Something very cool happening in my corner of the fedi: The WELL opened an official, members-only Mastodon server!
Creating a public-facing server is a major change for The WELL which is principally a private conferencing system. And it did not happen over night. The new server builds on more than a year of work by one volunteer running an unofficial server for members.
>> "Despite skepticism within the tech industry that a social-networking site geared toward African Americans could be successful, about 1 million users joined BlackPlanet within a year of its launch. By 2008, it had about 15 million members."
Listening to venture capitalists from a16z spinning a truly bizarro revisionist history of the internet in which "no one cared...except for computer scientists" until we got broadband??? Bros, you worked at NETSCAPE and AOL and EBAY!! 😂😵💫
Call for papers about "AI and Resilience" for a special issue of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. This is an interdisciplinary call for a range of perspectives. Critical, humanistic, cultural, historical perspectives are all welcome => https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/62761/ai-and-resilience
In July 1999, someone stole a trailer jammed with Sonic Youth gear out of a Ramada Inn parking lot. Lee Ranaldo immediately sent an email that was reposted to alt.music.sonic-youth:
> Please no pranks, all, this is really serious--
> all the gear we've used to write our last few LPs
> worth of stuff, instruments used for songs old
> and new which if truly lost will mean those songs
> will be lost forever.
The persistence of news (and politics) on Threads is a nice example of the stubborn power of users within these platforms. The platform owners can discourage political talk but they still need people to post. So, the news and politics remain.
As with so many aspects of a control society, infrastructural power is real power but it's not limitless.
The East Asia Center and Miller Center at U of Virginia are hiring a Global China Post-doctoral Research Associate.
This position is open to applicants from a range of backgrounds including global studies, history, media studies, politics, science and technology studies, and sociology. Language proficiency in Chinese is preferred.
🎺 Nominations are now open for the 2024 Mahoney Prize!
📃 Send your outstanding articles in the #history of computing and information technology.
💰📅 The prize consists of $500 and a certificate. Articles published in 2021, 2022, and 2023 are eligible. Self-nominations are encouraged and do not require a cover letter.
📧 Send your submission to the committee by April 15, 2024.
The original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4.0 file from 1990. Recovering the text, diagrams, and formatting was not impossible but it was hard. A great example of the use of #emulation for historical research and digital preservation.
This comment by @Gargron reflects a tension I see often see in my research: Most people have no memory of the pre-platform era!
🗣️ "What we’re doing is not new in the sense that it's returning to the roots of the internet [...] but also most people haven't experienced that early version of the internet. So it's new to them."
Has anyone implemented local trends on #mastodon? Is this a #hometown feature? I'd love to see local-only trends or at least some mechanism for positively weighting the contributions of local #AoIR users.
Oh no, the Anatomy of AI domain (anatomyof dot ai) got snagged and squatted (don't click). I've used this on syllabi in the past and I'm sure some of you have as well.
Wayback has a snapshot from earlier this month so hopefully they will find a new home. Unfortunately, I doubt they'll recover the original domain.