Motherboard: How Shock Sites Shaped the Internet. “To talk about shock sites is to talk about the internet, understanding how the latter couldn’t exist in its modern form without the former. And they’re far from a relic of the past. Shock site creators, meme historians, and psychologists say they’ve reshaped pop culture, defined the modern era of the internet, and informed how we use it today.”
Tubefilter: In 2022, 65% of all internet traffic came from video sites . “Each year, intelligence firm Sandvine identifies the websites and applications that gobble up the most bandwidth. In 2022, Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Report reinforced an ongoing trend: Data usage from video sites increased by 24% year-over-year, and video now accounts for 65% of all internet traffic.”
UK Web Archive Blog: UK Web Archive Technical Update – Winter 2022. “As in previous years, the 2022 Domain Crawl continued to run right up until the end of the year. Overall, things ran smoothly, with only brief outages for upgrading the virtual server over time as the size of the frontier grew.”
The Atlantic: The Battle for the Soul of the Web. “It feels like things have gone wrong on the internet. Decades removed from the gonzo highs of blinging GIFs and wacky blogs, the web is now a place where many people feel exploited, manipulated, and tracked; where freedom of speech is being tugged around in a strange culture war; and where the rich get richer.”
Daily Beast: Here’s What the Metaverse Apocalypse Will Look Like. “Whether we like it or not, metaverse fever is rising. From flaming Travis Scott towering over players in Fortnite, to suit-clad avatars arguing spreadsheets on Teams, to Facebook swapping its face for Meta—it seems there’s been an onslaught of new virtual playgrounds brought to life every day. But for every new virtual world being born, there’s a digital graveyard of realms that have already died.”
Internet Archive Blog: Imagining a Better Online World: Exploring the Decentralized Web. “The World Wide Web started with so much promise: to connect people across any distance, to allow anyone to become a publisher, and to democratize access to knowledge. However, today the Web seems to be failing us. It’s not private, secure, or unifying. The internet has, in large part, ended up centralizing access and power in the hands of a few dominant platforms. What if we could build something better—what some are calling Web 3.0 or the decentralized web?”
MakeUseOf: How to Access Websites That Won’t Load: 5 Methods to Try. “Have you ever clicked on a link or bookmark and instead seen an error page? It can be extremely frustrating when a site won’t load, so is there a trick you can use to access a busy website with heavy traffic? Do you know how to open a crashed website? What if it contains blocked content? Fortunately, there are a few ways to access web pages that won’t otherwise load.”
Make Tech Easier: The Differences Between Deep Web and Dark Web: What You Need to Know. “If Aquaman has taught us anything, it’s that there is more going on under the surface than we realize. To continue this nautical theme, there are many similarities between the Internet and the oceans. They both have surface, deep, and dark web layers. These layers are unexplored for the most part. We will take a look at the deep web and dark web in this guide and show you the differences between the deep web and dark web.”
CNN: The worldwide web as we know it may be ending. “Over the last year, the worldwide web has started to look less worldwide. Europe is floating regulation that could impose temporary bans on US tech companies that violate its laws. The United States was on the verge of banning TikTok and WeChat, though the new Biden administration is rethinking that move. India, which did ban those two apps as well of dozens of others, is now at loggerheads with Twitter.”
Mashable: What Apple, Google, and Amazon’s websites looked like in 1999. “The year was 1999: Cher’s ‘Believe’ was blasting on pop radio stations, Bill Clinton was impeached, Jar Jar Binks hit the Big Screen, and the beep, beep, static of dial-up internet echoed in family rooms across the globe. The World Wide Web was still young then — gawky, awkward, and painfully slow. The dotcom bubble was still growing, on the cusp of bursting. The public had been using the internet for under a decade and those making online content (before we even called it content en masse) were often just throwing stuff at the wall.”
MIT Technology Review: This know-it-all AI learns by reading the entire web nonstop. “To collect its facts, Diffbot’s AI reads the web as a human would—but much faster. Using a super-charged version of the Chrome browser, the AI views the raw pixels of a web page and uses image-recognition algorithms to categorize the page as one of 20 different types, including video, image, article, event, and discussion thread. It then identifies key elements on the page, such as headline, author, product description, or price, and uses NLP to extract facts from any text.” How fortunate that every page on the Internet is 100% true.
Search Engine Journal: 21 Web Directories That Still Have Value. “In the early days of SEO, web directories were the thing. Back then, the Google algorithm was a lot easier to game. If your site was listed on a ton of online directories, it must be pretty dang special – or at least, that’s how the algorithm saw it. The number of directory links you had positively influenced how well your site ranked in the search engines. Online marketers caught on, and schemed to litter the web with directory listings of their website. It was a simpler time.” But thanks to pop-ups, just as annoying.
New York Times: Goodbye to the Wild Wild Web. “Within a 48-hour period this week, many of the world’s internet giants took steps that would have been unthinkable for them even months earlier. Reddit, which spent most of its life as a lawless free-for-all, banned thousands of forums for hate speech, including the largest pro-Trump forum on the internet. Twitch — an Amazon-owned video-gaming platform not known for its political courage — suspended President Trump’s official account for ‘hateful conduct,’ while YouTube purged a handful of notorious racists and punished a popular creator with a history of problematic videos. Facebook, under pressure from a growing advertiser boycott, took down a network of violent anti-government insurrectionists who had set up shop on its platform.”
Mashable: The best apps for remembering that website you want to revisit. “Maybe you’re trying to remember that really funny video you saw online but can’t remember what the heck it was called. You can’t find it online. Your browser history doesn’t go that far back, and it’s not pulling anything up. Or maybe you’re just a bit of a digital hoarder, like me. Either way, not being able to find what you’re looking for is, well, annoying. I’m here to solve this problem. Here are a few of my favorite apps that will help you create your very own web history archive so you never forget about another website you once visited again.”
Digital Inspiration: The Best Online Tools To Know Everything About a Website. “How do I contact the owner of a website? Where is a particular website hosted? What other websites are hosted on that same server? Is the site using WordPress or Gatsby? Which ad networks are they using to monetize a site? Is my site accessible from China? Here are some of the most useful online tools that will help you know every single detail of any website.” Good list, decent annotation.
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