A Bit of Web History: Time to Say Goodbye, Adios, Shalom: So Long Netscape!
A little bit of history.
If you've been using the WWW since the early days it's likely you'll never forget the first time you saw Netscape. It was a wow. We will also never forget that in those early days when you asked what search engine someone searched they would often respond NETSCAPE! Of course, some 17 years later that still happens from time to time. :-)
Now, word from AOL 1 ||| 2, the current owner of Netscape, that they will no longer be supporting the browser.
As the great baseball player Satchell Paige once said, "Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you." Well, in this case, most knew it was MSFT. Still, it's a lesson in not taking any hour of business for granted.
At one point, Netscape controlled 80%, that's right, 80% of the browser marketplace. Today, while Firefox has a devoted following (and for good reason in our view) most of that marketshare is controlled by Microsoft. So, score another for Gates and crew. Of course, there are close ties between Netscape and Mozilla/Firefox.
This News.com post from October, 1994 has a useful chronology of Netscape's history beginning with Marc Andreessen 1993 announcement of the development of Mosaic, a graphical web browser. Other browsers also exisited at this time like Cello and SlipKnot. Of course, Netscape is the one that took off.
So goes another web tool. From one day at the top of the heap to 17 years later, no more. Time sure flies and even those of us who follow the web and search closely can easily forget.
Perhaps another question for AOL? What will become of the now spam-filled DMOZ or Open Directory.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
