Alex Reid

The Internet Archive announced it had raised enough funds to buy a PetaBox (an in-house custom designed server created to store and process up to one petabyte, or a million gigabytes).  They still need to raise enough money before the end of the year in two weeks to buy three more PetaBoxes.

An anonymous donor has promised to match 3 to 1 any other donations before the end of 2012, so your $25 donation would actually provide $100 of support. With that offer in place, the non-profit is trying to get to a $150,000 target – earning itself a $600,000 total injection.

The Internet Archive, the non-profit digital library known for its Wayback Machine service, says they have amassed to date over 10 petabytes of cultural (online) history. There are estimates that their library is growing at a rate of 1 petabyte every five or six months, so this is just the start.

If you can, for the sake of cyberanthropology for decades to come, please donate to this cause. Caching the online world is far more important to merely wikifying history.

https://archive.org/donate/

Earlier today, Internet Archive (archive.org) posted preview clips of everything that was on American network news since 2009. The new digital collection includes 350,000 news programs collected over the past 3 years from 20 TV channels; the major networks and local TV stations in San Francisco and Washington D.C.  The Archive says it will update the site with new broadcasts 24 hours after they are aired, with older shows to be added later.

“Let a thousand Jon Stewarts bloom.”

- Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle

You can find content by searching for keywords within a certain time frame. The keywords are found in the closed captioning text of each show. The web site allows you to watch the short news clip surrounding the keyword. You can also borrow the entire show or clip in person at the Internet Archive library in San Francisco or order a DVD copy.

Since 1996, the Internet Archive has been a prominent digital library; offering a variety of digital data material including movies, music and almost three million public-domain books. The non-profit organization is also known for its Wayback Machine which can show you cached versions of web sites.

Say good bye to phones and computers.

Google has embarked on a new revolutionary front first envisioned by Steve Mann, the father of wearable computing. Google’s new physical product is called Google Glass, an augmented reality head-mounted display with the additional capability to capture video and take photos. This is the actual product version of the visual search application Google Goggles.

Google has announced that they will be selling the Google Glasses to US developers for $1,500 (USD) and may be consumer-ready by next year.

Here is what your day could look like next year:

Rick Mercer says it true:

Watch this talk from TED to understand the background and mechanisms of SOPA and PIPA.