Ann Blair writes about information overload in the Boston Globe: “[In the 16th century] the literate classes experienced exactly the kind of overload we feel today — suddenly, there were far more books than any single person could master, and no end in sight. Continue reading
The Economist’s science and technology blog, Babbage, takes a look at the recently auctioned Apple-1 and reproduces Apple’s 1976 logo. 
Says Babbage: “It depicts Isaac Newton sitting under a tree with an apple about to fall on his head. The inscription on the logo’s border is a quote from William Wordsworth, a romantic English poet: ‘Newton… a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought… alone.’ Could it be that Mr Jobs himself is a hidden romantic?”
Today’s Boston Globe on the planned revamping of the JFK Library and Museum’s website with the results of the first four years of digitizing its collection: “The amount of material to be posted online in January is huge — 200,000 pages of text, 1,500 photos, 1,250 files of audio recordings and moving images, and 340 phone conversations totaling 17 1/2 hours — but represents just a small portion of the collection.” Phase two will likely focus on movie footage “from what’s widely considered to be the country’s first television presidency.”
In the December issue of Communications of the ACM, Francine Berman calls for a “Research Data Census, ” a reliable, cost-effective storage and preservation of research data on national scale. Berman says: “Just as the U.S. Census drives planning for infrastructure in the physical world, a Research Data Census would inform cost-effective planning for stewardship of federally funded, shared cyberinfrastructure in the Digital World.”
Berman sees the following benefits derived from the data census: Continue reading
Today in 1864, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) gave Alice Liddell a handwritten manuscript titled “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground,” with his own illustrations. It was published a
year later as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and has never been out of print.
Marginize for Web publishers launched today on Boston.com, Xconomy.com, and eight other Websites. Continue reading
Following the recent discoveries of Vivaldi manuscripts in Britain, Tom Service says: “Something’s going on. It’s as if Vivaldi deliberately left some of his original manuscripts around locations in Britain as part of a deliberate attempt to keep posterity interested in his music, creating a posthumous treasure hunt that would take more than two and a half centuries to solve.”
Today in 2004, Blizzard Entertainment released World of Warcraft on the 10th anniversary of the Warcraft franchise. Last month it announced that the online game has reached 12 million subscribers. Strategy Analytics estimates that the market for massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) exceeded $5 billion last year and forecasts it will grow to $8 billion by 2014.
Tim Berners-Lee published today in Scientific American an article titled “Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality.” Continue reading
IDC announced today that mobile shoppers will account for 28% or $127 billion of the $447 billion the National Retail Federation (NRF) predicts U.S. consumers will spend this holiday season. “More than one third of smartphone-carrying consumers (who represent 24% of all U.S. consumers) are ready to use their mobile devices in ways that transform how they shop everywhere and, in particular, how they shop in retail stores.”
The Story of Information 