70,000 BC: The Earliest Known Examples of Paleolithic Art
668 BC: Ashurbanipal Attempts to Collect all Knowledge
150 BC: Earliest Analog Computer
593 AD: First Mention of Printing in China
1454 AD: The Gutenberg Bible
1964 AD: Creation of ARPANET
From Cave Paintings to the Internet, a timeline of the history of information technology. [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole on Oct 30, 2008 - 10 comments

Hi Kofi. Diplomats from 191 countries meet this week in Geneva for the three-day United Nations World Summit on the Information Society. It's the occasion for The Helloworld Project to project thousands of 500-foot-high laser-light SMS messages onto the Geneva fountain. Internet users everywhere can post billboard thoughts almost instantly onto the fountain -- or onto the northern façade of New York's U.N. building, the face of a mountain in Rio de Janeiro or the front of a Bombay skyscraper.
posted by the fire you left me on Dec 8, 2003 - 15 comments

We need an "Information Technology Disclosure Act." The Programmer's Guild is pushing for the creation of legislation to require companies which outsource abroad to tell consumers when their sensitive personal information is being sent to companies in other countries. This aspect of outsourcing has gotten little attention, but the SF Chronicle's David Lazarus has reported on it being done by hospitals (like UCSF, which is being threatened over back pay by a transcriber in Pakistan), accountants, banks (BofA), telecom companies (SBC), and perhaps most alarmingly, two of the three major credit-reporting agencies.
posted by homunculus on Nov 9, 2003 - 24 comments

Ambient Information (NYT reg. required) Ambient information can be defined as material objects, such as computers, watches or furniture, which interact with digital information and react in certain ways such as sound, color, or light. Apple has filed an intriguing patent for a computer that could change color when you get an e-mail, for example. So, is this concept the next “new thing” or the next pet rock?
posted by jeremias on Jan 13, 2003 - 15 comments

Sign up to fight the filters. As filters get piled upon filters it gets difficult to tell whether the document requests fail due to technical problems or due to active denial. These folk are developing a distributed application which will use idle cycles to map out the boundaries of filter space and help fight the cantonization of the Net.
posted by srboisvert on Jul 24, 2002 - 4 comments

Mappa Mundi is a magazine about information visualization and navigation with a focus on the web. What similar sites are out there? A second related question is when why are tools for finding stuff on the web so primitive? More inside.
posted by rdr on Sep 5, 2001 - 8 comments

Death by Information: "Does the word 'pedestrian' frighten you? Could you survive for an hour without a cell phone, laptop, or - even worse - a television?"
posted by Zeldman on Apr 22, 2001 - 24 comments

Too Much Information? Heavy information overload: the world's total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage. This is the equivalent of 250 megabytes per person for each man, woman, and child on earth.
posted by faithnomore on Oct 24, 2000 - 15 comments