Opinion on the search engine topics

So, someone has to be the first one to react. I took a look at the Youtube movies and I just want to say that it's clear that the one with the Google guy is the most interesting. After that I logged in to Google to look at the 3rd link, the one to create an own Google-based search engine. I think it's a pretty cool feature, but I don't really need it (now). Maybe we can discuss about the purposes of this later.
About html: in highschool I learnt to build a website in html code, so I am familiar with the use of it, not with the technical mechanisms behind it. So that could be an interesting topic too.

search engines

Ok, please before diving into the lectures of Berkeley University
read first this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine

Then watch this (all the lectures please, btw the guy you see on the first video is one of the two who build Google):
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=1777A89066B1D71D


And as a little bonus, explore this link (you may need Google account, if you don't, then search for "personal search engine Google"):
http://www.google.com/coop/manage/cse/create/1


I will provide other stuff

Readings and some tasks for the 3rd class

I am sending links to the video we used in the previous lesson
Warriors of the net 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruw4jHJ53FY
Warriors of the net 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxweOmLBQ5w
I would like to invite you to think about the ways how to work around the censorship (in China, Saudi Arabia and others) based on understanding you already have. Some terms might help, if you don't understand them, their definitions can be found elsewhere:
- packets
- routers
- firewalls
- Internet as the network of networks

So, how China actually does the filtering?

In the upcoming class, we still stay on the technical side, talking about
- IP addresses
- DNS, domains and registration

Please find and study the wikipeadi entries for those things:
IP address
ipv4, ipv6 (don't go into details if it does not interest you, but please scan it at least)

Read this fairly informative tutorial on DNS:
http://www2.rad.com/networks/2002/dns/index.htm


I would also like to ask you to reread the article by Vannevar Bush (you'll find the link in the 1st lesson's page) and try to find out the predictions that happened, what became reality (now).

Please, think until the next meeting whether you want to know more details about HTML language (this class will never be so extensive to teach somebody to write HTML pages, but we can stay with that topic longer, covering details and differences of (x)HTML and XML, SGML - all of them are often [and perhaps too much] mentioned by various people, some of whom cannot tell the tag from page heading elements) We can skip the topic mentioning only the most important parts, or we may dedicate one lesson or two to it.

My first entry

I will start to type my first entry

Readings for the 2nd class

How Internet Works : http://www.howstuffworks.com/internet-infrastructure.htm

Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China : http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/

-----
HTML entry from Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Html
XHTML entry from Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML
Web browser entry from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser
(please follow links that interest you, we will cover Javascript and Java in the class together - you do not need to know how to program with them, not even how to install them, but for sure you should know what they are useful for)

Initial outline

An initial outline of the class, may be specified as we continue.

GENERAL OUTLINE
The boring things first - history of Internet
- together with principles
- packets and their life in the network
- webserver and other beasts
- protocols or "which language are you talking to me with"?
- gang of HTTP protocols
- DNS does not mean a DeNial of Service ;-)
- my address, my computer, my own place in the big big World
- changes in IP6 protocol aka "the death of Internet that had never come"
- censure of the internet, China "rulez"!
Services of Internet
- E-mail, the most successful thing ever - why?
- e-FfffTeePee, my electronic tent
- Usenet, teleconferences
- hey! You old guys, don't you know something better?
- peer-to-peer vs. client-server architecture
- how does the Skype works? Well, who knows... ;-)
- ICQ, file-sharing, podcasting (hope somebody will help me here :-)
Search engine is not a Ctrl+F function of your text editor
- crawlers, spiders, robots - my electronic friends and enemies (spambots) and how they work?
- index, indexes, indices - my pre-sorted list of (un)relevant things
- advertisements, business models (maybe)
Browser, browser, browser, oh mighty browser!
- (X)HTML - ehh, yes, another cumbersome details of one of many marking languages
- Javascript, DOM
- plugins and extensions (Java, Flash, Quicktime)
My web, my castle
- usability, accessibility of web pages
- yes, I can deploy that bloody thing even if I know nothing about programming!
Web 2.0
- some old fashioned library things as metadata, digital object identifiers, bibliographic description in a brand new world
- social sites, virtual communities, sharing, collaboration, 1+1 is not 2, but maybe 3,4,5....
- semantic web vs. Web 2.0
- no philosophy please, show me examples of services, trends, applications

Reading for the first lesson

READINGS FOR THE FIRST LESSON

History of Internet
"As We May Think" Vannevar Bush [http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/Secondary/Bush.html]
"The Library of Babel," in: Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings" Jorge Luis Borges [http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.html]

A Brief History of the Internet. Barry M. Leiner, Vinton G. Cerf, David D. Clark, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, Daniel C. Lynch, Jon Postel, Larry G. Roberts, Stephen Wolff http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml

World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else. by Doc Searls and David Weinberger (2003). http://www.worldofends.com/

Introduction to Internet Architecture and Institutions Ethan Zuckerman & Andrew McLaughlin August, 2003. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/digitaldemocracy/internetarchitecture.html
just for a reference:

Hobbes' Internet Timeline v8.2 by Robert H'obbes' Zakon http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

Uncritical adoration

The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before. The Internet represents one of the most successful examples of the benefits of sustained investment and commitment to research and development of information infrastructure. And while people may not be aware of it, we all stay on shoulder of giants. Ideas behind it are so... (I dare saying) NICE that I truly appreciate the people who made it real and self-standing network of networks.

You can see that
--commercial sphere adopts results, takes profit and gives inevitably something back
--people, new group of internauts emerged and they create new things together (believe or not, one cell does not make the brain work, but the intelligence of so many individuals has already created great works)
--and global, political implications are tremendous

Yet in this course, we will leave the philosophy to philosophers and to "philophing" librarians who never understood how Internet really works. We want to focus on the technical details, understand the Internet partly and become technologically savvy.

The technology: did you know one of the core technologies,

Packet Switching

was invented at several places independently, in England and USA! Doesn't it resemble some other things in the history of humankind? What about invention of a telephone?

It took almost 8 years since the first network of 4 computers was started, only after three years the protocols were stable enough that the smart people around Arpanet got time to develop applications, first email arrive in 1972 and become one of the most popular services of the Internet ever. Why?

Internet was based on the idea that there would be multiple independent and heterogenous networks. No vendor, no provider should have monopoly over the network (so different from the view of telecoms and especially that of Europe in 90'). The network must have been open, bringing about open architecture networking - each network (node) acted as a peer for other networks (nodes). They cooperated.

* Each distinct network would have to stand on its own and no internal changes could be required to any such network to connect it to the Internet.
* Communications would be on a best effort basis. If a packet didn't make it to the final destination, it would shortly be retransmitted from the source.
* Black boxes would be used to connect the networks; these would later be called gateways and routers. There would be no information retained by the gateways about the individual flows of packets passing through them, thereby keeping them simple and avoiding complicated adaptation and recovery from various failure modes.
* There would be no global control at the operations level.

It happened after several years of intensive research that Internet protocol was reorganized into TCP - error checking, data flow control part and IP - addressing and transfer part (without checking), and today it is present in almost every computer operating system.

Internet had to change (can you imagine how smart must have been these people who built basis of network that is functional 20 years later?). Big changes happened in the meantime, there came a massive boom of personal computers, ethernet and together with it ever raising number of networks. Initially, computers were few, but after a while a new robust and scalable system of world-wide IP-to-address translation (DNS) must have been designed.

And here again, openness was the key to the rapid growth. The free and open access to the basic documents, especially the specifications of the protocols, allowed for massive adoption and development. And this pattern will be seen later.