100 Ideas that Changed the Web
Jim Boulton
Language: English
Pages: 216
ISBN: 1780673701
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This innovative title looks at the history of the Web from its early roots in the research projects of the US government to the interactive online world we know and use today.
Fully illustrated with images of early computing equipment and the inside story of the online world's movers and shakers, the book explains the origins of the Web's key technologies, such as hypertext and mark-up language, the social ideas that underlie its networks, such as open source, and creative commons, and key moments in its development, such as the movement to broadband and the Dotcom Crash. Later ideas look at the origins of social networking and the latest developments on the Web, such as The Cloud and the Semantic Web.
Following the design of the previous titles in the series, this book will be in a new, smaller format. It provides an informed and fascinating illustrated history of our most used and fastest-developing technology.
information graphics are less than 100 years old. It was in 1925, at the Social and Economic Museum of Vienna, that Otto Neurath invented information graphics as we recognize them today. Neurath’s vision was to bring ‘dead statistics’ to life by making them visually attractive. His maxim was: ‘To remember simplified pictures is better than to forget accurate figures.’ Originally called the Vienna Method, and later ISOTYPE (International System Of TYpographic Picture Education), the graphic language
gathers all film reviews into a single place. WikiLeaks infamously does the same for classified information. Similar sites exist for music, financial services, cars, cameras … the list goes on. More recent aggregation services collate news from the social web. Flipboard collects content from social networks ‘Aggregation has become an essential way of filtering out the noise.’ and other feeds, presenting it in magazine format that users can ‘flip’ through. This is not without controversy. Newspapers
often for free. Competitors launched similar platforms, including Google Play, the Amazon Appstore and Blackberry App World. Despite Apple’s best efforts, the term ‘app store’ is now generic, referring to any platform that allows self-contained programs to be downloaded to mobile devices. By January 2013, the App Store had topped 40 billion downloads. Within five years, it has totally transformed the mobile Web. Web users in transit can get the rich experience they have become used to, without the
can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.’ Within 24 hours there were over 1,000 sign-ups. Within the first month, more than half the students at Harvard had registered. In 2005, Facebook became available to every college student in the US. In September 2006, it was open to everyone in the world aged thirteen or older. Now with more than a billion users, it is the second most popular site on the web and is gaining on Google fast. Social networks satisfy our need to connect with
than the existing format. His solution was the Quick Response (QR) code – a barcode that could be read horizontally and vertically. Traditional barcodes are scanned by a beam of light. Hara’s version could not only hold more information but also be read digitally. The biggest challenge, however, was how to scan this more complex code accurately. Hara’s solution was to add positional information. The reader first locates three distinctive squares at the corners of the QR code and then normalizes