Serendipity35

A post on https://thehistoryoftheweb.com posits that 1995 Was the Most Important Year for the Web. That's a debatable claim, but they have a point. It was a fascinating and turbulent year in general, as well as for the fairly new Web.

Look at some numbers. At the close of 1994, there were around 2,500 web servers. T the end of 1995, there were almost 75,000 and 700 new servers were being added to the web every day.

The web got a mention in The New York Times because it was new news. But the OJ trial was a bigger story. The White House got a website, but Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was also happening there. The Oklahoma City bombing was the major story of domestic terrorism. Windows 1995 was launched. The Palm Pilot was released.

The US Department of Justice was building a case for the 1998 lawsuit against Microsoft for what they called "monopolistic corporate maneuvering" because the company's Internet Explorer (trying to overtake Netscape Navigator) was free and bundled into Windows and didn't leave much incentive for competition.

If you're too young to remember Netscape know that by early 1996 that company had made a deal with America’s largest single online services provider, AOL Netscape pulled a Microsoft move and bundled a version of their browser directly into AOL’s platform and also did that with another big player at the time, CompuServe. In six months, Netscape had 10 million new users.

It was the start of the first of two "browser wars," but Internet Explorer ruled for almost a decade. Opera was released in April 1995, making it one of the oldest desktop web browsers to exist, but it never grabbed a large portion of potential users. Firefox 1.0 wouldn't appear until 2004, and Chrome came in 2008. Apple's Safari was released in 2003 but was limited to Apple devices, so it wasn't as big a threat. 

 

It's not the metaverse. The fediverse is a network of interconnected social media servers from all over the world. Each server on the fediverse can be thought of as an independent platform with its users, content, and rules. Servers share information to enable people to connect and discover new things across the fediverse.

I was using Threads and changing my settings so that my posts there would not crosspost to the other Meta products Instagram and Facebook. I saw this note:

Threads has joined the fediverse, an open, global network of social media servers. If you decide to turn on sharing to the fediverse, people from different platforms (like Mastodon or Flipboard) can follow your Threads profile and see and engage with your posts even if they don’t have a Threads profile. Sharing to the fediverse is optional and only available to people 18 and over with public profiles. Threads is integrating with the fediverse in a phased approach that will add new features over time. It’s important to understand how sharing to the fediverse affects your privacy.

Meta doesn’t own the fediverse (or the metaverse, despite its name) and Threads is just one of many servers that has joined it.

The fediverse, short for "federated universe," is new enough to most users that there are still questions about whether or not it is good and safe. The fediverse can be a great option for those seeking more control over their social media experience, valuing privacy, and wanting to support decentralized technology. Safety depends on the specific instance and its policies. Users should carefully choose instances with good moderation practices and align with their values.

I'll admit I was unaware of what the fediverse means even though it was created in the early 2000s. The idea was that it could create greater connectivity and community, no matter which app they use. Other platforms that have joined the fediverse include Flipboard, Mastodon, PeerTube and others.

Meta on its privacy page about the fediverse says that one way to think about the fediverse is to compare it to email. You can send an email from a Gmail account to a Yahoo account because those services can communicate. Similarly, if you can post from Threads to the fediverse, a person who uses a Mastodon server can follow you and see and interact with your content directly from their server.
Unlike email, your fediverse conversations and profile are public and can be shared across servers.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence focused on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language. The "natural" part is that the goal is that this AI language use is meaningful and contextually relevant. This might be used for tasks such as language translation, sentiment analysis, and speech recognition.

Search engines leverage NLP to improve various aspects of search. Understanding what a user means when searching for a search string and understanding what the different pages on the web are about and what questions they answer are all vital aspects of a successful search engine.

According to AWS, companies commonly use NLP for these automated tasks:
•    Process, analyze, and archive large documents
•    Analyze customer feedback or call center recordings
•    Run chatbots for automated customer service
•    Answer who-what-when-where questions
•    Classify and extract text

NLP crosses over into other fields. Here are three.

Computational linguistics is the science of understanding and constructing human language models with computers and software tools. Researchers use computational linguistics methods, such as syntactic and semantic analysis, to create frameworks that help machines understand conversational human language. Tools like language translators, text-to-speech synthesizers, and speech recognition software are based on computational linguistics. 

Machine learning is a technology that trains a computer with sample data to improve its efficiency. Human language has several features like sarcasm, metaphors, variations in sentence structure, plus grammar and usage exceptions that take humans years to learn. Programmers use machine learning methods to teach NLP applications to recognize and accurately understand these features from the start.

Deep learning is a specific field of machine learning which teaches computers to learn and think like humans. It involves a neural network that consists of data processing nodes structured to resemble the human brain. With deep learning, computers recognize, classify, and co-relate complex patterns in the input data.

Overview of NLP

The Wayback Machine (part of https://web.archive.org) has been making backups of the World Wide Web since 1996. Mark Graham, its director, describes it as "a time machine for the web." It does that by scanning hundreds of millions of webpages every day and storing them on their servers. To date, there are nearly 900 billion web pages backed up. Computer scientist Brewster Kahle says "The average life of a webpage is a hundred days before it's changed or deleted."

The first time I heard the name "Wayback Machine" I immediately thought of the fictional time-traveling device used by Mister Peabody (a dog) and Sherman (a boy) in the animated cartoon The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends. In one of the show's segments, "Peabody's Improbable History", the characters used the machine to witness, participate in, and often alter famous historical events.

It has been many years since I watched these cartoons, but I recall them as funny and educational. I might be wrong about the latter observation.

I visited the website today and searched this blog's URL https://www.serendipity35.net and found that our site has been saved 153 times between February 8, 2009, and May 3, 2024. However, this blog started in February 2006, but that was when it was a little project in blogging I started with Tim Kellers when we were working at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. At that time it was hosted on NJIT's servers, so our URL was http://dl1.njit.edu/serendipity, for which there is no record. Perhaps, the university did not allows the Wayback Machine to crawl our servers.

According to Wikipedi's entry, The Wayback Machine's software has been developed to "crawl" the Web and download all publicly accessible information and data files on webpages, the Gopher hierarchy, the Netnews (Usenet) bulletin board system, and downloadable software. The information collected by these "crawlers" does not include all the information available on the Internet, since much of the data is restricted by the publisher or stored in databases that are not accessible. To overcome inconsistencies in partially cached websites, Archive-It.org was developed in 2005 by the Internet Archive as a means of allowing institutions and content creators to voluntarily harvest and preserve collections of digital content, and create digital archives.

Crawls are contributed from various sources, some imported from third parties and others generated internally by the Archive. For example, crawls are contributed by the Sloan Foundation and Alexa, crawls run by Internet Archive on behalf of NARA and the Internet Memory Foundation, that mirror Common Crawl. 

Searching on another website of mine - Poets Online - I find pages from 2003 when it was hosted on the free hosting platform Geocities. There are broken lonks and missing images but they give a taste of what the site was back then in the days before customizable CSS and templated websites. They have archived a page from March of this year and most of the links and some images come through.

The online Wayback Machine is not the one that sparked by time-traveling imagination as a child. Yes, I wanted to accompany Sherman and Mr. Peabody, but I will have to be content to the time travel of looking at things from my past on and offline.

Screen shot from DVD of Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons., Fair use, Link