son began to actively campaign for a new highway system.

In 1986, Gore introduced S 2594, the Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986. But things really began rolling when the 1988 report Toward a National Research Network was released. In 1991, Gore introduced S 272, the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991. Despite previous failures to get a bill through both houses of Congress, the 1991 bill passed and was signed by President George H.W. Bush.

One result of the act was easy to document: Marc Andreessen's creation of the Mosaic web browser was accomplished via funds from "the Gore Bill." The National Research and Education Network created by the Gore Bill has been characterized as "a short-lived stepping-stone to the commercial Internet."

The question can be raised - could the Mosaic web browser and the commercial Internet backbone had come forth through private initiative alone? On this question, however, even Newt Gingrich defers to Al Gore's vision.

In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is -- and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a "futures group" -- the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the '80s began to actually happen.

Gingrich is also quoted as saying

Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet.

Gore was certainly a major contributor.

(empo-tymshft) From CERN to NCSA - and a major development

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications was not the first site on the World Wide Web, or even among the first ten. Depending upon how you count, the NCSA was the 26th organization to host a site on the World Wide Web. After seeing the web in action, they signed up:

In 1992, Joseph Hardin and Dave Thompson worked at the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputer Applications), a research institute at the University of Illinois. When they heard about Tim Berners-Lee's work, they downloaded the ViolaWWW browser, and then demonstrated the web to NCSA's Software Design Group by connecting to the web server at CERN over the Internet. The group was duly impressed.

However, a couple of the people were apparently not that impressed with ViolaWWW:

Two students from the group, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, began work on a browser version for X-Windows on Unix computers, first released as version 0.5 on January 23, 1993.

Marc Andreessen duly informed Tim Berners-Lee of the new browser, and Berners-Lee took to Usenet to announce the availability of NCSA's X Mosaic:

Newsgroups: alt.hypertext,comp.infosystems
Path: sparky!uunet!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!spool.mu.edu!yale.edu!ira.uka.de!math.fu-berlin.de!news.netmbx.de!Germany.EU.net!mcsun!dxcern!news
From: ti...@info.cern.ch (Tim Berners-Lee)
Subject: New "XMosaic" World-Wide Web browser from NCSA
Message-ID: <1993Jan29.122243.26454@dxcern.cern.ch>
Sender: n...@dxcern.cern.ch (USENET News System)
Reply-To: ti...@info.cern.ch (Tim Berners-Lee)
Organization: CERN European Lab for Particle Physics
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1993 12:22:43 GMT
Lines: 106

An exciting new World-Wide Web browser has come out, written by Marc
Andreessen of NCSA. Using X/Motif, and full of good features, it
installs very easily, as the binary is completely self-sufficient.

The release note is appended to this message. The sources and
binaries are available by anonymous FTP from ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu
as described below, and also from info.cern.ch as files

/pub/www/src/xmosaic-0.5.tar.Z The sources

/pub/www/bin/decstation/xmosaic_0.5.Z binary (ultrix)
/pub/www/bin/sun4/xmosaic_0.5.Z binary (sun4)
/pub/www/bin/snake/xmosaic_0.5.Z binary (hp 700)
/pub/www/bin/sgi/xmosaic_0.5.Z binary (sgi)
/pub/www/bin/rs6000/xmosaic_0.5.Z binary (ibm rs6000)

- Tim Berners-Lee WWW project CERN ti...@info.cern.ch
_________________________________________________________________

Begin forwarded message:

Date: Sat, 23 Jan 93 07:21:17 -0800
From: ma...@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)

By the power vested in me by nobody in particular, alpha/beta version
0.5 of NCSA's Motif-based networked information systems and World
Wide
Web browser, X Mosaic, is hereby released:

file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/xmosaic/xmosaic-0.5.tar.Z

This release of X Mosaic is known to compile on the following
platforms:

SGI (IRIX 4.0.2)
IBM (AIX 3.2)
Sun 4 (SunOS 4.1.2 with stock X11R4 and Motif 1.1).

Binaries for these platforms are available on ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in
/Web/xmosaic/binaries-0.5. More binaries will be supplied as I am
able to find other Motif-configured platforms to use (DEC MIPS
probably within the next half hour).

Although this is alpha/beta software, I'm looking more for feedback
on
design and functionality than bug reports right now -- down the road
the bulk of the program will be rewritten in C++ anyway, so don't
take
the current code too seriously. But bug reports are welcome too.
New
releases will probably come out about every 7-14 days until 1.0
arrives.

A list of current and future capabilities of X Mosaic follows this
message.

Cheers,
Marc

--
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
ma...@ncsa.uiuc.edu


Current capabilities
..................

Motif interface.
Multiple toplevel windows.
Save/mail/print document (plaintext or HTML).
Document source- and URL-viewing windows.
History list per window with GUI interface.
Option for new window per document (TurboGopher interface).
On-the-fly font selection.
Many common document choices accessible via menubar.
Keyword search capability.
Hotlist capability -- keep list of interesting documents,
add/remove items, list is persistent across sessions.
Smart handling of documents too big for single X window --
virtual document pages via inlined hypertext.
Interruptable at any time via SIGUSR1 signal.
No config or resource file installation required;
self-contained executable.
Hypertext help.
Integration with NCSA Collage and NCSA DTM to broadcast documents
into real-time networked workgroup collaboration sessions.
Stable! :-)


Future capabilities
.................

Multimedia/MIME.
Asynchronous collaboration functionality.
(annotations, references, revision control).
Hypermedia interface to scientific data.
Visual hyperweb/hierarchy layout and navigation.
3D/immersive interface.
???

Although not present in version 0.5, the future capability to integrate non-textual items, such as graphics and sound, led to a revolution in the young World Wide Web. Within a few short years, there would be a multitude of pages of flying angels with directly-loading bad MIDI tracks. Some of these pages, or their direct descendants, still exist today.

(empo-tymshft) A 26 site World Wide Web

Around 1982, I was an active participant in an early version of Usenet, which at the time consisted of a couple of dozen sites.

Ten years later, I didn't realize that there was another revolution brewing, with a couple of dozen sites linked together in something called the World Wide Web.

Interestingly enough, some sites that were familiar to early Usenet users - Duke, the University of California at Berkeley, etc. - were not present on the early World Wide Web. Of course, the Web began in Switzerland, and many of the early sites were therefore European. American sites included the University of Arizona, Stanford University, Cornell University, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

(empo-tymshft) The solution to "Losing information at CERN" - how about Mesh?

Modern-day users employ the World Wide Web for a variety of tasks.

But how many organizations require the World Wide Web to keep track of information?

Yet that was the problem facing CERN in 1989 - or at least that's what Tim Berners-Lee claimed. In order to get funding for his hypertext proposal, he had to present a business case to CERN - and, in 1989, he did. Here's an excerpt from that business case:

Losing Information at CERN

CERN is a wonderful organisation. It involves several thousand people, many of them very creative, all working toward common goals. Although they are nominally organised into a hierarchical management structure,this does not constrain the way people will communicate, and share information, equipment and software across groups.

The actual observed working structure of the organisation is a multiply connected "web" whose interconnections evolve with time. In this environment, a new person arriving, or someone taking on a new task, is normally given a few hints as to who would be useful people to talk to. Information about what facilities exist and how to find out about them travels in the corridor gossip and occasional newsletters, and the details about what is required to be done spread in a similar way. All things considered, the result is remarkably successful, despite occasional misunderstandings and duplicated effort.

A problem, however, is the high turnover of people. When two years is a typical length of stay, information is constantly being lost. The introduction of the new people demands a fair amount of their time and that of others before they have any idea of what goes on. The technical details of past projects are sometimes lost forever, or only recovered after a detective investigation in an emergency. Often, the information has been recorded, it just cannot be found.

If a CERN experiment were a static once-only development, all the information could be written in a big book. As it is, CERN is constantly changing as new ideas are produced, as new technology becomes available, and in order to get around unforeseen technical problems. When a change is necessary, it normally affects only a small part of the organisation. A local reason arises for changing a part of the experiment or detector. At this point, one has to dig around to find out what other parts and people will be affected. Keeping a book up to date becomes impractical, and the structure of the book needs to be constantly revised.

The sort of information we are discussing answers, for example, questions like

* Where is this module used?
* Who wrote this code? Where does he work?
* What documents exist about that concept?
* Which laboratories are included in that project?
* Which systems depend on this device?
* What documents refer to this one?

The problems of information loss may be particularly acute at CERN, but in this case (as in certain others), CERN is a model in miniature of the rest of world in a few years time. CERN meets now some problems which the rest of the world will have to face soon. In 10 years, there may be many commercial solutions to the problems above, while today we need something to allow us to continue.

Berners-Lee then examined existing organizational methods, all of which were too dependent upon a particular person or a particular organizational structure to be of long-term practical use.

The solution? Hypertext.

In 1980, I wrote a program for keeping track of software with which I was involved in the PS control system. Called Enquire, it allowed one to store snippets of information, and to link related pieces together in any way. To find information, one progressed via the links from one sheet to another, rather like in the old computer game "adventure". I used this for my personal record of people and modules. It was similar to the application Hypercard produced more recently by Apple for the Macintosh. A difference was that Enquire, although lacking the fancy graphics, ran on a multiuser system, and allowed many people to access the same data.

Now I was not reading Berners-Lee's paper in 1989, but a multi-user hypertext application would sound impressive to me - even if I couldn't dream about what it could become.

And even Berners-Lee's proposal didn't envision the Internet as we know it today. Here is how Berners-Lee envisioned hypertext at CERN:

uucp News
This is a Unix electronic conferencing system. A server for uucp news could makes links between notes on the same subject, as well as showing the structure of the conferences.

VAX/Notes
This is Digital's electronic conferencing system. It has a fairly wide following in FermiLab, but much less in CERN. The topology of a conference is quite restricting.

CERNDOC
This is a document registration and distribution system running on CERN's VM machine. As well as documents, categories and projects, keywords and authors lend themselves to representation as hypertext nodes.

File systems
This would allow any file to be linked to from other hypertext documents.

The Telephone Book
Even this could even be viewed as hypertext, with links between people and sections, sections and groups, people and floors of buildings, etc.

The unix manual
This is a large body of computer-readable text, currently organised in a flat way, but which also contains link information in a standard format ("See also..").

Databases
A generic tool could perhaps be made to allow any database which uses a commercial DBMS to be displayed as a hypertext view.

Of course, the paper was designed to address specific needs at CERN, and didn't advance the thought to see what would happen if the system were available at CERN...and at NIST...and at Reed College...and at Microsoft...and at a Pink Floyd website.

(empo-tymshft) One more Usenet post of note

I've talked ad nauseum about Usenet over the past few days, but I wanted to share just one more thing.

Back in 1991, Usenet included a plethora of active discussion groups - some silly, some scintillating. One of those groups - interestingly enough, in the alt. hierarchy - was a group called alt.hypertext. Now hypertext had been implemented in a variety of ways - for example, the only time that I have ever been employed as a professional programmer was when I used Hypertalk to create special Hypercard stacks. But some people were thinking about implementing a new way of sharing hypertext, which prompted one Tim Berners-Lee to post this message to the alt.hypertext Usenet group.

Perhaps this message represents the true end of Usenet.

Path: gmdzi!unido!mcsun!cernvax!info
From: timbl@info .cern.ch (Tim Berners-Lee)
Newsgroups: alt.hypertext
Subject: WorldWideWeb: Summary
Keywords: heterogeneous hypertext, web, source, protocol, index, information retrieval
Message-ID: <6487@cernvax.cern.ch>
Date: 6 Aug 91 16:00:12 GMT
References: <6484@cernvax.cern.ch>
Sender: n...@cernvax.cern.ch
Lines: 84

In article <6...@cernvax.cern.ch> I promised to post a short summary of the
WorldWideWeb project. Mail me with any queries.

WorldWideWeb - Executive Summary


The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to
make an easy but powerful global information system.

The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should
be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within
internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by
support groups.

Reader view

The WWW world consists of documents, and links. Indexes are special documents
which, rather than being read, may be searched. The result of such a search is
another ("virtual") document containing links to the documents found. A simple
protocol ("HTTP") is used to allow a browser program to request a keyword
search by a remote information server.

The web contains documents in many formats. Those documents which are
hypertext, (real or virtual) contain links to other documents, or places
within documents. All documents, whether real, virtual or indexes, look similar
to the reader and are contained within the same addressing scheme.

To follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse (or types in a number if he or
she has no mouse). To search and index, a reader gives keywords (or other
search criteria). These are the only operations necessary to access the entire
world of data.

Information provider view

The WWW browsers can access many existing data systems via existing protocols
(FTP, NNTP) or via HTTP and a gateway. In this way, the critical mass of data
is quickly exceeded, and the increasing use of the system by readers and
information suppliers encourage each other.

Making a web is as simple as writing a few SGML files which point to your
existing data. Making it public involves running the FTP or HTTP daemon, and
making at least one link into your web from another. In fact, any file
available by anonymous FTP can be immediately linked into a web. The very small
start-up effort is designed to allow small contributions. At the other end of
the scale, large information providers may provide an HTTP server with full
text or keyword indexing.

The WWW model gets over the frustrating incompatibilities of data format
between suppliers and reader by allowing negotiation of format between a smart
browser and a smart server. This should provide a basis for extension into
multimedia, and allow those who share application standards to make full use of
them across the web.

This summary does not describe the many exciting possibilities opened up by the
WWW project, such as efficient document caching. the reduction of redundant
out-of-date copies, and the use of knowledge daemons. There is more
information in the online project documentation, including some background on
hypertext and many technical notes.

Try it

A prototype (very alpha test) simple line mode browser is currently available
in source form from node info.cern.ch [currently 128.141.201.74] as

/pub/WWW/WWWLineMode_0.9.tar.Z.

Also available is a hypertext editor for the NeXT using the NeXTStep graphical
user interface, and a skeleton server daemon.

Documentation is readable using www (Plain text of the instalation instructions
is included in the tar file!). Document

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

is as good a place to start as any. Note these coordinates may change with
later releases.

_________________________________________________________________

Tim Berners-Lee Tel: +41(22)767 3755
WorldWideWeb project Fax: +41(22)767 7155
C.E.R.N. email: t...@cernvax.cern.ch
1211 Geneva 23
Switzerland

(empo-tymshft) And if you want Usenet today...

Perhaps you're a student at Duke University who lost Usenet access and wants more than access to an archive.

Well, here is a list of Usenet access services that are available today.

(empo-tymshft) May 20, 2010 - one possible date for the end of Usenet

I've written in this blog about how Usenet started. When did Usenet end - if it has ended yet? While some people maintain that Usenet ended in 1987, at the time of the Great Renaming, and others maintain that Usenet ended whenever the latest court case shuts down a torrent site, one can make a case that Usenet ended on May 20, 2010. See this May 17 press release from Duke University:

This week marks the end of an era for one of the earliest pieces of Internet history, which got its start at Duke more than 30 years ago.

On May 20, Duke will shut down its Usenet server, which provides access to a worldwide electronic discussion network of newsgroups started in 1979 by two Duke graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis.

Working with a graduate student at UNC-Chapel Hill, they came up with a simple program to exchange messages and files between computers at Duke and UNC using telephone modems.

The "Users Network," Usenet for short, grew into an international electronic discussion forum with more than 120,000 newsgroups dedicated to various topics, from local dining to computer programming languages. Each group had a distinctive name such as soc.history or sci.math.

Usenet also played an integral role in the growth of the popularity of the Internet, said Dietolf Ramm, professor emeritus of computer science. At the time, a connection to the Internet was not only expensive but required a research contract with the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency.

"ARPA had funded a few schools to begin the early stages of Internet, but most schools didn't have that," said Ramm, who worked with the students who developed Usenet. "Usenet was a pioneering effort because it allowed anybody to connect and participate in communications."

Many social aspects of online communication -- from emoticons and slang acronyms such as LOL to flame wars -- originated or were popularized on Usenet.

Although e-mail and other forms of online communication have largely supplanted Usenet, it is still in use, with tens of thousands of discussion groups.

Indeed, Truscott -- now a software developer at SAS Institute in Cary -- said he still checks Usenet daily. "In those days, there were very few computers at Duke," he said. "Now Usenet is just one of many choices."

New tools -- from blogs and RSS feeds to Facebook and Twitter -- have made online communication more user-friendly since the days of Usenet, said Lenore Ramm, Dietolf Ramm's daughter, who now works as an IT analyst with Duke's Office of Information Technology (OIT).

"Applications like Twitter have made communicating easier, but the challenges are still the same: trying to keep up with the information flow, sorting through it all and prioritizing what information to take in," she said.

Like an increasing number of Internet service providers who have shut down their newsgroup servers, Duke decided to retire its aging Usenet server based on low usage and rising costs.

The decision prompted a handful of calls to the OIT Service Desk and even some chatter in the blogosphere. Duke users can still access Usenet archives -- the largest collection of posted online messages -- through Google Groups.

Anyone with questions about the shutdown should contact the OIT Service Desk.

Goodbye, !duke!.

(empo-tymshft) Another perspective on Usenet

When I was participating in Usenet in the early 1980s, I had no idea about the future global ramifications of the service. Google, who took over the Deja News archives in 2001, has helpfully provided a Usenet timeline covering highlights in those archives.

For example, while I was using Usenet to review record albums, Jack Buchanan at the University of North Carolina was writing about a strange new illness:

Message-ID:
Newsgroups: net.singles
Path: utzoo!decvax!duke!unc!mcnc!jwb
X-Path: utzoo!decvax!duke!unc!mcnc!jwb
From: mcnc!jwb
Date: Wed Dec 22 03:33:48 1982
Subject: Re: AIDS
References:
Posted: Tue Dec 21 13:57:09 1982
Received: Wed Dec 22 03:33:48 1982

I am in no way an expert on AIDS. I did recieve a copy of recommendations
from the Center for Disease Control for health personnel working with these
patients. They summarize the current level of knowledge in the first paragraph.
"the etiology of the underlying immune deficiencies seen in AIDS cases is
unknown. One hypothesis consistent with current observations is that a trans-
missible agent may be involved. If so, transiDmission of the agent would appear
most commonly to require intimate direct contact involving mucosal surfaces, such
as sexual contact among homosexual males, or through parenteral spread, such as
occurs among intravenous drug abusers and possible hemophilia patients using
Factor VIII products. Airborne spread and interpersonal spread through casual
contact do not seem likely. These patterns resemble the distribution of disease
and modes of spread of hepatitis B virus, and hepatitis B virus infectons
occur very frequently among aidDDDAIDS cases.

"There is presently no evidence of AIDS transmission to hospital personnel
from contact with affected patients or clinical specimens. Because of concern
about a possible transmissible agent, however, interim suggestions are
appropriate to guide patient-care and laboratory personnel, including those
whose work invloves experimental animals..... "

Essentially the suggestions are those which are followed when caring for
patients ore boDDDDDr body fludDids with haDepatitis. (Handwashing, gloves, gowne,DDs D, masks,
etc.)

Quote from "Morbidity and Mortality WeelDkly Report, 31:43, Nov 5, 1982."
This is a respected newsletter type of thing sent by the Center for Disease
Control to physicians and other healteDh personnel. The CDC, incidently, is
a government agency probably most noted currently for tracking down Legionaires
Disease.

Jack Buchanan (MD))D
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC
duke!mcnc!jwb

See other items from the Usenet timeline here.

(empo-tymshft) A little more on Usenet

I've written about this in other forums, but my history on the Internet goes back to the early 1980s. Of course there was no World Wide Web at the time, but the predecessor to yesterday's Usenet was out there. However, as I noted in two MySpace posts from 2007, the intellectual quality of Usenet in the early 1980s was equivalent to the intellectual quality of the Internet today.

October 9, 2007

...I started working on my presentation from my home computer. However, the only part that would interest most of you would be a reference to a 1982 Usenet posting of mine in which I talked about Wall of Voodoo.

Come to think of it, even that wouldn't interest you...

Ten days later:

Got to have a bit of fun in one of the public presentations. Though I did not resurrect the Paddy O'Furniture jokes from the Reed College Usenet days, I did find an old Wall of Voodoo post written by a Reedie back in 1982 (said Reedie shall remain nameless). Incidentally, this goes to prove that Google stores EVERYTHING. Be warned.

For a little more information on Usenet in the early 1980s, see the second of the eight things in this post.

And here's the (in)famous post from 1982:

Message-ID:
Newsgroups: net.records
Path: utzoo!decvax!cca!hplabs!hao!menlo70!sytek!zehntel!teklabs!reed!bred@sri-unix
X-Path: utzoo!decvax!cca!hplabs!hao!menlo70!sytek!zehntel!teklabs!reed!bred@sri-unix
From: bred@sri-unix
Date: Thu Nov 18 10:19:00 1982
Subject: Wall of Voodoo album
Posted: Sun Nov 14 23:46:25 1982
Received: Thu Nov 18 10:19:00 1982

Just bought Wall of Voodoo's latest album "Call of the West"
(I.R.S.) a few weeks ago. The group uses synthesizers, etc.
while still maintaining a western American feel both in music and
lyrics (such as the lyrics in "Lost Weekend", about a couple who
just lost their life savings in Las Vegas, and "Factory", about a
factory worker). I'm not sure whether the album's being played
on many radio stations, having only heard it on Reed College's
(Portland OR) radio station KRRC. Wall of Voodoo has recorded at
least one other album, "Dark Continent", but I haven't listened
to it yet.

Questions: has anyone else heard this album or the previous one?
Opinions? How long has Wall of Voodoo been around?

John Bredehoft (...!teklabs!reed!bred)

P.S. At least one other person likes this album; the KRRC copy
has mysteriously disappeared...

A few comments on this post for people who are more familiar with the "new" Usenet of the late 1980s and 1990s.

First, the group net.records is correct. Usenet was in its infancy at this time, so a simple groupname such as net.records worked fine.

Second, the intricate paths to get to sites are correct. My username was "bred" and I was in the "reed" domain, but to get to reed, you had to go through teklabs and a few other places to actually reach me. Nowadays, most of us don't worry about the paths that our messages take to reach the outside world.

Third, yes it could take several days for a message to propagate across the (huge) network. I don't know the priority that Reed College used to exchange messages with other sites, but it certainly wasn't updating every few seconds. So you wouldn't have used the 1982 Usenet to comment on an earthquake.

(empo-tymshft) Searching for Usenet knights of yore - Computer doctor John Grubor

If the name "Dr. John Grubor" doesn't mean anything to you, and if you aren't a computer owner in western Pennsylvania, you can skip this post.

While musing on SOPA, I began thinking about censorship and free speech, which reminded me of some of the mid-1990s fights on Usenet regarding "true free speech."

Sadly, Steve Boursy is no longer with us. But I was able to locate another figure from that era - one who is still alive.

Yes, if you need computer repair services in western Pennsylvania, there's a computer doctor who can help you.

John Grubor
EA Computer Systems

I have been building and repairing computers for 34 years, ever since I completed my Doctorate at PITT in 1975. Nobody knows more about Computers and Operating systems than me.

Contact me through Thumbtack and I'll show you my resume.

I have Windows 7 Ultimate for installation at half of the going price. My Office is in North Versailles Township off of Rt 30.

I repair all computers including laptops and desktops and I build new 64 bit superdesktops.

And Grubor is also on Facebook.

(empo-tuulwey) (empo-tymshft) When retro doesn't make sense (Image3D)

Yes, we should have a sense of history. But we should also have a sense of perspective.

My older readers probably remember View-Master. It was a device that looked like a pair of binoculars, with two eyepieces. You would insert a circular disk into the device which contained pictures; you would click on the device to advance the pictures. Because there were two pictures per view, and because there were separate, slightly different pictures for each eye, you would get a 3-D effect.

Well, Rich Dubnow, the lead photographer for View-Master, started a new company in 1997 called Image3D. The company is now allowing people to provide their own pictures. which can be loaded onto a disk and viewed via a View-Master like device. (I don't know if the device is technically a View-Master or not.)

The cost? $24.95 for a viewing device and a disk with seven pictures on it. You can order extra copies for a slightly lower price.

Now this MAY be worth it if the pictures were rendered as 3-D images, but...

Unfortunately, your two-dimensional images will still read as two dimensional through the eyepiece....

Now Image3D can add text or other effects that will appear as 3-D, but what's the point?

Sorry, but this retro idea sounds like a waste of money.

(empo-tymshft) How online education is influenced by social interactivity

Last weekend, my father-in-law and I were listening to a sports radio station and heard an ad for an online degree in sports management. We both took notice, because it was offered in conjunction with the school from which my wife (his daughter) graduated. Once known as Concordia College River Forest, it is now known as Concordia University Chicago - yeah, they pulled the Rita Moreno of Arte thing and renamed themselves after the nearby big city. Information on the sports management program, which offers master's and doctoral degrees, can be found here.

When we mentioned this to my wife, we remembered that one of her relatives - thus, one of my in-laws - is actually teaching at Concordia University Chicago now, and her area of expertise is in online programs.

I hunted around, and while I couldn't find any of Dr. Ardelle Pate's publications, I did find an abstract of an article that was published here.

Title: Questioning the Necessity of Nonacademic Social Discussion Forums within Online Courses

Authors: Pate, Ardelle; Smaldino, Sharon; Mayall, Hayley J.; Luetkehans, Lara

Source: Quarterly Review of Distance Education, v10 n1 p1-8 2009

Abstract: Within the online environment, social interactivity is a necessity to the formation of knowledge. Learning, in order to be truly effective, must embody a social element that nurtures an individual through the multi-intelligences of a group while it also embraces and fosters an individual to recognize self-efficacy. The idea of successful learning within a social environment has been reiterated by educational theorists. Some researchers have indicated the importance of providing time and activities for establishing a social presence within a friendly online environment. By establishing a social presence, learners support each other in their quest for knowledge, and the group dynamic enhances critical thinking within the community of learners. The purpose of this research was to examine the social interactions of required academic discussion forums, optional academic discussion forums, and optional nonacademic social discussion forums to see whether different types of forums actually enhance the sense of social presence. The intent was to see if these forums contributed to a social sense of community, which was intended to enhance learning and broaden the individual's role in the community of learners.

This is all a new world to me, because I have never taken an academic course in an online setting. (My most recent academic coursework was completed in 1991.) And the online courses that I have taken, mostly during my time at Motorola, were pretty much canned courses without live interaction with a professor or students.

While I do not have access to the conclusions of Pate et al, one would intuitively think that social interactivity would contribute to the online educational experience. After all, much of my learning at Reed College and at Cal State Fullerton took place in small groups, some of which were away from the formal class. If an online course merely consists of direct interaction with the professor/instructor, you're only getting part of the experience.

(empo-tymshft) Raining on the cloud

I have said before that IT philosophy swings like a pendulum between centralized and decentralized models. Time-sharing gave way to individual PCs, and then we centralized, and then we de-centralized. This week's buzzword is "the cloud," which leans toward the centralized end of things again. Whether you're talking about enterprise stuff, or you're talking about consumer stuff, the cloud offers you the wonderful capability to store things in a central location and access them from anywhere. Everyone involved in IT, with the possible exception of Ashton Kutcher, has been bombarded with cloud sales pitches.

But the praise of the cloud is not unanimous. Peter Evans-Greenwood argues that the cloud is outdated.

...the future of IT in business will be determined by the need to knit together a fabric of IT enabled services, many of which will be obtained externally. I don’t need a project portfolio management solution, I need a portfolio management capability backed by the tools and skills required to make it work. I don’t need a CRM solution (SaaS or not), I need a sales management and reporting methodology (Holden? Miller Heiman?) supported by technology to enable it to scale. It’s outside in thinking, rather than inside out.

What will the industry that accretes around this new need look like? If we look at many of the current on-demand / SaaS vendors, then they could best be described as enterprise software, but in the cloud!. Take the old model and make it multi-tennanted.

However, I don't see such a market happening - because of organizational behavior. In such a "cloud 2.0" market, you'd have all of these different services vendors who plug and play with other stuff. However, no vendor is willing to do just one thing. Remember when Oracle was a database company? Now they offer everything from hardware to vertical software packages. Why? Because Oracle belives it can make more money by offering a bigger share of the pie. If you go tell Larry Ellison to divest most of Oracle, and concentrate on making the best possible database that will be interoperable with everything else, Ellison (and Ellison's stockholders) will tell you to go pound sand.

So don't expect objects - whoops, that's an old term - to dominate the market any time soon.

(empo-tymshft) When words change their meanings - an example from the biometric world

While we sometimes think of language as a static thing, it is in reality constantly changing. This is especially true for languages such as English that are widely used - my language is always incorporating terms from foreign languages, and is always inventing new terms - and new meanings for terms. If you don't believe me, take a time machine back to 2001 and ask Ashton Kutcher to tweet.

I work in the biometrics industry, and in that capacity I subscribe to various feeds and mailing lists. Among these is a private mailing list that often speaks of the science of biometrics. Therefore it was interesting when one of the participants (again, since this is a private list, I will not state the name of the person, although I don't think the person would mind) shared this with us:

Innerscope uses biometrics to understand the full scope of emotional reaction.

Huh? I could go to a crime scene and look at a fingerprint, and chances are I wouldn't be able to deduce anything emotionally (unless the fingerprint appears next to a hole smashed in the wall).

The quote above is from a press release that begins as follows:

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwire - Oct. 21, 2011) - The British Columbia Chapter of the American Marketing Association (BCAMA) is pleased to announce the upcoming presentation on the use of biometrics for advertising evaluation by Ipsos. The event will take place on Thursday, October 27th, 2011 at 7:00am PT at the Westin Bayshore Hotel. To register for this event, visit www.bcama.com or call 604.983.6AMA (6262).

The essential part of marketing is research and testing, which is applied to almost every stage of the product cycle. Psychology tells us that emotions play an important role in how we make decisions. Yet much emotional processing occurs below our level of consciousness. So there are limits to what can be measured in a survey about emotions. By the same token, if we can reach deeper to understand these emotions, it will provide even greater insight into what makes great marketing and great advertising. To achieve this promise, Ipsos has partnered with Boston-based Innerscope Research. Innerscope uses biometrics to understand the full scope of emotional reaction. Biometrics is a fascinating field that measures and analyzes our biological reactions (heart rate, skin conductance, respiration, movement) to decipher the emotional response to any stimulus.

"Biometrics is a branch of neuroscience that takes the measurement of emotions to a deeper level," said Indivar (Indy) Kushari, Senior Vice President, Ipsos ASI Toronto and presenter at the BCAMA event on October 27th. "It allows marketers to understand second-by-second the unconscious consumer responses to marketing elements they encounter, ultimately leading to greater insight into how brands and advertising are connecting with people."

Read the rest here.

Now those of us who work with fingerprint or palmprint identification, or facial recognition, or iris recognition, or DNA, or vein recognition, or gait recognition, or whatever might be scratching our heads after reading that. (Hmm...I wonder if people scratch their heads in a unique manner?) Lately our industry has been criticized for making decisions based upon emotions.

But another participant in the mailing list reminded myself and others that the meaning of the word "biometrics" has evolved over time. The International Biometric Society has posted this definition of biometrics:

The terms “Biometrics” and “Biometry” have been used since early in the 20th century to refer to the field of development of statistical and mathematical methods applicable to data analysis problems in the biological sciences. Statistical methods for the analysis of data from agricultural field experiments to compare the yields of different varieties of wheat, for the analysis of data from human clinical trials evaluating the relative effectiveness of competing therapies for disease, or for the analysis of data from environmental studies on the effects of air or water pollution on the appearance of human disease in a region or country are all examples of problems that would fall under the umbrella of “Biometrics” as the term has been historically used. The journal “Biometrics” is a scholarly publication sponsored by a non-profit professional society (the International Biometric Society) devoted to the dissemination of accounts of the development of such methods and their application in real scientific contexts.

Recently, the term “Biometrics” has also been used to refer to the emerging field of technology devoted to identification of individuals using biological traits, such as those based on retinal or iris scanning, fingerprints, or face recognition. Neither the journal “Biometrics” nor the International Biometric Society is engaged in research, marketing, or reporting related to this technology. Likewise, the editors and staff of the journal are not knowledgeable in this area.

So all of us fingerprint/face/iris/DNA/vein/gait/whatever people are Johnny-come-latelies to the use of the term "biometric." And I'm certain that some International Biometric Society members get angry every time they see a guy on a TV show talking about "biometrics" when there is no wheat field in sight.

For these people, the "CSI effect" is the effect of reduced rainfall on the corn sugar industry. And they probably get all emotional about it.

[DISCLOSING THE OBVIOUS: I WORK IN THE BIOMETRICS INDUSTRY. NO, NOT THAT ONE; THE OTHER ONE.]

(empo-tuulwey) (empo-tymshft) The multi-user phone?

First, a little personal history.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, I used a mixture of single-user and multi-user computers - dedicated BASIC machines, UNIX computers, THEOS computers, and Macintosh computers. While the BASIC machines and the Macs could be used by multiple people, they weren't really designed for this purpose. UNIX and THEOS (formerly Oasis) computers, however, were specifically designed with multiple user accounts, and could be used by several people at the same time.

Decades later, when I switched from Macintosh to Windows computers for home use, I always configured our family's home computers with multiple accounts. No, these computers could not be used by multiple people simultaneously. However, configuration of multiple accounts allowed setting of preferences for each member of the family. Each of us could have our own music libraries. Each of us could have our own Internet home pages. And, when our daughter was very young, we could implement parental controls on her account. (In the end, they were more trouble than they were worth, since some of the controls blocked religious pages; kind of tough when you're attending a Lutheran school.)

I was thinking about this recently when I read a thread on Google+. The thread, from Marvin Ryan Vista, was entitled Siri the Pimp. The thread alludes to the fact (also mentioned by Leo Laporte) that if you ask Siri particular questions, it will use its GPS capabilities and available cloud data to provide you with a list of nearby escort services.

On the Google+ thread, Chris Karson and I discussed some of the ramifications of this. Karson was disturbed by the ramifications of this feature, and noted that "kids will use these devices." I wondered, however, how Apple could draw the line between what information to present and what not to present - escort services, after all, are listed in telephone books.

Another participant in the thread, Wanda Hollis, also noted that children could use these devices, and wondered if anyone had made parental filters for phones.

At this point, I noted:

This would require the concept of a multi-user phone.

On the surface, it seems silly. A cellular phone is one of the most personal devices that you have. While there are families that share a single cell phone between family members, in most cases each member of the family (or at least those over the age of 13, or over the age of 7, or whatever) has his or her own phone.

But I'm sure that most of us have run into situations where we have to share our phone. This especially happens with smartphones. Maybe you're stuck in a waiting room with a kid, and all of a sudden the kid says, "I'm bored." If you had a multi-user phone, then the kid could play Angry Birds and not play whatever adult stuff you may have on your phone.

But as I thought about it more, I realized that this was not enough. Some applications, such as web browsers and voice-based services, tap into a variety of information sources, including some sources that you might not want your kid to view. Some people may choose to restrict access to these items altogether, but some would prefer some type of...parental controls.

In the United States, the cellular service providers themselves offer parental controls, according to Paul O'Reilly at the Online Mom. (Yes, I just referred to "Paul O'Reilly at the Online Mom.) Regarding content filters, AT&T and Verizon seem to have the most sophisticated ones for mobile phones. Even these services, however, do not appear to be customizable by the parent (how do I block Dallas Cowboys content?). In addition, the content filters apply to all users on a single phone - again, multi-user capabilities would be good here.

In the end, this is just another reminder that mobile phones are computers, and need to be treated in the same way that computers are. Although I'm not ready to buy an uninterruptible power supply for my phone just yet...

(empo-tymshft) I was wrong - Google+ may surpass Twitter in live events coverage

Normally when I use the "empo-tymshft" label, I am talking about things that have changed over the course of decades.

For this post, I'm talking about something that changed over the space of a few months.

For the last several years, I have used Twitter to cover live events, such as Oracle OpenWorld and Rose Parades. And I have consistently maintained that Twitter, because of its simplicity, is ideally suited for coverage of live events. As I saw it, if something were happening at a certain point of time, it would be much easier for someone to tweet about it than it would be for someone to blog about it, or to write a Facebook wall post about it.

Or to write something in Google+ about it.

You can see where this is going. Yes, I'm having another Jim Bakker moment.

The latest episode started about 18 hours ago, when Thomas Morffew started a thread that related to the article Twitter and Google 'just can't agree' on Realtime Search deal. Morffew's comment:

Who cares?

Google+ realtime search works for me.

This launched an interesting thread, in which the majority of commenters stated that Google+ realtime search worked for them also. My view was the minority view:

No, Google+ search isn't enough for me. I prefer access to all available realtime information. If Sparks included the entire Twitter stream, as well as online updates from other non-Google services, then Google+ would be fine (although Sparks results don't present as well as Google results).

And then I made this comment:

Twitter still excels during major events, such as natural catastrophes and major conferences such as Oracle OpenWorld. If there's an earthquake, people aren't going to run to Google+ and launch into detailed conversations about it.

Paul Brocklehurst didn't agree with me:

+John E. Bredehoft realtime search was only launched a week or so ago. Give it till Christmas, many more will be using G+ to follow along, certainly with techy events. Take tonight (your timezone my vary). I would imagine much better coverage would take place for the ICS/Nexus Prime launch on Google+ than on Twitter. What does everyone else think?

This is something that could be checked, and I said so in a thread of my own.

Time for a test of the real-time reporting capabilities of Google+ vs. Twitter.

+Paul Brocklehurst has stated (see the comments in the attached +Thomas Morffew thread): "I would imagine much better coverage would take place for the ICS/Nexus Prime launch on Google+ than on Twitter."

I'll grant that the Google+ posts will be much more in-depth, but my personal suspicion is that the number of meaningful tweets at the time of the announcement will exceed the number of meaningful Google+ entries.

What do you think?

As it turned out, I was not online at the time of the ICS/Nexus Prime launch, which occurred at 7:00 pm Pacific time. When I was next online, at approximately 8:10 pm, I searched both Twitter and Google+ for occurrences of the hashtag #ics.

As I expected, there were many, many tweets with the ICS hashtag, many of which included short comments on the announcement. I originally planned to look at all of the tweets since 7:00 pm PDT, but there were so many tweets that I had to stop after a few minutes.

I then went to Google+, and was surprised to find that in that same 5-10 minute period...there were many, many Google+ entries. Perhaps not as many entries as there were Twitter tweets, but it was awfully close. And, of course, as I had even conceded before, the Google+ entries were much more in depth.

So, in the words of Jim Bakker, "I was wrong." It appears, at least for technical events, that Google+ can give Twitter a run for its money.

Perhaps I'll go listen to some music. Anyone have a copy of Brian Eno and David Byrne's "Mea Culpa"?