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Tim Berners-Lee, the man attributed to the creation of the internet, gave a speech at an MIT symposium and shared his two decades worth of internet knowledge with the crowd. He spoke about a wide variety of issues, from net neutrality, which he is supportive of, to mobile web access. Berners-Lee's words concerning web access raised a couple of eyebrows, and definitely raised the interest of this writer. "Access to the Web is now a human right" he continues, "It's possible to live without the Web. It's not possible to live without water. But if you've got water, then the difference between somebody who is connected to the Web and is part of the information society, and someone who (is not) is growing bigger and bigger."

The idea of a "digital divide" -- describing those who can or cannot get on the Internet -- has been around since the 1990s. Although, it used to refer mostly to access, now it often also means the quality and speed of Internet access -- and the skills to make use of the technology.

According to a report released by Freedom House titled Freedom on the Net 2011, Iran is the worst country when it comes to online freedom.  The top three countries, in order, are Estonia, The United States and Germany. The study judged countries based on three specific criteria: Obstacles to internet access, limits on content and violations of user rights.  They assigned each country a numerical score based on those criteria.  Countries scoring from 0-30 are designated "free," countries scoring from 31-60 are designated "party free" and those with score of 61-100 are labelled "not free."

The double-digit growth of social networks in the U.S. are on track to reach their peak, according to a new report from eMarketer. eMarkter estimates nearly 150 million Internet users will be active on social networks at least monthly this year, bringing the reach of such sites to 63.7 percent of the online population. By 2013, 164.2 million Americans will use social networks, or 67% of internet users.

As I read both Carr and Shirky over the past couple weeks-who both seek parallels between the rise of the internet and digital social media and the invention of the printing press in the 16th century-I couldn't help thinking about medieval manuscripts. Since the early 1990s, both medievalists and electronic media theorists have pointed to the hypertexted quality of medieval illuminated manuscripts in making complementary claims: medievalists to continuing cultural relevancy and electronic media theorists in continuity to literary tradition. The medieval books we admire so much today are distinguished by the remarkable visual images, in the body of a text and in the margins, that scholars have frequently compared to hypertexted images on internet "pages."

Google recently announced that it will help fund groundbreaking research by computer scientists and economists at Tel Aviv University.  The Blavatnik School of Computer Science is attempting to help computers make better decisions using a term they dubbed "regret." Head of the program Professor Yishay Mansour began this project earlier this year at the International Conference on Learning Theory in Haifa, Israel.  He and the other researchers are working on algorithms that would allow computers to learn from their past failures in an effort to make better predictions.  This is referred to as "minimizing virtual regret" by Mansour. "If the servers and routing systems of the Internet could see and evaluate all the relevant variables in advance, they could more efficiently prioritize server resource requests, load documents and route visitors to an Internet site, for instance," says Mansour.

An interesting study by Netpop Research entitled Social Face-Off : A Comparison of U.S. and China Social Media Use finds that people in China are more involved in every type of social media activity of which they studied.  First, some general facts about the two internet communities: of the broadband users age 13 and above, the Chinese have a much younger, more educated internet population than the U.S.  They also spend more time online per weekday.

As Iran's nuclear plant attack and Chinese-based hackers attacking Morgan Stanley demonstrate how the Internet can wreak havoc on business and governments, a new paper by a fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy hypothesizes what an all-out cyberwar between the U.S. and China might look like.

The world in which we live would hardly be recognised by someone who lived and died half a century ago and who may have caught a glimpse of the television generation. The children born in the 90′s have only known a world where the Internet was a natural part of  their day to day lives. We now live in a society that verges on a digital tipping point that wraps and integrates our lives with the Web and it is no longer considered a luxury but a necessity in our modern lifestyle. So what is driving us to this digital dawn that is transporting us from the industrial past of the last 200 years and the TV industrial complex that emerged 50 years ago and embracing us in an information age that challenges our paradigms?

Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going-so far as I can tell-but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be foraging in the Web's info-thickets'reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they're sometimes likened, hyperlinks don't merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

In the growing global battle against substandard and counterfeit medicines, the Promoting the Quality of Medicines (PQM) program has launched a new, public database of medicines collected and analyzed in collaboration with stakeholders from countries in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. Free of charge and available to anyone with access to the internet, the Medicines Quality Database (MQDB) includes information on the quality of medicines collected from a variety of sources. To date, more than 8700 records of tested samples collected from Ghana, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, Peru, Guyana and Colombia have been entered into the database.

Do you have an embarrassing moment in your past? Did it turn out to be newsworthy? There is a good chance it made it to the Internet and now is forever searchable by Google and the other search engines. Google is being hit with a "Right To Forget" lawsuit in Spain as the country's Data Protection Agency has ordered the Web giant to take down search links on 90 people. According to The Associated Press, Google is fighting five of those lawsuits in Spain's National Court and in January refused Spain's request on all 90 of the claims.