Jinni is a movie and TV recommendation service that has apparently developed an algorithm similar to Pandora's Music Genome Project. Their algorithm is cleverly titled The Movie Genome Project.
posted by reenum on Dec 8, 2009 - 14 comments

Google began inviting volunteers to a public preview test of their new Wave web-based collaborative email and document communications platform yesterday, which enables users to "communicate and work together in real time." Initial reviews this past May seemed positive. (Previously) [more inside]
posted by zarq on Oct 1, 2009 - 75 comments

The brain's plasticity has some neuroscientists worried about what the internet will do to reading - and to humanity. [more inside]
posted by smoke on Aug 13, 2009 - 64 comments

Internet Mapping Project l slide-showl more about it here. Please draw a map of the internet, as you see it. Indicate your "home". You can download a blank PDF here and email it to [Kevin Kelly] when done. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye on Jul 30, 2009 - 7 comments

With the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on Thursday, China's ever-vigilant censors have stepped up the reach of the "Great Firewall," blocking Western sites like Twitter, Flickr, and (just one day after its launch) Microsoft's Bing. via [more inside]
posted by infini on Jun 3, 2009 - 54 comments

Jerry Yang, founder and CEO of Yahoo, has stepped down. He recently turned down a $31 a share offer from Microsoft, and with Yahoo shares hovering around $10, some say he was forced out.
posted by plexi on Nov 18, 2008 - 27 comments

Aurora is a concept video exploring one possible future user experience for the Web.
posted by plexi on Aug 8, 2008 - 37 comments

Anthropologists in the digital domain tend to be a day late and a dollar short as far as us early adopters are concerned, but Michael Wesch managed to capture the popular imagination with his YouTube video, The Machine is Us/ing Us. He recently gave a presentation to the Library of Congress titled An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube in which he talks about the best of the web (not to be confused with The Best of The Web.)
posted by PeterMcDermott on Aug 4, 2008 - 29 comments

Mapping Iran's Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere. [more inside]
posted by chunking express on Jun 5, 2008 - 4 comments

Timewarner has set a precedent by creating tiered internet use that is capped at certain levels. Pricing will be about $29.95 per month for a 5 GB monthly cap to $54.90 per month for a 40 GB cap.
posted by ejaned8 on Jun 4, 2008 - 64 comments

ArsTechnica is reporting on the practice of altering and editing web-traffic enroute from the server to your client/browser. Is your ISP, work or connection path altering your requested documents? Find out here.
posted by loquacious on Apr 16, 2008 - 18 comments

Google takes on Wikipedia with Knol. The web responds. Invite only, of course.
posted by Soup on Dec 14, 2007 - 121 comments

Blue Vertigo | Web Design Resource Links
posted by Gyan on Nov 21, 2007 - 24 comments

In the same spirit as the Open Net Initiative and Committee to Protect Bloggers that both track global internet filtering, Sami ben Gharbia's Access Denied Map tries to track the blocking of sites like Blogger, Flickr, YouTube and others by governments, as well as efforts by activists to keep them accessible or to challenge their blockage.
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Nov 19, 2007 - 5 comments

If Google was designed for Google.
posted by armoured-ant on Oct 16, 2007 - 36 comments

Newsfilter: 30,000 customers in the San Francisco area lost power today at about 1:50pm PDT, in a series of power failures which knocked out a major datacenter hub: 365 Main. The hub controls servers for many social media sites, including Technorati, Netflix, Yelp, Craigslist and all Six Apart properties, including TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox. (6A's twitter stream has updates.) More here and here. Amusingly enough, 365 Main tempted fate and released a press release today patting themselves on the back for "two years of 100-percent uptime".
posted by zarq on Jul 24, 2007 - 82 comments

E-motional breakdown: The state of e-mail misery. Is email finally at the breaking point? My inbox is so oversaturated I need professional advice to avoid bankrupcy. Or maybe I'll just wait it out -- the kids might know best.
posted by Chinese Jet Pilot on Jul 23, 2007 - 32 comments

In 1997, a geeky little boy from New Mexico became one of the first major web celebrities when he reached out to meet his future girlfriend. He talks about the impact that this unexpected celebrity had on his life. Apparently, after years of eschewing the web, he's all grown up and he's looking for "bois" on MySpace (sound is NSFW). (via szanalmas, possibly NSFW).
posted by madamjujujive on Mar 12, 2007 - 45 comments

Luke Vaughn has no car, but he wanted to travel from his home in Eugene, OR to the East Coast for the holidays. So he asked his fellow fans of the show with zefrank for a little help. He's becoming the Human Baton, and with the help of dozens of internet strangers, he's started his trip cross-country. They're each putting a pin on his jacket, posting photos, and blogging it. Oh, and they're planning meetups with him all through his route.
posted by Plutor on Dec 12, 2006 - 10 comments

You got chocolate in my Google! How do you make websites better? Simple. Like Peanut Butter Cups, you just take two things that rock and mash them together. It's cheap, effective...and really gaining steam. Here's one example, along with a list of a ton of others.
posted by PreacherTom on Nov 13, 2006 - 11 comments

It is done. Windows Internet Explorer 7 has been released.
posted by armoured-ant on Oct 19, 2006 - 131 comments

Friendster : Wallflower at the Web Party via
posted by Afroblanco on Oct 15, 2006 - 27 comments

The Croquet Project is a staggeringly ambitious attempt to create 'an operating system for the post-browser Internet' - a multi-platform, open-source, extensible, decentralised, peer-to-peer, 3D virtual reality metaverse [2,3], designed for 'highly scalable deep collaboration', led by Alan Kay.
posted by MetaMonkey on Oct 1, 2006 - 37 comments

I can't work out if iKarma is a well-intentioned stab at applying the power of social software to the world of business, or simply a well-intentioned scrape at the bottom of the Web 2.0 barrel.
posted by Jofus on Apr 26, 2006 - 32 comments

Usability Exchange -- a testing service determining site accessibility for disabled users. They're only in the UK now, but it seems like a great idea. Organisations set up their tests online and submit them directly to disabled testers in our database. Testers are then free to complete these tests in their own time, earning money for each test they complete. As tests are completed by users, organisations can view test results, web page logs and other information in real time. More here at BBC, including some concerns.
posted by amberglow on Mar 17, 2006 - 17 comments

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web. Robert Bringhurt's undisputed bible of typography until now has been limited to print design. This site, a work in progress, presents his principles one at a time, and explains how to follow them as a web designer using HTML and CSS.
posted by Robot Johnny on Mar 8, 2006 - 29 comments

You can't just give away free software! Or can you? Firefox's copyleft premise destroys U.K. anti-piracy laws. Gervase Markham takes on a U.K. official who wants to arrest pirates for distributing firefox.
posted by FeldBum on Feb 23, 2006 - 14 comments

Google Zeitgeist 2005
World Affairs Nature Movies Celebrities Phenomena
posted by Mwongozi on Dec 20, 2005 - 25 comments

3quarksdaily. Just another blog, sure, but a good one. 3quarksdaily is a filter blog much like our very own, but with only 15 users (and an editor). As they say on their about page "On this website, my guest authors and editors and I hope to present interesting items from around the web on a daily basis, in the areas of science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else we deem inherently fascinating." The do an admirable job.
posted by panoptican on Dec 6, 2005 - 26 comments

Standup comedy cultural hot button Wikipedia hack. Standup comics! Need a cultural hot button topic for a joke? Check out Wikipedia articles with the most revisions. Comedy gold. Just pick a topic and start riffing.
posted by basilwhite on Nov 30, 2005 - 55 comments

UK politician chooses his blog over his party: Paul Leake, a Liberal Democrat councillor in Durham, was asked by his local party to remove any "controversial" posts from his weblog and to give them the right to vet future posts. Denis Jackson, another Liberal Democrat on Durham City Council, said that the Labour councillors were using the blog to find "lurid headlines". Leake refused, and stepped down from the party. He'll now serve his constituents as an independent. [Via The Political Weblog Project]
posted by tapeguy on Sep 19, 2005 - 3 comments

Internets: Serious Business! These last few months have seen an increase in the attacks on the participatory culture of the web. The mainstream establishments, both political and corporate, have been looking with a cautious eye towards this new developing place. So far we've established that blogs can get you fired, keep you from getting a job, give pedophiles a place to ruminate on snatching your children, threaten journalistic integrity *snicker*, endanger the marketing , product planning, and product life cycles for automobile manufacturers, can infect your computer with virii, and have all sorts of negative consequences. The internets (both of them) can cause your children to be charmed, seduced, and addicted by readily available porn, and can also provide access to extremist radical and fundamentalist groups, prompting Congress to discuss more restrictive legislation (NSFW), but only for the porn. It has even been claimed that the web has given "Al Qaeda wings". P2P is blamed as causing record loses by the music industry, despite their investments in local station marketing payola. The FEC has held public hearings attended by both hemispheres of the blogosphere (amazingly in near-agreement) discussing the regulation of political speech online. The figureheads of a certain political party fear that their affiliated slice of the blogosphere may be too far-left. Newspapers and TV are leading the charge, with the internet standing in for pharmaceutical scares, yo-yo diets, and missing white women. The question is, how will the libertarian-minded digerati respond to this very real attack on the essence of web culture?
posted by rzklkng on Jul 29, 2005 - 34 comments

PBwiki is a super simple, extremely clean route to having, what you always wanted (admit it), your very own wiki. Just enter your username and email address, and wait for the password to be sent to you, and you're off and running. No need for your own web space, no messing around with CGI, PHP or Python, and if you're worried that the site will vanish and take your stuff with it, you can even download your entire wiki in a ZIP file. It's not the first free wiki farm out there, but it's just about as simple and clean as one can get.

But what do you do with it once you have one? I've been using a personal wiki for keeping track of ideas, places and characters for a (rather sprawling) novel project; the simplified page markup of a wiki combined with easy hyperlinking make them great for brainstorming. You could also start up a game of Lexicon, which is well-suited for play on a wiki, and as previously seen in these parts. Or, you know, you could just start your own Everything. (Originally found on bOINGbOING.)
posted by JHarris on Jun 4, 2005 - 17 comments

Jeffrey Zeldman's site is now a decade old!
posted by riffola on May 31, 2005 - 22 comments

Internet Explorer - We discovered the web. Check out this humorous parody site created for Microsoft's browser Internet Explorer. Something tells me this won't be up for too much longer though.
posted by sjvilla79 on May 28, 2005 - 37 comments

One of many Wikipedia-based applications, Omnipelagos mines the hive mind to map the connections between two things.
posted by jenh on May 10, 2005 - 31 comments

The web gets mashed up.
posted by Tlogmer on May 10, 2005 - 49 comments

Search Wars The BBC reviews five search engines, including Google and the new MSN beta
posted by Mwongozi on Nov 12, 2004 - 8 comments

Filtering hasn't worked in Iran, they now arrest web journalists: Several online journalists have been arrested, raising fears of a government crackdown on Internet dissidents. (Christian Science Monitor)
posted by hoder on Oct 29, 2004 - 2 comments

“Ten Years, Ten Trends” Highlights of the major findings in Year Four of the Digital Future Project’s study of the impact of the Internet on Americans.
posted by gwint on Oct 15, 2004 - 4 comments

Firefox 1.0 Preview Release is now available. The Spread Firefox site hopes to see a million downloads, and they've already passed the halfway mark. The advantages of Firefox have been previously discussed on MeFi, but this version includes an interesting new feature - Live Bookmarks, which allow you to view RSS news and blog headlines in the bookmarks toolbar or bookmarks menu. Obsessively checking MetaFilter is now easier than ever.
posted by Stuart_R on Sep 17, 2004 - 51 comments

Dick Cheney claims that disappointing jobs numbers are undercounting ebay power sellers. The man is on a tear!
posted by luser on Sep 10, 2004 - 47 comments

Words: Woe & Wonder The CBC explains and debates usage from a Canadian-journalism standpoint - for example, why the Iraqi ex-leader is referred to by his first name and whether to capitalize this place.
posted by casarkos on Jul 15, 2004 - 8 comments

The web won't topple tyranny. "The myth that the Internet will utterly transform capitalism has died. The myth that the Web will destroy tyranny should perish as well." [Via /.]
posted by homunculus on Mar 28, 2004 - 18 comments

Cat and Bunny [caution: shockwave]: a hare-raising tail of love in the face of all common sense.
posted by SPrintF on Mar 7, 2004 - 19 comments

Mining the Deep Web. Google indexes 4 billion pages, but there are hundreds of billions of documents out there in the Deep Web that are effectively unreachable by search engines because they are locked in databases or are unsearchable media. It looks like Yahoo is going to start giving us a peek by providing unified access to a wide variety of sites that are ordinarily only searchable by their own custom search engines.
posted by badstone on Mar 2, 2004 - 12 comments

Client: "People don't know what links are on the web yet, you have to make it blink and say 'CLICK HERE!' " Web designer horror stories from the last days of the dotcom boom. (via the Spinnoff forums)
posted by UKnowForKids on Nov 19, 2003 - 50 comments

Too good to be true? United Internet is launching its public hosting service with a special promotion: a full 500 meg hosting account free for three years. Includes email hosting, FTP and shell access, 5 gigs of transfers, Perl, Python, PHP and MySQL... plus $25 worth of Google AdWords. Sounds fishy to me, but they never asked for my credit card when I signed up.
posted by johnnydark on Nov 14, 2003 - 58 comments

Scott McCloud and Clay Shirky are trading ideas on Micropayemnts again. Clay Says user-pays schemes can't simply be restored through minor tinkering with payment systems, because they don't address the cause of that change -- a huge increase the power and reach of the individual creator.. Scott Says micropayments, well, BitPass are here to stay this time.
As a content producer I like the idea, but as a content consumer I'm just not sure yet.
If mefi went Micro, would you pay?
posted by Blake on Sep 13, 2003 - 28 comments

So you know all those worms that have been circulating recently? Well, turns out that they mean that the Internet has failed. (via the Obscure Store)
posted by Johnny Assay on Aug 27, 2003 - 35 comments