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The New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative has published a report called Bandwidth Caps for Residential High Speed Internet in the US and Japan I remember us talking in class one day about the bandwidth limitations we have here in the United States. I found this site which clearly supports this fact. The table that is posted on this site give a clear visual example of how much slower our download speeds are here in the US, and also that we pay an absurd amount of money compared to Japan to surf the internet. Not only is the United States ranked 27th in average internet download speeds, but we are paying a lot of money for these slow download speeds. For example, you could pay $60 a month for internet whose download speed would max at 10mbps, and an upload speed of 512kbps when you could pay $60 a month over in Japan for a download and upload speed of 100mbps! So essentially we are paying the same amount of money for internet that is ten times slower than what we could get it for over in Japan.

Since we are using newer technologies on the Internet, such as Twitter and Diigo, I thought this article was appropriate. As in the title, this article is about, 50 things that are being killed by the Internet. The article points out a lot of things that many people wouldn't think would be affected by the internet. The article says that Twitter has become a clearing-house for jokes about dead famous people. Tasteless, but an antidote to the "fans in mourning" mawkishness that otherwise predominates. It also points out before mobile phones, people had to actually be on time for their appointments. In this age, people just text the person they are about to meet, so they know they'll be running late. It also states that the lunch break is often lost, and instead people just sit at their desk and eat, while checking emails and browsing for vacations.

This article is made up of pictures that have mind boggling facts about the Internet. Since we use the Internet almost every day of our lives, and print off numerous articles for classes, I figured it would be appropriate. Such facts include, if you printed the Internet in its entirety, it would take 57,000 years to read, at 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, non stop. I know, it's crazy to imagine how much information has developed over its relatively short life span. It goes to show, if you really want to know something, there's probably a website with the answer you are looking for.

Time magazine is a great display of how multimedia and advertising has taken over writing. Just on the main page alone you'll find videos and podcasts, which are completely different from Time Magazine's old periodicals. In addition articles are rated and views can be counted giving readers instantaneous information about the popularity of an article, which wouldn't be feasible with a printed magazine. In addition, there are also polls, apps, facebook pages, and RSS feeds displaying the degree in which technology has become a part of Time's product. Time is a perfect example of how new technology can be implemented to improve a user base.\n\nI think this site relates to our course work because it is such a fine example of how multimedia can be used in almost any situation. Formerly, Time focused completely on its magazine and viewed any form of internet news sites as competition. This is because they offered Time's product for free. But, by adopting multimedia and the internet Time has been able to stay mainstream and maintain respect instead of slowly wasting away like many other news papers and magazines are in this new internet age.

This is an old video from the 1990's about the Internet. With the Internet just being established at the time, I found it very funny how Tom Brokaw made this new phenomena sound like it would never come true. The things it talks about are outdated for our times, but the ideas claimed to be in the future actually came true. At the time it seemed like a bold claim to say that every store would be at the click of a button on the Internet, but it definitely wasn't. It makes me wonder how our new inventions will potentially evolve in the future.

Apparently, if you printed all the pages in the web, it would take 45 million ink cartridges totaling half a million liters of ink sprayed over 700 square miles of paper made from 40,000 trees, twice as many that are in central park. It would also take: 3805 years on a single ink jet printer. So if the ancient Babylonians started printing in 1800 BCE they would be done right about now. If everyone in the United States printed a portion of it out it would take 6 minutes and 36 seconds. If the litters of in where fuel it would fuel a 747 jet for 18000 miles! To add to this amazement it would weight 1.2 billion pounds and span 10000 feet tall! Now want to read it? it would only take 57000 years if you were to do it 24 hours a day for 7 days a week non stop.

It seems like everything is turning to the Internet. Disney unleashed a new digital service saying it will "transform how children read its storybooks." For $79.95 per month, families can access their favorite Disney books. The website is geared towards children ages 3-12 years old. Disney reports that the website is arranged by reading level. Disney realized children are reading less and less, and this is their attempt to reverse that trend. I think this is a great idea for families. I think it could easily reverse the trend; like Disney thinks it will. But, I remember growing up listening to my parents reading me Disney storybooks before I went to bed. Would it be the same if they were reading you the same story from a laptop? That is the main concern I have. Reading Disney storybooks to young children is a tradition, in my opinion. It is a very tough decision for me to make; whether I like the idea or not. -Alan

"This does awesome ****" a quote professor Barlow. Point Grey has just setup an incredible demo of its latest technology. It is a new webcam using the new USB 3.0 technology. It shoots and yields an uncompressed video in FULL 1080p at 60fps! I am not going to lie, this is awesome! Just picture watching on a high definition television : a long distance pen pal, your husband or wife that is constantly traveling, or your mother and father from college with HD technology and no latency. "It's pretty stunning" says gizmodo.com. The camera uses technology from the newest Sony camera that has recently been able to shoot not only very high resolution pictures, but also HD videos. Now this is just a prototype but it has set a market release date of very late 2009 or early 2010. Now since it is using USB 3.0 technology it will be able to display and stream the high definition of video (depending on if the user has a decent internet connection). The camera prototype currently lacks an autofocus but has a manual focus to let it capture nice clear images. The only downfall is the lack of users that do not use the rare PCI-Express-to-USB-3.0 card. I personally cannot wait for this to come out. Depending on the price, I will keep this in mind. This could be a neat thing to play around with, or easy to troubleshoot computer problems without the need to leave my favorite chair. \n

My parents use to tell me all the time how technology use to be back in their days. I always thought how hard it would have been to survive in their days without the internet, a computer, cellphone, a color tv, and numerous other things. This article lays out some ideas that the author thinks we will be telling our grankids in the future. When we are explaining how life use to be in our days, we might say how we use to only need 140 characters on a text message or twitter post. We could explain how our tv's use to be a lot bigger, and movies were only on at certain times. The author also thinks that English won't be the dominate language, but Chinese.

This article discusses how Twitter has become an American necessity as with Myspace and Facebook. Businesses are now using Twitter to get their advertisements and promotions for their products. Anyone who follows their page will get these updates. I chose these articles because it relates to our Twitter usage all throughout the semester. It's amazing how much twitter has grown, 32 million users. It's projected to grow to 50 million by the end of the year, growing by 50%-100% each month. I think soon Twitter will soon pass pop-ups for a mainstream advertising on internet webpages. Just follow someone and they have all the power in the world to give you coupons, promotions, and flyers.

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. The article states that ISP's will now have to monitor their customers because they will now be liable if they download copyrighted material. If they are found to do so, they will be cut off from the internet. One person from a family could ruin it for everyone. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability. I can't imagine this happening in the United States. I don't think it is possible to stop all of the copyright infringement. Lets hope this agreement doesn't happen any time soon.

I don't know what this article is about because I didn't read it. Just kidding I did. It is about how society has lost interest in reading books and novels and became interested in blogs and tweets. Because the internet has brought us those things we seem to have trouble focusing on a novel.

I know I'm a little late, but Firefox's birthday didn't occur on a diigo class day. But anyways, this is a little article that LifeHacker did about Firefox and its history. It starts at Netscape, moves to Mozilla, goes to Firefox (and all of its versions), and ends with today! It also has a nifty and well done video promoting Firefox. Anyways, I think Firefox's birthday is worth celebrating. Its such a great browser and it really promotes the spirit of the internet; freedom, sharing, connecting for a greater good. Its addons are a perfect example. There is a great creative community that displays a wide variety of needs and wants. It creates a customizable browsing experience for everyone, which is one of the best parts of Firefox and why its truly worth celebrating.