Here’s a bummer for you. I recently came upon this sad website titled Garden in the Dumpster. The site chronicles the birth and death of a community built public garden in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The garden, which sat on 3 plots of land, was destroyed without warning by work crews who cleared the center plot for construction of a house. The demolition occurred despite ongoing negotiations between a community organization and the landowner to seek options to preserve the garden.
The Web is now over 15 years old. During a recent interview Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, reflected on things he’d have done differently in the beginning and where he sees the Web going in the future. The interview in its entirety may be found here.
Berners-Lee refused to patent his Web idea preferring instead to share his invention with the world as an open standard platform. Today he views software patents as a major threat to innovation on the Web. According to Berners-Lee, “A bright idea is OK, but getting people to adopt common standards is impeded by patents.”
Here’s another quote from the interview.
“Customers (i.e. users) need to be given control of their own data – not being tied into a certain manufacturer so that when there are problems they are always obliged to go back to them. IT professionals have a responsibility to understand the use of standards and the importance of making Web applications that work with any kind of device. They need to take the view that data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves. “
Congratulations to Wikipedia on passing its millionth article milestone last week. Wikipedia is a free content encyclopedia that began operations in January 2001. The Wikipedia press release about the event is provided below.
English Wikipedia Publishes Millionth Article
ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA, UNITED STATES, March 1, 2006
The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the 1,000,000th article in the English language edition of Wikipedia. The article is about the Jordanhill railway station in Scotland, and it was started by Wikipedia contributor Ewan Macdonald. Wikipedia is a free, multilingual, online encyclopedia with 3.3 million articles under development in more than 125 languages.
The full text of the English Wikipedia is located at en.wikipedia.org. In addition to articles, the English Wikipedia offers dozens of graphical timelines and subject-specific portals. Its media repository includes four hundred thousand images and hundreds of full-length songs, videos, and animations, many of which are available for free distribution.
Although its method of editing is new and controversial, Wikipedia has already won acclaim and awards for its detailed coverage of current events, popular culture, and scientific topics; its usability; and its international community of contributors. BBC News has called Wikipedia “One of the most reliably useful sources of information around, on or off-line.” Daniel Pink, author and WIRED Magazine columnist, has described Wikipedia as “the self-organizing, self-repairing, hyperaddictive library of the future,” and Tim Berners-Lee, father of the Web, has called it “The Font of All Knowledge.”
Wikipedia is among the world’s most popular websites, receiving tens of millions of visitors every day. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, and has spawned sister projects, including a dictionary, a library of textbooks, a compendium of quotations, a news site, and a media repository. These projects are all run using the open source MediaWiki software.
Other articles created within the same minute included an overview of the Tennessee Commissioner of Financial Institutions, a biography of baseball player Aaron Ledesma, and a look at cellular architecture.
