Celebrating first “summer of code,” Web launchings, 15 and 20 years ago

A few months more than 20 years ago, the pleasure boating monthly Soundings published an article headlined “Computers link boaters oceans apart,” probably the first time I managed to get something about the Internet into good-old-fashioned print.  The piece actually had more to do with commercial computer networks like CompuServe, Prodigy and BIX than the free-for-all Internet, but it did mention the ARPANET, BITNET and UUCP, all components of the pre-Web ‘net.

That was February of 1990, the year that computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee started defining the HyperText Markup Language and HyperText Transfer Protocol that would link Internet resources together like never before. I guess that means this is the 20th anniversary of the Web’s first “summer of code,” now an annual ritual for programmers.

Berners-Lee had proposed his “World Wide Web” idea in 1989 and spent a year at it, delivering the first browser and server by Christmas, and introducing it to an audience of physics researchers and technologists over the next year or two. The thing really took off in 1993 and 1994, after the University of Illinois’ NCSA released Mosaic, a free browser that used graphics and worked on  PCs and Macintoshes, as well as the Unix machines the research community used in the Web’s inaugural years.

That was enough to send me back to grad school — for a faster Internet connection — at the University of North Carolina, home of some of the first hypertext research and some of the first Web servers in the U.S., including sunsite.unc.edu, which I had been reaching from a Connecticut boatyard over a modem, a service called BIX and a text-only browser link to “laUNChpad.unc.edu.”

In Chapel Hill, Sunsite’s boss, Paul Jones, told me to give him my resume in HTML, so I figured out just enough of the language, using (I think) an early ncsa.uiuc.edu tutorial. But before Sunsite came up with an opening, the Raleigh News & Observer launched NandO.net, and I landed a part-time job preparing news stories for the Web at what was one of the Internet’s first 24/7 news sites.

In the beginning, we were publishing Web versions of stories from all or most of the wire services the N&O subscribed to for its print editions — treating the Web site as just another edition of the newspaper, but one that could handle dozens of new or updated stories every hour, drawing on the Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times wire service, Bloomberg News and more. (There must have been some very interesting executive discussions of just what publication rights were covered by those wire contracts!)

The real surprise for me came as the school year was wrapping up — a call from Soundings‘ editor, Marleah Ross, announcing that my old employer, the monthly tabloid subtitled “The nation’s boating newspaper,” was launching a Web site of its own, and that I was invited to write the cover story for the August 1995 issue, then follow up with a regular column called “Data Waves.” The goal was to tell boaters why on earth they should care about the World Wide Web.

Fifteen years later, Soundingspub.com is still online, and I’ve just spent some nostalgic weeks documenting its online beginnings, and paying tribute to its late publisher, Jack Turner. See the current issue of the aptly titled Journal of Magazine and New Media Research. My essay “Getting Under Way in New Media” is downloadable as a PDF file here, but I also recommend the other articles in the journal, including editor Carol Schwalbe’s essay on “Finishability: An Antidote to Information Overload.” (Note, as of this writing the edition’s directory is at a “current issue” address, but it will be moved to an archival page in the fall, when a new edition comes out.)

Internet advertisers & consumer groups eye Boucher bill

Our local 9th district congressman, Rep. Rick Boucher, appears on the techie blogs and news sites today with his draft of privacy legislation for online ad networks.

I suspect this is somehow related to the data-sharing that lets Facebook keep sending me all those “date hot grannies in [your county's name here]” ads.

Organizations like the Center for Digital Democracy and Consumer Watchdog are using terms like “industry-friendly” to describe the draft legislation.

Boucher’s press release says the discussion draft “confers privacy rights on Internet users.” See that address for an executive summary and the 27-page bill as a PDF.

More:

• MediaPost Publications Consumer Groups Pan Boucher Privacy Bill 05/05/2010.
• NYTimes: Privacy Bill Finally in Draft, Both Sides Weigh In
• WSJ: Proposed privacy regulation wins few fans
• WSJ interview (Feb. 2010): Boucher calls for Internet ad regulation

The more digital ink Boucher gets over this, the more my students (and maybe some geeks from farther away) will be asking themselves, “What’s a mild-mannered politician from the hills of western Virginia doing poking around the Internet?”

For those uninformed folks, here are a few bytes of history: Boucher helped invent the commercial Internet; WPost profile; techpresident discussion.

Tell Clyde I’m on the road to Floyd with a Droid

It was a tough decision, but having an excuse to write that headline made it all worthwhile.

My first “smartphone” was a Handspring Treo 180, almost 10 years ago. When I moved to Knoxville a few years later, the lack of T-Mobile service disabled most of the smartness, so I regressed to a Palm TX paired to a Cingular Razr Bluetooth phone, a semi-smart setup.

Last weekend, I wrestled the “iPhone vs. Droid” decision to a conclusion. With a Droid, I get Floyd: Verizon covers the neighboring county, AT&T doesn’t, and Floyd has some of my favorite folks and music stops on the crooked road. (I made the decision despite this horrible Droid website.)

Now I just have to convince my friend Clyde that I ordered the new smartphone (smart new phone?) before reading his blog saying that news folks should get smartphone-savvy right away. “Honest, Clyde, I got the Droid because of Floyd” sounds like one of those 1940s novelty songs.

Maybe I’ll get an iPad next month.

Anyhow, I’ll point AEJMC Newspaper readers to Clyde Bentley at the University of Missouri for a timeline for “Mobile Newspaper Success”…  The road to 2013: A timeline for newspapers.

Responding to a Gartner Research study that forecast  mobile devices would  replace PCs in Web access by 2013, Bentley built a timeline from the endpoint to the present.

If you’re a “key editor” at a newspaper, you should get a smartphone this month, or you’re already playing catch-up.

By August-September, Clyde says, newspapers should be training their news and ad staff on “mobile potential,” if they want to stay on track with the Gartner deadline. Within a year, mobile reporters should be producing niche-market features for mobile customers. Clyde’s examples: “Smoke-break wraps, during-game scores, pre-commute weather.”

He doesn’t mention one  crossover: Twitter (or Facebook status updates), whether Twitter’s  140-character limit is really enough for a “nugget of news” or not. Newspapers, broadcasters and online-only newsies are already tweeting away to anyone with a smartphone Twitter app, including Clyde’s own blog. So obvious it went without saying, I guess.

(I’m @bobstep on Twitter.)

(Note: If anyone from Verizon offers me a “referrer” bonus check for the slogan “Get Floyd with a Droid,” I’ll take it.)

Radford University 100th birthday

Radford celebrated a culture of public service Wednesday with an innovative entrepreneurial shoe guy, cake and balloons… and I used it an an excuse to test my Kodak zi8 camera and WordPress.com’s photo gallery feature. (Is it obvious that those “thumbnail” images are meant to be clicked on to get larger versions? And from there, is it a safe guess that clicking on the headline takes you back to the story? I wish they built in a “photo caption” device that would stay with the picture. Or maybe I just haven’t figured out the system yet.)

I neglected to get a picture of the cake… or eat any of it… Maybe the next time we have a centennial I’ll get in that line.

From a journalism and new-approaches-to-media angle, I found it interesting when Blake Mycoskie talked about TOMS Shoes getting its first success from a feature story in the LA Times. Then he used CraigsList to get some interns. (He didn’t mention whether he at least paid for a subscription to the LA Times to say thanks.) Then Vogue came calling. And social networking through Facebook helped spread the message.

Eventually, AT&T heard about his running the business by phone; AT&T was already his service and told his story in AT&T ads — which turned-on even more people to his buy-a-pair/give-a-pair approach to combining a for-profit business with service to poor people around the world.

Tangling where the wires meet the Web

AP, Yahoo Near Deal on Content Use – WSJ.com.

The Wall Street Journal says the Associated Press wants tighter restrictions on Yahoo’s use of wire stories, and that negotiations may wrap up “in the next few weeks.”

Official AP quote: “The AP is one of Yahoo’s most important content partners. Yahoo values our long-standing relationship with AP and expects it will continue for years to come.”

Google’s  is also facing the renewal date of its AP contract and has stopped putting new AP content on Google News “in case a deal isn’t reached,” the Journal said.

The story also has a handy chart of  comScore figures on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft  traffic going to major newspaper Web sites — the Washington Post, L.A. Times, USA Today, New York Times and the WSJ itself. (There’s no text explaining the chart, but it looks to me like biz.yahoo.com sends the WSJ a lot of visitors.)

For students, here’s some background on the Associated Press:

http://www.ap.org/pages/about/about.html

Notice the “.org” — yes, AP is an organization, and non-profit. It calls itself “the backbone of the world’s information system,” which might be a title Google or Yahoo would like to arm-wrestle over.

The AP is a cooperative, owned by its base membership: 1,500 U.S. daily newspapers, and distributing contributions from those papers as well as its own staff of correspondents and photographers.

News Corp. and Microsoft Corp.

The WSJ article also mentions that “according to people familiar with the matter,” the newpaper’s parent company, News Corp., “has held discussions with Microsoft Corp. about a plan to remove the publisher’s newspaper content from Google’s search engine while continuing to feature it on Microsoft’s online properties.”

Here’s an earlier story from the not-NewsCorp-owned Guardian, with a few more colorful quotes (“parasite”) on News Corp.’s attitude toward Google.