wikinomics

Wikinomics
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything is a book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams, first published in December 2006. It explores how some companies in the early 21st century have used mass collaboration (also called peer production) and open-source technology, such as wikis, to be successful.According to Tapscott, Wikinomics is based on four ideas: Openness, Peering, Sharing, and Acting Globally.
1. Free Creativity (Openness and Sharing) - Making what you like and then broadcasting your creation globally with other users, e.g. YouTube
2. Peering - the free sharing of material on the internet
3. Acting Globally - Web 2.0 makes thinking globally inevitable, the internet makes communication of ideas simple.

Wikinomics is now making things more simple with more choice for example "iTunes" there is no factory with man-made product, it's all in the form of downloads. This is cutting out mass productions and distributions, making is easier for both the company and customer

what is creative commons

A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they have created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of their own work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.

CC licensed music is available through several outlets such as SoundCloud, and are available for use in video and music remixing.

We Think theory

WeThink
We Think explores how the web is changing our world, creating a culture in which more people than ever can participate, share and collaborate, ideas and information.
'We Think' states that the way we think and make sense of 'knowledge' is fundamentally shifting in the online age. One of the main contributions to this statement is social networking. Social networking sites, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, have become a hugely important part of our everyday lives. The way we think and see things now partially depends on what happens on those sites and the actions that people do.


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when did wikipedia launch

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger coined its name. a portmanteau of wiki and encyclopedia. It was only in the English language initially, but it quickly developed similar versions in other languages which differ in content and in editing practices. With 5,228,462 articles, English Wikipedia is the largest out of more than 290 versions of encyclopedias on Wikipedia. Overall, Wikipedia consists of more than 40 million articles in more than 250 different languages and as of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors each month.

when did google go live?

On Sept. 4, 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin filed for incorporation as Google Inc. — they had received a $100,000 check from an investor made out to Google, Inc., and needed to incorporate that name so they could legally deposit the check. However, in recent years, Sept. 27 is the day the celebratory Google Doodle appears.

Prior to the launch, Page and Brin met at Stanford in 1995, and soon decided to launch a search service called BackRub in January 1996. They soon reevaluated the name (and the creepy logo) in favor of Google, a play on the mathematical figure, "googol," which represents the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The name embodied their mission to create an infinite amount of web resources. And that they did.

Since then, Google has become a household name to billions of people worldwide. You'll overhear senior citizens command their grandchildren to "google" the price of foot cream. You'll witness toddlers punching the screen of the latest Android phone. And chances are, you've navigated the circles of Google+ (if not, let's get you an invite already).

why 1995 is significant for internet users

his was the year that the Internet entered public consciousness and also the year it was completely privatized and the United States Government no longer funded it with public money - in April 1995 the NSFNET was retired. America Online and Prodigy offered access to the World Wide Web system for the first time this year, releasing browsers that made it easily accessible to the general public.

January 27 – Prodigy (online service) offers access to the World Wide Web.
March 1 – The first Yahoo! Search interface is founded.
March 25 – Ward Cunningham loads the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, in Oregon.
May 23 – The Java programming language is announced to the world.
June 8 – Danish/Greenlandic/Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf releases the first version of the scripting language PHP, which in 15 years will be used as the server-side language on 75% of all Web servers.
July 16 – Amazon.com, incorporated a year earlier by Jeff Bezos in Washington (state) as an online bookstore, sells its first book, Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.
Andy Harter and colleagues devise Virtual Network Computing

what happened in 1988?

1988 was a crucial year in the early history of the Internet—it was the year of the first well-known computer virus, the1988 Internet worm. The first permanent intercontinental Internet link was made between the United States (NSFNET) and Europe (Nordunet) as well as the first Internet-based chat protocol, Internet Relay Chat. The concept of the World Wide Web was first discussed at CERN in 1988.

what is MUD and USENet?

MUD(MUlti-User DUNEGON)
A MUD or Multi-User Dungeon is an inventively structured social experience on the Internet, managed by a computer program and often involving a loosely organized context or theme, such as a rambling old castle with many rooms or a period in national history. Some MUDs are ongoing adventure games; others are educational in purpose; and others are simply social. MUDs existed prior to the World Wide Web, accessible through Telnet to a computer that hosted the MUD. Today, many MUDs can be accessed through a Web site and some are perhaps better known as "3-D worlds."

MUD participants adopt a character or avatar when they join or log in to a MUD. Typically, you can describe your avatar to the other participants. Each MUD has its own name, special character and ambience, and set of rules. MUDs are run by advanced participants or programmers called wizards.

Although many MUDs continue to be entirely text-based, some new MUDs use virtual reality settings and you can see the characters. However, the focus is on the exchange of text between participants who are logged in at a particular time. There are a number of variations on the MUD, including MOO s, MUCKs, and MUSHes, each associated with a server program of that name and varied mainly by the programming language used and the capabilities offered

USENET

Usenet is a collection of user-submitted notes or messages on various subjects that are posted to servers on a worldwide network. Each subject collection of posted notes is known as a newsgroup. There are thousands of newsgroups and it is possible for you to form a new one. Most newsgroups are hosted on Internet-connected servers, but they can also be hosted from servers that are not part of the Internet. Usenet's original protocol was UNIX-to-UNIX Copy (UUCP), but today the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is used

When was SPam born?

EMAIL SPAM IS BORN

3 MAY 1978

Though unremarkable today, the sending of an unsolicited bulk of commercial e-mail by a marketing representative to every ARPAnet address on the west coast marked the unwelcome birth of the reviled modern annoyance known as email spam, on this day in 1978.

Naturally, someone was trying to sell something. Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager for the American computer company Digital Equipment Corporation, needed to spread the word about his company’s upcoming open houses in Los Angeles and San Mateo, California. Digital Equipment Corporation would be showcasing its latest computers and Thuerk was eager to kindle interest in the new technology. There were some 600 people on the invite list, most of whom were computer scientists, and Thuerk decided to email them simultaneously. He had his assistant, Carl Gartley, write a single mass e-mail, then used the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPAnet, an operational packet switching network that was the first Internet, to send his message. Like many spam emails sent today, that first spam message was long, tedious, and all-caps. A portion of the message read:

DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T…WE INVITE YOU TO COME SEE THE 2020 AND HEAR ABOUT THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AT THE TWO PRODUCT PRESENTATIONS WE WILL BE GIVING IN CALIFORNIA THIS MONTH.

Thuerk did snag some interested computer scientists for his company’s events. But the message annoyed many more recipients than it attracted–including a swift crackdown by very annoyed governing authorities. Since it was on ARPAnet, the world’s first spam also inspired heated debate on the then-miniscule Internet community. Said computer programmer Richard Stallman, “Nobody should be allowed to send a message with a header that long, no matter what it is about.


the rest as they say is history!

who created E-mailing?

who created emailing?

Raymond Tomlinson is widely known for inventing network electronic mail, choosing the “@” sign in emails to connect the username with the destination address. His email software (SNDMSG) was widely distributed for years, and proved to be an exceptionally innovative solution. Tomlinson was also lead in developing the required services in network electronic mail, including defining a place to put inbound email on the user's machine, developing a mail transport agent to move email between machines, creating a protocol for moving email between machines, setting a standard format for email messages, and designing a tool for creating and reading email. 

In addition to his significant contributions to network email, he played a leading role in developing the first email standards. In 1972, Tomlinson was one of the participants in a meeting to enhance FTP to support email, which was used until 1982 when it was replaced by SMTP. In addition, Tomlinson was a co-author of RFC-561 (September 1973), the first standard for Internet email message formats. RFC 561 defined several of the email fields we still use today (e.g. From, Subject and Date).

Long-tail theory by chris anderson

The Long Tail, in a nutshell

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

One example of this is the theory's prediction that demand for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio. In other words, the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don't individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may someday rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar.

The term refers specifically to the orange part of the sales chart above, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to hard goods. The vertical axis is sales; the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the hits, which have dominated our markets and culture for most of the last century. The orange part is the non-hits, or niches, which is where the new growth is coming from now and in the future.

Traditional retail economics dictate that stores only stock the likely hits, because shelf space is expensive. But online retailers (from Amazon to iTunes) can stock virtually everything, and the number of available niche products outnumber the hits by several orders of magnitude. Those millions of niches are the Long Tail, which had been largely neglected until recently in favor of the Short Head of hits.

When consumers are offered infinite choice, the true shape of demand is revealed. And it turns out to be less hit-centric than we thought. People gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not).

Our research project has attempted to quantify the Long Tail in three ways, comparing data from online and offline retailers in music, movies, and books.

    1) What's the size of the Long Tail (defined as inventory typically not available offline)?
    2) How does the availability of so many niche products change the shape of demand? Does it shift it away from hits?
    3) What tools and techniques drive that shift, and which are most effective?

The Long Tail book is about the big-picture consequence of this: how our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to million of niches. It chronicles the effect of the technologies that have made it easier for consumers to find and buy niche products, thanks to the "infinite shelf-space effect"--the new distribution mechanisms, from digital downloading to peer-to-peer markets, that break through the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar retail.

The Wikipedia entry on the Long Tail does an excellent job of expanding on this.

The shift from hits to niches is a rich seam, manifest in all sorts of surprising places.