HIST 390-001 The Digital Past Fall 2013

If you want to gain strong reputation points in the Wikipedia community and therefore gain more privileges, here's how -- this is a tutorial from Wired magazine.

A terrific video that describes, visually, how Wikipedia works.

Interesting article of secrets of Google and its creation

A look at how the Google doodles are made. The article includes an interview with some of the doodlers of how they get their ideas for Googles new doodles.

Interesting article about the new business side of Twitter. Twitter is planning on becoming a publicly traded company which means stock will be sold to the general public. This article goes over the effects this will have in the future.

This article describes the benefits of search engine alternatives to the mighty Google. In doing so, it also reveals how much information Google keeps on you every time you do a search. 

after reading this article my first thought was "Awesome, new sites I can Google on!"

A quick Zotero tutorial video for both Mac and Windows users

I came across this as I was looking for history of search engines and its pretty crazy that the site Topsy has been able to save every single tweet since twitter launched! that's 300 billion tweets!!! and you can search them all as it is open to the public. I hadn't heard about Topsy but it seems like they are gaining a good reputation and going against big search engines like Yahoo and Bing.

This gives a list (and short description) for 20 popular OSS platforms. This article includes examples given in class such as, WordPress (#1 on the list) and Mozilla Firefox (#3 on the list).

A tutorial on how to put RSS code into a website and basic information and history of RSS.

Fascinating article from the Wall Street Journal on Google and how they are handling China's censorship laws.

Even though Prof. French gave a rather in detail tutorial of Zotero in class, here's a visual guide in case you get lost!

I was still a little confused on what a web crawler was exactly. I thought this site was helpful.

Yes, it is! I've already given you credit for one link this week, but that is a good explanation -- even though the page it was last updated in 2005 and the search engine it gives as an example is Alta Vista. :) Alta Vista doesn't even exist anymore; it was acquired by Yahoo awhile ago, I think. Here's the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista

Ya I saw the date, but felt the explanation was good.

This article discusses how US telephone companies (Verizon, AT&T, etc) constantly send phone records to the government without questioning their motives.

That term "metadata" (data about data!) is more interesting than you might think, and this article shows why ...

This a great website not only describing how web crawlers work, but how you can create on your own. Descriptions and pictures really help to create one if your stuck too.

That is a good tutorial -- thanks, Gordon. My own PHP skills are good enough to build this, though at the moment I don't need to. I had forgotten the synonym "scrapers," too. Useful quotation: "One typical task that Google performs is to pull all the links from a page and see which sites they are endorsing."

Interesting article explaining the pros and cons of Zotero vs. EndNote!

My buddy Brian Croxall wrote that. Good find, Claire. It's a very thorough comparison.

Companies make have huge profit margins when it comes to providing Internet.

Boy, I hate sites that have as many ads as that one does. The first site that that article links to is a bit better -- it's from the MIT Technology Review, which is an established and well-known journal / magazine. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/510176/when-will-the-rest-of-us-get-google-fiber/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130205 If you live in Austin, TX, you can buy Internet service directly from Google. Maybe the rest of us will be able to soon.

This Wikipedia page shows all the available online resources open to the public.

Interesting, Taylor. Notice that that page is part of a project called "The Resource Exchange" and/or "The Wikipedia Library." I was just talking to a frequent Wikipedia editor named Jake Orlowitz the other day who's volunteering with the Wikipedia Library; we're going to try to bring him to campus to give a talk. If we do, I'll let y'all know. Thanks for the link!

Another good Common Craft video about search engine optimization -- says that "Google and Bing are the librarians of the Internet." Interesting, and a total coincidence, that this video also uses the notion of a "recipe" to explain how to make your website more searchable -- the same analogy I used to explain an algorithm.