Category: History

According to this article from Edutopia, the one billionth user connected to the World Wide Web sometime last year. I have no idea how anyone arrives at these sorts of statistics, but it probably doesn’t really matter. The point is that it’s a big number, and there are lots and lots of people from all over the world who are becoming part of this phenomenon we call the Internet.

But in the age of Web 2.0 – the read/write web – I found this paragraph particularly poignant…

“The striking thing to me about that milestone is not the enormity of the number, however. More interesting, perhaps, is that the one billionth person to jump onto the Web could just as easily been an eight-year-old kid from Sweden or the South Bronx (or, for that matter, an eighty-year-old from South Africa) who sat down at a computer, opened a browser, and for the first time started connecting to the sum of human knowledge we are collectively building online. Furthermore, that eight-year-old had just as much ability to start contributing what she might know about horses or her hometown or whatever her passions might be, becoming an author in her own right, teaching the rest of us what she knows.”

It’s the whole Wisdom of Crowds thing… the idea that we are collectively smarter than any of us could be as individuals. I think that’s really food for thought.

I just watched the most amazing documentary on the 9/11 attacks from 5 years ago. It was just called, simply, 9/11.

It was on TV last night, and had a bunch of footage that I’d never seen before. Considering the huge amount of press coverage that the attacks got when they first happened, and how well documented the events have been since then, I was surprised to find that there was still such a large chunk of footage that I’d never ever seen before.

The documentary was made by two French filmmakers that were actually making a doco about a young firefighter who had just joined the FDNY. They’d been following this guy around, fimling and getting to know the other fireys for a few months and had been taking their cameras out on shoots to local fires, etc. They just happened to tag along when the guys were called out to attend an unknown event on the morning on 9/11, not really knowing what they were in for. Turns out that one of the filmmakers got caught up in the foyer of the building with all the NY fire chiefs during the main part of the disaster. It was a real insiders view of events.

Our recent visit to Ground Zero was an amazing experience and made the events of five years ago so much more real. As I say, I’d never seen any of this documentary footage before, and found it to be quite compelling viewing. Well worth a look if you get the chance.