Berners-Lee, Web take bow at Olympics

Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee takes a star turn during the opening ceremony for the Summer Olympics in London.

Sir Tim looks on as his tweet lights up the stadium.

(Credit: Screenshot by Edward Moyer/CNET)

 

Forget about the ripped-and-rugged sprinters and shot-putters, bring on the gold-medal geeks.

The opening ceremony of this summer's London Olympics obliged that sentiment, as Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee got the star treatment during the extravaganza.

A hip-hoppy dance routine featuring legions of fist-pumping club-types gave way as a stage-set suburban house rose from the ground to reveal a lone keyboard jockey surfing away in solitude.

None other than Berners-Lee it was, and with a flick of his wrist, he lit up the stadium with a grandly flashing tweet: "This is for everyone."

And so, more and more, it is. In the two decades or so since its inception, the WWW has grown from a nerdy curiosity into a tool well nigh as widespread as the telephone or TV. Twitter itself reported today that 9.66 million tweets concerning the Olympics opening ceremony were sent out as the spectacle unfolded -- that's more than the number of tweets sent out about the 2008 Beijing Olympics during the entire run of that tournament. Clearly, the Web is nothing these days if not mainstream (though it bears noting that a digital divide does still exist, even in a country as well off as the U.S.).

Berners-Lee's tweet itself generated almost 10,000 retweets, Twitter said in its blog post. Here, courtesy of Berners-Lee himself, and the Web, is a clip of Sir Tim's big Olympic moment:





Related stories
• Tim Berners-Lee: Tell Facebook, Google you want your data back
• Tim Berners-Lee speaks out against U.K. surveillance bill
• Tim Berners-Lee: The Web is threatened
• Berners-Lee calls for higher purpose of Web
• Tech advice from Tim Berners-Lee
• Pew: Smartphones narrow digital divide
• Web accessibility no longer an afterthought
• Berners-Lee in a dress and the Web's first uploaded photo

by Edward Moyer

Crave writer Edward Moyer, also CNET News' Saturday editor, once built a model of the DNA molecule for a PBS science series--out of telephone cord and tapioca balls. He also worked at USA Today and other pubs--waxing philosophical with Elvis' ex and slurping spaghetti with Roller Girl of "Boogie Nights," among other things. E-mail Ed with your story ideas and insights.

Related post:
Chinese supremacy at Olympics

Medal Count as at July 30, 2012

Leaders

Total

1		China	9	5	3	17
2		United States	5	7	5	17
3		France	3	1	3	7
4		DPR Korea	3	-	1	4
5		Italy	2	4	2	8
6		Korea	2	2	2	6
7		Russia	2	-	3	5
8		Kazakhstan	2	-	-	2
9		Japan	1	4	6	11
10		Australia	1	2	1	4
11		Romania	1	2	-	3
12		Brazil	1	1	1	3
12		Hungary	1	1	1	3
14		Netherlands	1	1	-	2
15		Ukraine	1	-	2	3
16		Georgia	1	-	-	1
16		Lithuania	1	-	-	1
16		South Africa	1	-	-	1
19		Colombia	-	2	-	2
20		United Kingdom	-	1	2	3
21		Cuba	-	1	-	1
21		Germany	-	1	-	1
21		Mexico	-	1	-	1
21		Poland	-	1	-	1
21		Thailand	-	1	-	1
21		Chinese Taipei	-	1	-	1
27		Azerbaijan	-	-	1	1
27		Belgium	-	-	1	1
27		Canada	-	-	1	1
27		Indonesia	-	-	1	1
27		India	-	-	1	1
27		Moldova	-	-	1	1
27		Mongolia	-	-	1	1
27		Norway	-	-	1	1
27		Serbia	-	-	1	1
27		Slovakia	-	-	1	1
27		Uzbekistan	-	-	1	1
✳		Malaysia	-	-	-	-

✳

Malaysia

-

-

-

-

Google's latest wheeze: Work out these blurry house numbers for us

Google, the pride of open everything, uses real blurry house number images as its Captchas, so that the general public can tell them what the number really is.

An openly available image of Sergey Brin in the open air.

(Credit: Google+,Sergey Brin)

 

I have spent much of the day blurry-eyed, moved by Google's Sergey Brin declaring his company the only great defender of the open Web.

The tears have, it has come to my attention, mainly emerged from laughter at Google's sweet, thoughtful gall that everything it claims the world desires just happens coincidentally to benefit it commercially.

Still, no sooner had my eyes dried a little when the Telegraph offered me Google' latest exemplar of sheer, beautiful openness.

For it seems that Google is using real images from Street View as security checks. Yes, if you want to access your own Google account, the company is asking you to decipher a slightly blurry image of a real house number.

It seems that if enough people decide on a particular number, then Google sharpens up the image on Street View.

Yes, you are being asked to work for Google, Openly. For free. And if you don't, well, you may not be able to access your own Google account.

The Telegraph naturally declares that certain privacy groups are foaming at the lips on hearing of this little scheme -- which, according to a Google spokesman, only occurs in 10 percent of security questions.

But surely some people, on hearing of this and Google being fined $25,000 by the FCC for, um, non-compliance with its inquiry into Wi-Fi eavesdropping, might feel that openness has a highly subjective definition in Google's complex collective cranium.

Google's version of the open Web seems very simple: let us get at everything. Whether it's books, streets, houses, Facebook accounts, iPhoto accumulations or perhaps even the remains of your spaghetti bolognese.

Something is open if Google can see it and scrape it. And when Google sees it and scrapes it, it can create a fuller picture of every element of your life -- just in case, you know, some lonely advertiser might pass by and show interest.

Some might call this freedom. There again, doesn't freedom sometimes entail being free not to let rapacious, baby-faced organizations peer into your life?

by Chris Matyszczyk 
Chris Matyszczyk is an award-winning creative director who advises major corporations on content creation and marketing. He brings an irreverent, sarcastic, and sometimes ironic voice to the tech world. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET.
.
Newscribe : get free news in real time

Related posts & articles:
Google's Business Experiment: Nothing but Web
Google+ face-lift triggers jibes over extra white space
Google plans major revamp for search engine
Google acquires more IBM patents
FCC Proposes: Fine for Google Wi-Fi snooping 'obstruction' 
Google testing Google News tweaks
Sergey Brin, Google: Web freedom faces greatest threat ever. 'It's scary.' (nextlevelofnews.com)
Google's Sergey Brin: China, SOPA, Facebook Threaten the 'Open Web' (wired.com)

Some life-affirming thoughts for a tech New Year

Tweet

by Chris Matyszczyk

 

(Credit: CC KhE/Flickr)
 

Viewing the tech world, as I do, largely from the fringes, I sometimes wonder just how seriously it takes itself.

Make a joke about Apple and invective will descend on you. Make a joke about Google+ and expect to be told to "eat a large bowl of raw d***"-- oh, and to be followed by a lot more people on Google+.

The New Year will, no doubt, see more intensity surrounding tech companies, tech products, and tech personalities.

Some people will work beyond their physical and mental capacities. Some people will believe that killing Google, Apple, Facebook is everything that exists in life. Some people will lose perspective entirely about what's important and what is mere group-speak.



So to celebrate the New Year, here are the words of a palliative-care nurse who's spent much of her life listening to people on their deathbeds. These truths were first published on the Arise India forum but were then republished by the extraordinary writer Kelly Oxford.

These, then, are what this nurse saw as the Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Perhaps they might seem obvious, perhaps not. But their raw reality becomes evident when, as the nurse says, people realized they were experiencing their last few days on Earth.



1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. This was, apparently, the most common regret. In tech terms, think of everything that is expected of people. Many of those who leave college believe that tech is the only place worth working these days. They don't always consider whether they'll enjoy it or not. Most people in the world are now being told that if they're not on a social network, they don't exist. So they spend hours every day peering into screens. The life that is true to you isn't always easy to identify, never mind to live.

2. I wish I didn't work so hard. Self-evident, perhaps. But surely still something worth thinking about in a world in which personal insecurity is now being traded as if it were just another commodity. We're scared, so we work harder. The harder we work, the more scared we become that this is all there is and all there ever will be.

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. The nurse talks about how people developed illnesses that she believes were directly related to the "bitterness and resentment" they felt as a result of living a false life. In tech terms, how many people truly believe they are creating a new tomorrow? And how many feel they are staring into their screens in order to line someone else's pocket and ego, without ever themselves being appreciated for what they do and who they are?

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. Yes, these people never had Facebook. But are those Facebook friends really your friends? Have you let go of your real friends because you're too busy with your Facebook friends? As the nurse puts it: "It is all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships." Which would mean real relationships.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier. "When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind," says the nurse. And yet here we are in the real, techified life, where what others think of us matters more than ever. If someone says something bad about us on the Web (something that is so very, very easy and therefore likely), we are mortified--more so, because the bad words will always live in some electronic physical existence. The bad words will never go away because we can find them. Ergo, so can everyone else. Yet what this nurse tells us is that the opinions of others matter far, far less than we might think at the time.

Perhaps this seems a somber way to wish everyone a Happy New Year. But the one thing we have that those of whom the nurse writes don't is time. Here's looking forward to a very happy 2012 and, hopefully, one that is very true to each of our individual selves.

Chris Matyszczyk

Chris Matyszczyk is an award-winning creative director who advises major corporations on content creation and marketing. He brings an irreverent, sarcastic, and sometimes ironic voice to the tech world. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET.

Newscribe : get free news in real time 

Startup Lets You Save and Share Parts of Web Pages

Tweet

No need to copy and paste—Clipboard employs advanced Web technology to let users save the part of a page they want.

Audio »
 

The Web may make it easy to communicate with people thousands of miles away and put libraries full of knowledge at our fingertips, but plenty of simple things are still surprisingly hard to do online. Take saving a piece of a Web page. That specific task is trickier than it sounds. A startup called Clipboard is building a simple solution using some rather sophisticated Web technologies.

Clipboard allows users to select and store pieces of Web pages in a cloud-based account. Users can comment on items, tag them, and search them. The site allows people to keep clippings private, share them with specific people, or offer them to the public. The new site has been in stealth mode until today, but it's now opening up for a private beta test (readers of Technology Review are invited to participate and can sign up here).

The site's founder is Gary Flake, who previously founded Microsoft's Live Labs, Yahoo Research, and Overture Research. Flake says that Clipboard grew out of his own needs. He couldn't find a satisfying way to save and share information he found while searching the Web. In fact, he describes a laborious process that will sound familiar to many Internet users: After finding something interesting online, he says, he would highlight it, hit control-C, open a word processor or e-mail program, paste the content in, and save or send it. "That's the state of the art for saving things on the Web," Flake says. "For me, there was a huge void waiting to be filled."



Of course, plenty of existing services let people save and share things they find online. People often post links to social networks such as Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, or to dedicated bookmark sites such as the newly revived Delicious. Services such as Evernote allow people to build up a digital memory cache loaded with notes, photos, and saved information from websites.

But when he went through what's already out there, Flake says, he couldn't find anything that met all of his requirements. He wanted to save items from the Web in a form that preserves the way they look, so that he can benefit from his visual memory of the page. He wanted the clips to continue to work—links should function and video should play. Finally, he wanted the things he saved to be portable, stored in the cloud, and easy to put there from a browser on any computer.

Flake describes Clipboard as a Web service that sits on top of the Web pages open in the browser. To use it, a person installs a bookmarklet in the browser. However, clicking the button doesn't take the user to a new Web page—it launches Clipboard's lightweight JavaScript application. When running, the application lets a user select portions of an open Web page. It then runs an extraction algorithm that analyzes the page and figures out how to write HTML and CSS that will re-create what the user selected.

Newscribe : get free news in real time