Well, I’ve decided that enough people think that this is a useful tool for keeping up to date on each other that I figure I’ll try it, at least for a while. Perhaps this journal will become a continuing quest to discover exactly what its usefulness is.
Although, I’m starting to see it. Not quite, but I can start to see why people find it popular, although some aspects (current music? separate clients?) still baffle me.
I’ve been seeing more and more how the Internet is containing the collective knowledge of all mankind. Perhaps what’s going on day-to-day in people’s lives was the one thing missing from that. Places like Google and the Internet Archive keep an archive of everything that anybody anywhere knows. Future generations will have an amazingly huge record of everything that ever occurred from this generation onward.
Kinda a neat thing to think about.
Yay, it’s uber-Pete! Glad to see you aboard.
Google covers all common knowledge. Unfortunately, a lot of the scientific stuff is locked away in places like JSTOR and IEEE Explorer. I think all the journals would still keep a lot of their value if copyright were limited to 3 years. People in the field would still pay for current subscriptions. Then Google would be able to eat EVERYTHING eventually, and the available science would be fairly contemporary. :)
-Adam
A lot of older documents got “put online” by simply scanning them and putting the images in a PDF… Which is much harder for things like Google to index. There’s an awful lot of research that is available online from the researcher’s sites.
While it isn’t quite there yet, the Internet is quickly becoming the archive of all things that all people know.