Martin believes his city is capable of producing top internet companies if the digital community had “the balls” to get going.

“I really think we could be doing a lot more in Manchester and the Northwest to promote and help develop the technology scene here”, Bryant told local news website How-Do.

“There’s a lot of digital talent but not enough entrepreneurialism based around original IP – most of the people I speak to in Manchester with Internet tech-related skills are doing client work.”

“That’s all well and good, but with such a pedigree in science, technology and the arts, Manchester should have the balls to produce the giant consumer Internet companies of tomorrow.”

Thanks to a new gadget, you can now smell when you have been mentioned on Twitter.

‘Olly‘ is a USB-powered device allows you to add smells to your internet experience.

How about a lovely smell of fresh coffee or refreshing fruit whenever you’ve received a calendar notification or a new email has dropped in your inbox?

Olly has been created by Mint Digital Foundry, a research team that explores physical objects which connect to the web though digital technology.

Developed under the working title ‘The Smell of Success’, Olly was born out of hacking off the shelf of Glade air freshener, the research team wrote in their website.

“We attached it to an Arduino and programmed it to be controlled through Processing. The software then listens to retweets of the @MintFoundry account. When it finds one, it sends a signal to the air freshener to puff.”

The idea behind Olly is that we like to be liked and acknowledged by our peers.

However, the satisfaction of a retweet is far too brief when experienced on the screen, the team wrote.

“A pleasant smell is the perfect analogy of this in the physical world, as it lingers on the nose just for a moment, before it disappears. With enough popularity, you’ll be able to quite literally bask in your own self glory!”

The plans are part of the Digital York initiative and Coney Street and St Helen’s Square will be the first places to offer free connectivity this Autumn.

If the pilot proves successful, free wi-fi will be rolled out across the entire area within the city walls.

According to Councillor James Alexander the trial will see York join, what is still only a handful of places offering free wi-fi in the UK.

“Internet access is now an essential part of our everyday working and private lives and this initiative – Digital York – will be a step change in the ambition we have for the city”, he said.

“Who the hell knew how much address space we needed?”, he said in an interview by The Sydney Morning Herald last week.

Cerf created the web protocol IPv4 which connects the world’s computers to each other. He said that back in 1977, he had no idea his “experiment” wouldn’t end.

“I thought it was an experiment and I thought that 4.3 billion [addresses] would be enough to do an experiment,” he said.

According to Cerf, the unique IP addresses – those long number sequences, not the domain names of websites – will be running out “within weeks”.

But don’t throw away your computers just yet! A new protocol, IPv6 was developed soon after Cerf’s protocol and is now being plugged by internet giants such as Google and Facebook. The two sites are planning to launch a World IPv6 day in June.

According to Engadget.com, IPv6 makes for 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 unique addresses, so talks about internet apocalypse can be put off for some while.

Source: Engadget.com

Quote

“One of the Internet’s strengths is its ability to help consumers find the right needle in a digital haystack of data.” ~ Jared Sandberg

A blog post by Asylum.co.uk brings together a selection of some of early web design’s “finest” achievements.

Sites that were once cutting edge – well, maybe not all of them – now have us hooked for all the wrong reasons.

The pick of the bunch is Dinosauria On-Line, developed in 1995. The site has everything you could dream of in the mid 90s – cool graphics, cool photo gallery, pre-blog type of journal section and even “hot links”!

Another great one is a tribute page for Robert DeNiro created by an eager (and clearly tech-savvy!) fan. Also published in 1995, the site features, among other things, a “multimedia” section with a sound archive containing mp3s of the actor’s famous lines, complete with unmistakable 90s hiss ruining the sound quality.

Have a look at these heart-warming experiments from the time when the internet was wild and free of conventional design and sleek & stylish sites:
http://www.asylum.co.uk/2011/01/06/the-oldest-websites-on-the-internet-gold-oldies-of-the-web/

After making it through its teenage years, the World Wide Web is getting ready for the huge task of organising all of its information.

Last Monday, to mark the 20th birthday of his creation, Tim Berners-Lee published an article in the Scientific American.

“The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending”, Berners-Lee opened.

Fragmented future?

A strong advocate of open standards and open data, Berners-Lee warned about the threat the closed nature of some of the most popular social media sites of our time pose to the web.

He also criticised both Apple’s iTunes and magazine publishers who create smartphone apps instead of web apps, for excluding their content from the rest of the web.

“The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space”, Berners-Lee wrote.

Web 3.0

Berners-Lee appealed for open standards as a driver for innovation and linked data to create a better, more meaningful web.

The term ‘Semantic Web’ has been talked about for a while, but as the world becomes increasingly well connected, the step towards the so called Web 3.0 seems more realistic than ever.

For those still unsure about what the ‘Semantic Web’ means, here’s a brief explanation. Quite simply, it’s a web of data as opposed to just data on the web – a global database, as Berners-Lee defined it more than decade ago.

So why would we want it?

To make the web of the future as useful as we can, Berners-Lee replies.

“The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine”, he said.

Scientists, Berners-Lee wrote, are already discovering the huge potential of shared information and linked databases.

“Researchers, for example, are realising that in many cases no single lab or online data repository is sufficient to discover new drugs.

“The information necessary to understand the complex interactions between diseases, biological processes in the human body, and the vast array of chemical agents is spread across the world in a myriad of databases, spreadsheets and documents.”

As Berners-Lee points out, linked data has already played a key role when a drug for Alzheimer’s disease was discovered. As more and more information gets shared and linked, the future is looking bright for the web as a young adult.

Case study

Search semantically with Wolfram Alpha

One example of what computers can do with data they understand is an ‘answer engine’ called Wolfram Alpha. Read more…

“[Cloud computing] is especially significant today, at a time when we are seeing an explosion in the number of portable devices with limited storage capacity,” Vaizey said at the China internet forum in London this week.

“Access to clouds enables them to transcend that limitation and provide a level of functionality which would normally be associated with much larger machines.”

In his speech, Vaizey also pointed out that with the introduction of cloud computing comes the need to rethink some of the issues regarding privacy and data security.

Vaizey has recently been at the centre of the tech media thanks to his controversial comments about net neutrality.

Last weekend, Vaizey has been busy taking back comments about agreeing to a ‘two-tiered’ web, where ISPs could sell faster access to certain sites.

Dave Hartland has been working with the internet since the early 1990s. Currently the director of a staff development organisation JISC Netskills based at Newcastle University, Dave’s first job in IT was in 1991 as a user support officer for Mailbase, a national email-based internet service.

We asked Dave to talk about the early days of the internet and life before Google.

Buzzing early ’90s

In the beginning it was all a bit clunky and simple, but the buzz was getting bigger and bigger. The early 1990s saw new technologies constantly emerging and new features incorporated into Mailbase, Dave explains.

“For example, there was a service called Gopher”, he says. “It was very much like the web but it looked more like just lists that were linked to files. It was developed by the University of Minnesota which is where the name comes from – Minnesota was known as the gopher state.”

“At the same time there was something called Archie, which I think came from the word archive. Archie was using FTP (file transfer protocol) and that was really the first search engine.

“Every month an Archie server interrogated FTP services and would find all files it could and index them.

“There was also a couple of things that came along that were a bit more like the web. For example, a thing called Hyper-G which was developed by the Graz University in Switzerland. It was already much more sophisticated with hypertext, hotspots and images.”

“This thing called world wide web”

Dave’s colleague Jill Foster was deeply involved in the Internet Society which was trying to promote the development of the internet across the world in the early 90s. Also a member was a guy called Tim Berners-Lee who had “this thing called the world wide web” which he was trying to get people interested in.

“Tim came along to present to the group on his idea which, I have to say, people initially didn’t really get. Particularly because in those days browsers were not like they are now so it was quite hard to try to understand what he was trying to do.”

This was until the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications in the US invented Mosaic – the first graphical browser.

“When Mosaic came out that’s when it really took off. It was the first browser as we recognise it and it really leapfrogged everything.”

According to Dave, the ace in world wide web’s sleeve was that it was fully open source.

“The other efforts were all reasonably successful and very much competitors to the web in the early 90s but the licensing made it more difficult for them to take on. That was never an issue for the web.”

27 September 1997

Dave remembers the birth of Google well.

“We used to run a workshop that was featuring emerging technologies and techniques in finding information”, he explains. “I can remember featuring Google as this new thing that a couple of graduates from Stanford had developed.”

When it first came out, no one was really sure if it could work.

“It seemed so extraordinary that any one search engine could index such a vast percentage of the internet – even though the internet was much smaller then – and deliver the results so fast.

“We were absolutely amazed and I think that’s sort of been lost now, people take for granted what an amazing thing Google does.

“Now obviously, like with any other big and powerful company, there are a lot of dangers and they don’t get everything right by any means, but one thing I really like about them is that they try new things all the time, try to really push things forward.”

And Vint Cerf is a cool guy

Dave was there also when Vint Cerf, now Google’s Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist and often referred to as the “father of the internet”, came to talk at workshops that were part of the Internet Society’s annual conferences.

So what was he like?

“A really nice guy. Looks a little bit like Doc Holliday, like an American cowboy. He always wore a three-piece-suit with a watch chain. Very laconic and slow-spoken but very impressive and really holds your attention. It’s a bit of an old fashioned word but I guess he comes across as being very wise.”

Case study

Google has exclusively claimed the meaning of the phrase “to search on the internet”. Who needs to be good at searching for information anymore when you can simply “google it”? Read more…

The implications of “googling”

According to new figures, 20% of smartphone users have installed a radio app and more than half of them are using it at least once a week.

The survey concludes that radio users seem to be adapting well to the internet with 31% of listeners tuning in online. The catch-up services are also gaining a foothold with 16% having downloaded a podcast.

It seems that listeners are becoming increasingly aware of personalised online radio services such as Last.fm, where the service creates a playlist based on previous track selections.

Christel Lacaze, research manager at Rajar, said that the growing market share of smartphones enables more people to tune in via mobile internet connections rather than an FM signal, giving them access to richer content on the go.

“These new findings are going to be of great interest to the industry and those involved in the development of radio apps”, he added.

Source: The Guardian, The Telegraph