Can the Web Save the World?

By Ken McCarthy in Technology

Can the web save the world?

In a word, yes.
And here’s the qualifier: “One piece at a time.”
Web activism has been part of my personal agenda for as long as I’ve been involved with the web.
In 1994, when I organized and sponsored the first conference on web marketing ever (Marc Andreessen gave the keynote), I invited all the usual suspects: ad agencies, PR firms, tech magazine writers - and NAMAC, the National Alliance of Media Arts and Culture


Why did I want to bring a non-profit group of independent filmmakers to the table for a discussion about the future of the web?
Because I felt then, and feel even more strongly today, that the work of independent media producers is essential for the pursuit of social justice and positive change in our society.
My then-extravagant hope was that some day we’d sort out compression issues and bandwidth limitations and be able to stream independently produced video across the net as an antidote to television.
Now that day has arrived. What are we going to do with it?
Save the world, of course, one piece at a time.
Saving a city
A city is a pretty good-sized piece and seven years ago some friends and I sat around my kitchen table and tried to figure out how we were going to save a little city that we loved. Just two miles square and sitting on the banks of the Hudson River, the City of Hudson appeared destined for obliteration.
Here’s what we were facing:
The second largest cement company in the world was planning to build the largest coal-fired cement plant in North America right next to town.
Cement plants are third only to oil refineries and chemical plants in the amount of health-damaging pollutants they produce. The plant which would run 24/7 was just a mile from schools, the city’s hospital and New York State’s retirement/long term care facility for retired firemen.
And here’s the really bad part: Not only was every local politician and every local media outlet in favor of the plant, an atmosphere of intimidation hung over the city that frightened many local people into keeping quiet about their concerns. The company was prepared to spend - and indeed did end up spending - $50,000,000 on advertising, PR, lobbyists, attorneys, and donations to local groups.
On our side: Fifty people and fifty bucks.
Six and a half years later, in a conflict that lasted longer than World War II, the fifty people with fifty bucks won.
How?
It’s a long story (see the “Additional Reading” below), but it all boiled down to this: we used the media we had - hand painted signs, meetings, flyers, the mail, the web - to build a membership organization that grew large enough to counterbalance and ultimately overcome what I think most reasonable people would have thought was an unbeatable force.
Today, I find myself thinking a lot about another city.
Saving our soul
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who have been initiated into the glories of New Orleans and those who have not yet had the pleasure.
Until June of 2006, I fell in the latter category. Then my old friend Steve O’Keefe, one of the Internet’s earliest commercialization pioneers, invited me to come visit. He’d been living in the city for the last ten years pursuing a passion we both share, music.
To say that I was stunned by the depth, breadth and sheer vitality of the music culture of New Orleans would be an understatement. How could I have missed this all my life? Understand, I’m a huge jazz fan. I’ve produced jazz concerts, hosted a jazz radio show, managed a jazz record label - and I never “got” New Orleans. (It might have something to do with growing up in New York City. I *assumed* my home town was the only place that mattered.)
Anyway, the city’s music scene is only the outer manifestation of something that is rapidly disappearing from North American society: communities…neighborhoods, where people know each other, celebrate and mourn together, and support each others’ creative endeavors. For too many people, New Orleans equals Bourbon Street, a Disney-like tourist trap where frat boys misbehave and puke on each others shoes.
That’s not New Orleans.
The real New Orleans is indescribably profound, creative, human and it holds a big piece of America’s soul - and the real New Orleans is dying.
Un-spinning the spin
Like so many stories the mass media sells us, the story of New Orleans has been spun to such an extreme that the reality and the reporting might as well be from different planets. For example:
* Myth #1: Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, right? Wrong.
The storm did little damage. It was the catastrophic failure of over one dozen federally built and maintained levees that caused the vast majority of the damage.
* Myth #2: The citizens of the city were disorganized, reckless and lawless. Wrong.
The pre-hurricane evacuation was one of the largest and most successful rapid movements of a civilian population in history. Those who were trapped by the flood waters caused by the collapsed levees were overwhelmingly peaceful and participated in countless acts of heroism, often risking their own lives to save others and feed and care for the most vulnerable.
* Myth #3: The hurricane was over eighteen months ago, they should be over it by now.
Wrong. Tell me what city could recover from the loss of 200,000 houses, 81,000 businesses, 175 schools and 6 major hospitals in a year? In two years? In ten? Per capita damage to Louisiana was a mind boggling $6,700 per state citizen. Compare this to New York after 9/11 ($390) or Hurricane Andrew which devastated South Florida ($139.)
What happened in New Orleans was the equivalent level of destruction of total war. After World War II, otherwise self-reliant and capable cities like Berlin and Tokyo and many, many others needed massive, prolonged infusions of outside assistance to get back on their feet.
So what’s going on?
Bottom line: The federal government - whose negligence caused the disaster in the first place - has made the decision that it’s cheaper, politically and financially, to let New Orleans die, rather rebuild it.
Thus the constant drumbeat of media propaganda that the city was destroyed by “an act of nature,” that its people are inherently corrupt and unworthy, that no one should live there. This last point is especially preposterous. If no one should live in New Orleans, no one should live in Holland either. The difference is Dutch levees don’t collapse.
You can probably see where this is leading.
Internet pros volunteers needed for New Orleans
New Orleans needs independent media to tell its story. Not just for the sake of telling a story, but to organize and rally all the people in the US and around the world who love the city and what it stands for - and there are millions of them currently unconnected.
Who’s going to do that?
More precisely, who’s going to create the media infrastructure that will make it easy for New Orleanians to tell their story and easy for outsiders who care to target their help where it will do the most good - both on the neighborhood level and in Washington.
City’s are savable. Even in the darkest times. I know. Hudson was savable. I believe New Orleans is savable too.
Are you a person with Internet skills who cares about the people of New Orleans? Would you like to play in a big stakes game, one that can change the destiny of a city and create a model for cities that may face similar systemic catastrophes in the future?
If so, please enter your name and skill set in our Internet Pros for New Orleans Database and we’ll try to match you up with a project where your skills will have the biggest impact.
Can the web save the world? Yes. One small piece at a time. Let’s start with New Orleans.
Join the Internet Pros for New Orleans volunteer database:
http://www.foodmusicjustice.com/signup.php

Author: Ken McCarthy is an activist webmaster who hope to use his skills and knowledge to better humanity, one city at a time.

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History of the Search Engine - What Came Before Google?

By Jeff Casmer in Technology
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Although we credit Google, Yahoo, and other major search engines for giving us the system we use to find the information we seek, the concept of hypertext came to life in 1945 when Vannaver Bush urged scientist to work together to help build a body of knowledge for all man kind. He then proposed the idea of a virtually limitless, fast, reliable, extensible, associative memory storage and retrieval system. He named this device a memex. But there is a long list of great minds that have given us the information system we now use today. This article illustrates some of them. Here is the History of the Search Engine:



Ted Nelson

Ted Nelson created Project Xanadu in 1960 and coined the term hypertext in 1963. His goal with Project Xanadu was to create a computer network with a simple user interface that solved many social problems like attribution. While Teds project Xandadu, for reasons unknown, never really took off much of the inspiration to create the WWW came from Teds work.

George Salton

George Salton was the father of modern search technology. He died in August of 1995. His teams at Harvard and Cornell developed the Saltons Magic Automatic Retriever of Text otherwise known as the SMART informational retrieval system. It included important concepts like the vector space model, Inverse Document Frequency (IDF), Term Frequency (TF), term discrimination values, and relevancy feedback mechanisms. His book A theory of indexing explains many of his tests. Search today is still based on much of his theories. History of the search engine uses some of the same techniques even today.

Alan Emtage

In 1990 a student at McGill University in Montreal, by the name of Alan Emtage created Archie; the first search engine. It was invented to index FTP archives, allowing people to quickly access specific files. Archie users could utilize Archies services through a variety of methods including e-mail queries, teleneting directly to a server, and eventually through the World Wide Web interfaces. Archie only indexed computer files. With Archie, Alan Emtage helped to solve the data scatter problem. Originally, it was to be named archives but was changed to Archie for short.

Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill

Archie gained such popularity that in 1991 Paul Linder and Mark P. McCahill created a text based information browsing system that uses a menu-driven interface to pull information from across the globe to the users computer. Named for the Golden Gophers mascot at the University of Minnesota, The name is fitting, because Gopher tunnels through other Gophers located in computers around the world, arranging data in a hierarchical series of menus, which users can search for specific topics.

Tim Burners-Lee

Up until 1991 until there was no World Wide Web. The main method of sharing information was via FTP. Tim Berners-Lee wanted to join hypertext with the internet. He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire (a prototype created with help from Robert Cailliau) to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first web browser and editor, called WorldWideWeb, and developed on NeXTSTEP. He then created the first Web server called httpd, short for HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon. The first Web site built was at:

http://info.cern.ch/

and was first put online on August 6, 1991. Tim Burners-Lee created the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994. Tim also created the Virtual Web library which is the oldest catalogue of the web. The history of the search engine is a fascinating story.

Author: Jeff Casmer is an internet marketing consultant and work at home business owner. For more information on search engines optimization please visit his “Top Ranked” Improve Search Engine Rankings Directory gives you all the information you need to Work at Home in the 21st century.

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