For one thing, the video, recently unearthed by Reddit, shows that many parents have always been confused and upset by the popular electronic medium. They're still worried about their kids playing too much today. 

Parents also still complain about the high costs of consoles and games. Back in 1991, a Super Nintendo cost $200, which according to various inflation measuring websites, amounts to $400 today. Pretty pricey.  While it’s true the relative price of video game consoles has gone down - a Nintendo Wii is now less than $100, Microsoft's Xbox costs $200 and Sony's PS3 for $300 - journalists are still debating whether or not they cost too much.

Sales pitches claiming “Better pictures, sound and adventures” are still being used today; Activision is touting its latest blockbuster Call of Duty: Black Ops II, released Monday, as having the “best graphics [of] any other game.” Seems like we hear that for every game, every year, right? 

Last but not least,  journalists still don’t know jack about video games. The 1991 news report said, “Video games are hotter than ever this season!” And the media seems to report the same thing every year - starting well before 1991.

Aptly named Google’s Cultural Institute, the Internet-based multimedia site showcases first-hand testimonials, photographs, artifacts and manuscripts that until last Wednesday, you had to take a plane trip or at least pay an admission fee to see.

A Museum Milestone

Museum of Polish History called the Cultural Institute “a real revolution." Avner Shalev of Yad Vashem - also a Cultural Institute partner - said of the project, “it might be seen as one of the major milestones in modern history.”  Not only is Google’s Cultural Institute providing public access to documents otherwise previously unavailable for mass consumption, the project is “taking away the notion of physical custody of archival material” noted Razia Saleh of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory in a mini-doc about the project.Building on the success of Google’s Art Project launched in February of 2011 in conjunction with now over 150 museums, Google partnered with 17 additional foundations and museums to launch 42 free digital exhibits as part of the Cultural Institute.

Not A Light-Hearted Experience

The 42 exhibits are a solid foundation and focus on World War II, the Holocaust and South African politics. Light-hearted or uplighting fare is few and far between. Google’s Mark Yoshitake has acknowledged the project will expand in the future though.

The exhibits themselves are displayed on a horizontal timeline, with navigation predominantly left and right arrows on both sides of the screen (you scroll across as opposed to scrolling down). This orientation makes sense when thinking about how exhibits are displayed in the real world, and Google has done a good job with its darker color scheme in keeping the site beautiful but solemn.

My Personal Thoughts

Eager to experience this revolutionary and game-changing web project, I spent a couple of hours perusing the site’s offerings. It wasn’t a life-altering experience, but I could immediately see its usefulness, especially if I was researching a moment in history covered by one of the digital exhibits. 

Personal items that you would only see in a museum were also included in the exhibits, including photographs of Frank’s infamous diary in the Anne Frank exhibit, and pictures of locks of hair in the Tragic Love at Auschwitz exhibit. These items were diligently added by curators trying to create in-depth stories about their subjects - and I certainly appreciated them. But I couldn’t help but feel their impact on me was cheapened when viewed through the Internet as opposed to me seeing it in person.

In a good museum, getting lost can be half the fun. Google’s Cultural Institute isn’t built yet for this type of free-form exploration, though I was able to achieve a bit of that same sense of discovery by browsing through the photo collections of LIFE and Getty Images, a search that was surprisingly clunky for a Google product. While browsing, I found this 1985 photo of former Libyan leader Gaddafi and a whole section of photos about the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. As a refugee from a former Soviet Union-occupied country, I was disappointed by the lack of cohesive exhibits about the USSR (or Hungary), but the vast photo collections might one day be organized like the previously mentioned 42 exhibits. (Some additional treats I found: this photo of a gay couple walking by graffiti on the Berlin wall, Boris Yeltsin making a fist while a portrait of Lenin looks on, and an anti-NATO communist propaganda poster from 1981.)

Would I visit the Cultural Institute again? Definitely. But it in no way replaced the experience of an actual museum. If anything, it made me appreciate my local (and physical) institutions a bit more.

Here’s your chance to meet the real world of Horrible Bosses, and get a glimpse of how they were rewarded - or occasionally punished - for behaving badly:

Scott Thompson, Former Yahoo CEO

Scott Thompson was at Yahoo’s helm only five months before getting the boot for claiming to have a computer science degree from a college that didn’t offer one at the time. While a charitable observer might say he never lied, Thompson also never explained how that erroneous info got on his work bio. Nevertheless, the untruth gave investor activist Dan Loeb just what he needed in his proxy battle to stack the Yahoo board with his supporters. Thompson was given the heave-ho this month and Loeb, who runs the hedge fund Third Point, got the board seats. Thompson didn’t leave empty handed. While he missed out on a severance package, he did walk away with $7 million in bonuses from the struggling Internet portal.

Brian Dunn, Former Best Buy CEO

Brian Dunn stepped down in April as chief executive of electronics retailer Best Buy for what the company later called an “extremely close personal relationship” with a female employee more than 20 years younger. The 51-year-old Dunn did not use company resources in his “friendship,” which included lunch and drinks during the workweek and on weekends. The pair also seemed to stay in touch a lot. During two separate trips abroad for a total of nine days, Dunn contacted his “friend” by mobile phone at least 224 times. In the end, the board found that Dunn’s behavior violated company policy, yet he was still entitled to some big bucks. His separation package totaled $6.6 million.

Mark Hurd, Former Hewlett-Packard CEO

Mark Hurd resigned in August 2010 as chief executive of tech giant Hewlett-Packard following a dalliance with a contract employee who later accused Hurd of sexual harassment. While investigating the allegations, the HP board found that Hurd had doctored expense reports in order to hide his personal relationship with marketing consultant Jodie Fisher, a former soft-core porn actress. Fisher denied the relationship with the married Hurd was sexual. She settled privately with Hurd and both sides agreed not to discuss the affair. Hurd left HP with $12.2 million in severance and enough stock to earn millions more - and was immediately hired by his friend Larry Ellison as co-president, director and board member of Oracle.

David Edmondson, Former RadioShack CEO

David Edmondson resigned in February 2006 as CEO of electronics retailer RadioShack after lying about his education. Edmondson topped Yahoo’s Thompson by claiming to have two college degrees when he had none. The CEO apologized for the “embarrassment” he brought to the company. RadioShack’s hometown newspaper, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, broke the story, reporting Edmondson never graduated from the unaccredited bible college he attended. The newspaper also found that the CEO was facing a trial on his third arrest on drunk-driving charges. Edmondson left the company with a severance payment of less than $1 million in cash.

Sanjay Kumar, Former Computer Associates CEO

Sanjay Kumar, ex-CEO of IT management software and solutions company Computer Associates, pleaded guilty in 2006 to his role in a $2.2 billion accounting fraud. He also admitted to interfering with a federal investigation by authorizing a payment of $3.7 million to silence a potential witness. Kumar, who was once a part owner of the New York Islanders hockey team, was sentenced to 12 years in prison, which he started serving in 2007. Computer Associates, which later changed its name to CA Technologies, paid more than $225 million to a shareholder restitution fund. Kumar contributed about $20 million from his own assets.

John Rigas, Founder, Former CEO of Adelphia Communications

After leading Adelphia Communications for more than five decades, Chief Executive John Rigas was sentenced in 2005 to 15 years in prison in a multibillion-dollar fraud case that collapsed the company he founded. Rigas and his son Timothy Rigas, who was Adelphia’s chief financial officer, were convicted of 18 felony counts of fraud and conspiracy. The younger Rigas got 20 years in prison. The Rigases were convicted of stealing $100 million from Adelphia, which had been the fifth-largest cable company in the nation. They also were found guilty of conspiring to hide $2.3 billion in company debt.

Bernard Ebbers, Former CEO of WorldCom

Bernard Ebbers was sentenced in 2005 to 25 years in prison for leading the nation’s largest-ever corporate fraud. The former chief executive of telecom carrier WorldCom was convicted of nine felonies in an $11 billion accounting scandal at the company. When WorldCom filed for bankruptcy in 2002, it was the largest in U.S. history and led to shareholders and employees losing billions of dollars. Ebbers forfeited the bulk of his assets to burned WorldCom investors. Those assets included a Mississippi mansion and other holdings worth as much as $45 million. The day before his sentencing, Ebbers called the predicament he was in “bizarre.”

Robert McCormick, Former CEO of Savvis Communications

Robert McCormick resigned in 2005 as chief executive of IT infrastructure management outfit Savvis Communications (now owned by CenturyLink) after it was revealed that he spent $241,000 entertaining business associates at a Manhattan strip club. The company’s board might have looked the other way, if McCormick hadn’t used his corporate charge card to pay for lap dances and then claim to be a victim of fraud when American Express demanded its money. Dubbed the “The Lap Dunce” by The New York Daily News, McCormick never submitted an expense report for the party at Scores. The company claimed it did not pay for McCormick’s night out on the town.

Joe Nacchio, Former CEO of Qwest

One-time Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio was convicted in 2007 of 19 counts of insider trading and was sentenced to nearly six years in prison. Nacchio was convicted of selling $52 million in stock in 2001 after it became known internally that the telecom carrier (also now owned by CenturyLink) was in danger of missing sales forecasts. Nacchio, who resigned in 2002, was ordered to forfeit almost $46 million and pay a $19 million fine. In 2011, Nacchio sued his lawyers from prison, claiming they were negligent. He also accused them of overbilling, pointing to charges that included lawyers' underwear purchases.

Gregory Reyes, Former CEO of Brocade

Gregory Reyes was convicted in 2007 in a stock options backdating scandal at networking solutions vendor Brocade and received a 21-month prison term. The conviction was later overturned and the ex-CEO was retried. Prosecutors won again and he was sentenced in 2010 to 18 months in prison. At his second sentencing hearing, Reyes broke down crying, and his attorney had to read his statement for him. At his second criminal trial, Reyes blamed the company’s outside counsel, which he claimed signed off on the backdating of stock options. The judge at the sentencing hearing didn’t buy the argument, saying that, at some point, people have to take responsibility for what they say and do.

Thompson photo courtesy of Yodel Anecdotal. Raju image via World Economic Forum/Flickr.

It’s that second part that makes the quote an apt metaphor for life in a startup - and a dire warning to entrepreneurs.

When you’re starting a company, your job is to be super-smart and achieve the best of times, while avoiding the dumb mistakes that can lead to the worst of times. And that means not getting so carried away with the excitement of building a company and a product that you neglect the legal basics.

To help you avoid walking into legal landmines, we turned to entrepreneur and attorney Charley Moore, founder and chairman of Rocket Lawyer, for his perspective on the most common - and most dangerous - legal mistakes that startups make, and how to avoid them.

Stupid mistake #1: Failure to incorporate

While most businesses in the U.S. are sole proprietorships — meaning there’s no legal distinction between the business and the owner — this business structure has major disadvantages and poses major risks to your personal assets (car, house, bank accounts), which can all be “lost” if the company gets sued.

If you incorporate, your company becomes a separate legal entity that conducts business, generates income and assumes its own tax and legal liabilities. Besides reducing your personal tax bill as an owner, incorporating can reduce risk to your personal assets. It’s not complicated or expensive to incorporate. (There are plenty of places online where you can incorporate your business, including Rocket Lawyer, Incorporate.com and Legal Zoom, among others.)

Another common mistake is choosing the wrong business entity. There are various business entities to choose from, such as C corporation, S corporation, LLC and nonprofit. Each corporate structure has different implications when it comes to expenses and procedures, legal liability, taxation and fundraising, so consider your present and future requirements when making your decision.

This is not a decision to make on your own. Make sure to speak to both an attorney and a tax advisor to get the big picture on what’s best for your situation.

Stupid mistake #2: Not protecting your intellectual property

It doesn’t do you much good to come up with the next big thing if you don’t control its ownership. It’s essential to protect your intellectual property, or you’ll run the risk that someone could steal or copy your idea, brand or product after you’ve put money and effort into it. If you fail to assert your rights to your intellectual property, you may inadvertently surrender your claim to essential components of your business’s success. And that could be the end of your startup. There are four types of intellectual property: trademarks, patents, trade secrets and copyrights.

A trademark is a symbol that distinguishes and identifies your startup’s product. You can acquire trademark rights through the consistent use of a mark even if that trademark is not registered. However, when push comes to shove and you need to enforce your trademark rights, it is helpful to have that mark registered with the U.S. Patent Office (USPTO).

Copyrights protect written works and apply without registration. To help protect the rights of your copyright, mark your written works with a copyright symbol. For extra protection, you can also register your copyright with the USPTO. In the event that someone infringes on your rights, you or your attorneys can send copyright notices and cease-and-desist notices to try and get the offenders to stop.

Trade secrets are your business’s proprietary practices and/or knowledge, and they can be highly valuable. Think of Coca-Cola’s secret formula. The company has successfully kept it under wraps for more than a century, and you should strive to take the same care with your company’s trade secrets. It’s actually fairly straightforward to get legal protections for your trade secrets. The first step is to ask anyone who has access to your proprietary knowledge to sign non-compete and non-disclosure agreements before you reveal anything.

Patents must be applied for, and although the process may take several years, you can generally note “patent pending” to communicate to others that a patent has been applied for. It’s also smart to include provisions in employment agreements that specify who owns any patents developed using company resources.

Stupid mistake #3: Not following employment best practices

Lawsuits by unhappy employees can kill a startup before it even gets off the ground. There’s also the risk that employees could leave your business, taking clients or ideas with them. Protect yourself from these risks by having new employees sign an employment agreement, where you clearly lay out your employees’ responsibilities, rights and obligations.

If you are hiring independent contractors or consultants, your agreement should also include their service fees, length of the agreement, completion date and what the consequences are for a breach of contract.

When putting together these agreements, don’t forget to include an arbitration clause. It could keep you out of court in the event of a conflict - and saving those legal fees could be the difference between success and failure.

Stupid mistake #4: Not getting agreements in writing

Whenever there’s an agreement of any kind, you should write a contract and get all of the parties to sign it. This helps make sure everyone is on the same page and, most importantly, creates a written record of the agreement. Hopefully nothing will go wrong, but if you have the agreement in writing, you’ll have a much easier time proving your case in court (or in private arbitration, which you can stipulate in your agreement as well).

Remember, written agreements protect everyone involved. Although they may take a short amount of your time upfront, they can save you thousands of dollars in legal expenses and losses at a later date if a dispute comes up.

When you’re in the throes of a startup, it’s all too easy to make stupid legal mistakes, thinking you’ll get around to doing it right eventually. More likely, you won’t think of it again until it’s too late to save your company.

Don't get me wrong: I was a big OS/2 fanboy. I even wrote a book about OS/2 in the enterprise, which was never published. But I think it is useful to recall the mistakes of computing yesteryear and see if we can try to avoid them in the present.

Back in the late 1980s, Microsoft worked with operating systems designers at IBM to produce a successor to the venerable DOS. OS/2 attempted to solve a real problem: Having only 640KB of RAM for running your programs and OS made it hard to do more than one thing with your PC at any given time. That's right: We are talking kilobytes, which is about the amount of RAM in your average coffee pot these days.

Back then we had various tricks for running other things in memory, or for extending that meager memory space, but they weren't easy. But this was all to get around the underlying issue: We needed the ability to run multiple programs concurrently and switch easily among them. Today, we take that for granted, and indeed, with the average multiple-monitor desktop rig - which brings to mind an air-traffic controller - we run dozens of programs and have all sorts of things open at any one time.

By the time OS/2 was finished, which was a long slog as hundreds of coders worked in dozens of cities around the world, it was basically irrelevant. Windows did a much better job of allowing for multitasking anyway. Intel had come out with better chip sets too, and the world had moved on.

All this meant that IBM and Microsoft were serving different masters when they worked on OS/2. It's no wonder they had trouble reaching common ground and ultimately split up, with Microsoft developing Windows and IBM trying to continue to improve OS/2.

Now look at what is going on with Windows 8. It also began its life trying to solve one problem (having the same OS on desktops, tablets and phones) but really trying to solve something else: how to beat Apple with a better tablet OS. That doesn't bode well. The misfire of Vista, an OS that no one could love or care about, is already behind us. All that Vista accomplished was to put XP more firmly in our minds and keep it on our desktops longer. Could an OS really serve two masters equally well? Wait a minute, didn't I just answer that question?

One of OS/2's problems is that its protected mode was very bad at running legacy apps. Almost none of the DOS apps ran on the first several OS/2 versions. Sound familiar? Win 8 is also having problems running legacy Windows XP apps.

When OS/2 was being built, most people were using 8-bit apps and didn't really care much (unlike the tech writers) about the move toward 16-bit computing. Because of the upgrade, it was hard to find OS/2 drivers for peripherals such as printers. In my book from 1988, I had written, "UNIX has been able to offer just about everything OS/2 intends to offer for more than a year." Little did I know that Unix would find its way inside the Mac OS and take off in subsequent years. Now we are used to the world of 32-bit and have trouble caring about 64-bit apps, and we have issues finding drivers for 64-bit Windows. Hmm.

Win 8 also has two different personalities, the old style "Start" that it inherited from XP and the new "Metrosexual" button display that it seems to have inherited from Windows Mobile. OS/2 started out with a simple text-only task switcher and quickly got a graphical UI that was crude and looked like something from a mainframe terminal designer.

(Thanks to PC Magazine for the archive screen shot.)

As Nokia and Microsoft work on Win 8, they might end up going their separate ways too, with one doing an OS optimized for phones and the other for PCs and tablets.

OS/2 came with communications and database servers built-in, at least with the IBM version. But these were ahead of their time. Now most OS's have full comms and database capabilities. Ironically, one of the hardest challenges that many business app developers have with the iPad is the lack of a built-in database and the APIs to access the same.

So will Win 8 be more like OS/2 or XP in terms of success? Hard to say at this point. But the similarities are somewhat chilling.

As Open Culture points out, by the late 18th century, new technology had culminated in national postal services and mass printing. This mechanically-based read/write web allowed for the proliferation of ideas across international borders in record time and subsequently led to revolutions, not unlike the Arab Spring and #occupy movements of today. (Though with more guns.) Stanford University has been conducting a project to map the data from the Republic and its efforts have led to some interesting discoveries.

By mapping the correspondence of the intellectuals of the Republic of Letters, Stanford, along with its partners, including Oxford University's Electronic Enlightenment project, have discovered for instance that leading enlightenment figure Voltaire had virtually no communication with English thinkers. Given England's prominence in French thinking of the time, this is surprising and introduces a new question for academics to pursue: Why?

One of the project's primary investigators, Dan Edelstein. explains.

The "visual browsing tool" (see below) is particularly intriguing. It is information-rich, but easy to use. You can watch the connections grow over a 51 year period. You can filter by years or by correspondents. You can compare the correspondence flow between two writers or view the era in terms of the geographical flow of ideas. You can click on correspondence to read the digitized original at the website of the Electronic Enlightenment.

Click to access data visualization

Along with the iPad, which itself is just over 18 months old after launching in the Spring of 2010, the Kinect has helped turn ideas that were once science fiction into developments that seem imminent. See, for example, the video below made by Microsoft to celebrate the innovation occurring on the Kinect platform.

How much of that stuff is live now? One staffer from the Haile Digital Planetarium at Northern Kentucky University comments on the YouTube posting of this video saying they've been letting students use their connect that way since July.

Multitouch, voice search, gestures. Those are now some of the most potent points of intersection between human will and computational power. Could this new stage of interface change the world as much as the transition from the Command Line to the GUI did? It may very well.

Let's hope no one single company exerts too much control over this change to the detriment of innovation and humanity at large.

On this first anniversary, Microsoft offers a site about what it calls the Kinect effect and a gallery of Kinect-based development projects. Both are very inspiring.

This is an important day to remember. I'd love to read your thoughts on it in comments, readers.

The launch is focused on the growing health & lifestyle app channel in the Apple app store and in the Android market.

The app is a Q&A platform that helps users find health information written by local physicians. The company says it has 5,000 physicians signed up for "virtual practices."

The app has one interface for doctors and a separate interface for patients. Patients can ask questions for free, and answers are delivered pretty fast, as I found out.

Warning: privacy advocates beware -- this app requires personal identity information, like name, age and location at registration.The app also asks if you want to share with Facebook, and it gives you a choice. That was good. I said no.

The app lists "trending" questions.

The questions most similar to yours scroll automatically to the top as you type. Doctors endure much in order to help the sick. One of the easier questions to print: "Can my co-workers catch my eczema?"

Many questions ask for advice about general themes: like baby care, and what to do with a fever.

I asked a purposely vague question, completely made up: "I have a rash on my foot, what is it?" A doctor, who was apparently real, provided an answer in about a minute through a push notification that sent me to the answer page.

The answer? "See a doctor." Thank you, doctor.

I asked another more serious question: "How many times should I change the gauze on my burnt hand?" No doctor had answered that question at the time of posting.

What is really interesting about this is that the catalyst for the app is the same catalyst that launched the blended learning movement in education. In order to free up time in the day, some portion of the teaching hours is devoted to online learning. This app does the same thing. The app works totally free of advertising and sponsorship from pharmaceutical companies so as to maintain trust and the feeling of objectivity.

Screenshot comes from iPhone image capture

Created by The Israel Museum in conjunction with Google, the project, first announced last year, offers the public the opportunity to read five of the scrolls in super high-definition.

As Google explains on its blog:

"The high resolution photographs, taken by Ardon Bar-Hama, are up to 1,200 megapixels, almost 200 times more than the average consumer camera, so viewers can see even the most minute details in the parchment. For example, zoom in on the Temple Scroll to get a feel for the animal skin it's written on - only one-tenth of a millimeter thick."

You can browse the various scrolls on the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls site. But you can also navigate by text search using Google itself.

Google assisted by "helping design the web experience and making it searchable and accessible to the world" and by hosting it on Google Storage and App Engine.The company has previously worked with the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum to digitize and share records of the Shoah.

For more information on the Scrolls and the process of digitizing them, read our coverage of the initial announcement last year.

Thousands of geoglyph "wheels," almost completely unknown to the public, are now part of public knowledge thanks to advances in technology, both photographic and social. These wheels are scattered across the deserts of Jordan and adjacent countries.

Professor David Kennedy of the University of Western Australia has been using Google Earth and aerial photography to study the structures, which were first reported in 1927 by British Royal Air Force fliers who were making mail runs over the area.

According to CBS News:

"(T)hese stone structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with spokes radiating inside. Researchers believe that they date back to antiquity, at least 2,000 years ago. They are often found on lava fields and range from 82 feet to 230 feet (25 meters to 70 meters) across."

"(W)heels form part of a variety of stone landscapes. These include kites (stone structures used for funnelling and killing animals); pendants (lines of stone cairns that run from burials); and walls, mysterious structures that meander across the landscape for up to several hundred feet and have no apparent practical use.

You can look at a gallery of the wheels on LiveScience and a much larger gallery of related structures on Flickr.

Other sources: A Blog About History | photos via LiveScience from Flickr : Image 1: Copyright APAAME_20090928_RHB-0120, Photographed by Robert H. Bewley; Image 2: Drawn by Stafford Smith, APAAME; Image 3: Copyright APAAME_20080925_DLK-0308, Photographed by David L. Kennedy

As you can see below, Twitter didn't have a hard time explaining itself at first. "If you have a cell and you can txt," the home page said, "you'll never be bored again...E V E R!" I guess when you've raised mountain upon mountain of venture capital and changed the world in multiple major ways, you've got to take yourself more seriously than that. (?) None the less, I like this old version of Twitter!

Click for full size.

Look out, little Twttr, the President of the United States, Ashton Kutcher and these ladies you'll learn about in the future called The Kardashians are coming! From dorky simplicity has sprung unfathomable magic and banality.

Just five years, people! Amazing. Kottke's own blog, if you're not yet familiar with it, is almost 3X as old as Twitter and still a great read. You might even say that if you read it...you'll never be bored again...EVER!

The ReadWriteWeb team and myself personally are on Twitter as well. If you follow us there, well - you might be bored less often, I'll say that much ;)

Whether you were all the way across the country as I was or in the neighborhood, you have, no doubt, very strong feelings about the event and may want to memorialize it somehow. But reabsorbing the terrible images seems almost unwholesome to me, personally. Do it if you want, if you think it will benefit you, but watch out. An alternative might be Broadcastr's September 11 Memorial. Here you can bear witness, in person or via telephone and your testimony will become part of the historical record.

Kate Petty, Broadcastr's director of communications, described the project for us. It is a collaboration between Broadcastr (whose efforts to preserve 9/11 oral histories we've written about before), HISTORY (formerly the History Channel) and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.

"We're inviting anyone to contribute a recorded story of what happened to them on 9/11, through a toll-free call-in line at 855-We-Remember, or at interactive kiosks installed at the 9/11 Memorial Visitor Center.

"All stories will be kept in the 9/11 Memorial's oral history archives. Select stories will be uploaded as MP3 files to Broadcastr, where they are accessible for free on the iPhone and Android apps, as well as on the Web."

The kiosks do not open until September 12, but the phone lines, though not promoted until tomorrow, are already receiving calls, 100 at last count.

"Everybody has a 9/11 story," Andy Hunter, founder and CEO of Broadcastr told us. "We wanted to create a way that anybody, anywhere could share these memories with each other, and preserve them as part of the 9/11 Memorial archives."

Also, I'm not sure who I'm kidding about my comments at the top of this post. While writing this up, I have already listened to the testimonies of nurse Francine Kelly, NYPD officer David Brink and New York firefighter Mike Moran. ...

WTC memorial photo by Pingnews

"[When] I first looked at the completed timeline," Wolfram writes, "the first thing that struck me was how much two entities stood out in their contributions: ancient Babylon, and the United States government... [It] is sobering to see how long the road to where we are today has been. But it is exciting to see how much further modern technology has already made it possible for us to go."

Above: Click to view full timeline.

Wolfram argues that Artificial Intelligence has languished over the years, but that the body of data that's become available for computation has exploded. "[We] can just start from the whole corpus of systematic knowledge and data - as well as methods and models and algorithms - that our civilization has accumulated, poured wholesale into our computational system... this is what we have done with Wolfram|Alpha: in effect making immediate direct use of the whole rich history portrayed in the timeline."

We've written here for several years about the explosion of data production that's beginning and will be a major factor in determining the nature of human civilization in the near-term. In terms of sheer quantity, far more will be made measurable in the next few years than has been instrumented by any of the other developments on Wolfram's timeline. Google's Marissa Mayer calls the coming Internet of Things "bigger than Moore's law." Former HP CEO Mark Hurd said in 2009: "more data will be created in the next four years than in the history of the planet."

What will we do with all that data? That's up to us as a society, but it's a good idea to see it coming and look at it within a historical context.

Why did MySpace fail? Why have Facebook and Twitter stolen its thunder? That will be a question for the ages, but one contributing factor may be the incredible hostility that MySpace had for outside application developers. MySpace thought, and said publicly, that all the rest of Web 2.0 was a leach, a monkey on MySpace's back. Below, an excerpt from a TechCrunch post I wrote about this five years ago. It looks pretty amazing now in retrospect and is a good reminder that today's leading companies should remember their humility.

The post was titled, "MySpace: We don't need Web 2.0," by yours truly and ran on TechCrunch, September 12th, 2006. I should add that Newscorp/Fox was not very happy with us for writing this post. Eight months later, Heather Harde, who ran the mergers and acquisitions team at Fox Interactive Media became the CEO of TechCrunch.

Almost five years later, can you imagine Mark Zuckerberg saying things like this about, for example, Zynga?

News Corp. chief operating officer Peter Chernin told company investors today that, "If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether it's YouTube, whether it's Flickr, whether it's Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace." MultiChannel News is reporting that Chernin said there is no reason why News Corp. couldn't build parallel businesses, targeting YouTube in particular. "Given that most of their traffic comes from us," he said, "if we build adequate if not superior competitors, I think we ought to be able to match them if not exceed them."

What didn't get discussed in the coverage of Chernin's talk to the Merrill Lynch Media & Entertainment Conference today are the steps the company has taken that have made it more difficult for outside companies to spread their presence inside MySpace, like blocking external links in Flash widgets. Could more hindrances like that be forthcoming? [To clarify, this is the context in which Chernin's comments were made, he did not discuss blocking other company's widgets.]

While competitor Facebook won accolades for opening an API to outside developers, it's understood that there is probably zero chance of such openness from MySpace.

It's unclear what more MySpace could do by way of features alone to compete with YouTube. The MySpace video player has embedding, related videos, top videos and viewer comments. Chernin said that MySpace's video efforts have been small so far and estimated that between 60 and 70% of YouTube's traffic comes from MySpace. That may become less the case as the YouTube community develops its own stars who use MySpace pages as static points of reference, at most.

Chernin also said that the company was looking to put more of its own commercial video on MySpace. "You're going to see us starting to play more aggressively on the entertainment side of that site," he said. Commercial video on YouTube has been a big gamble, with some of it well received and some of it eliciting a very hostile response from users.

To summarize: the COO of News Corp. says that Web 2.0 is leaching traffic off of MySpace, that they can build their own services to compete with any of it and that there's going to be an increasingly aggresive commercial push on the site. That sounds both dangerously arrogant and like a real validation of fears that MySpace dependency is too risky for outside developers.

The two organizations will make the historical books, pamphlets and other periodicals available both on the library's site and on Google Books.

Anyone will be able to bring up Google Books or the British Library site, read or even save, copies of these publications.

The project will take several years to complete and Google is to foot the bill for digitizing them, according to the BBC.

The pamphlets are particularly intriguing. They were the pre-electronic age's equivalent of blogs: getting the word out, stirring up people, introducing radical ideas, arguing political stances and more. They give the reader a window into the time as it moved for those living there, as opposed to the more measured and mythopoeic vision of books.

In the first batch to be digitized, a pamphlet on Marie Antoinette, the 18th century queen of France who was executed in the French Revolution.

The amount accessible via this partnership is a mere drop in the library's collection, which features 14 million books, almost a million periodicals and pamphlets, 58 million patents and three million sound recordings.

Chief Executive Dame Lynne Brindley, of the British Library, told the BBC that "the scheme was an extension of the ambition of the library's predecessors in the 19th Century to provide access to knowledge to everyone," making the Internet the modern "reading room."

If you want to see the Sarajevo haggadah or a manuscript of Wilfred Owen's 'Anthem for Doomed Youth,' annotated by Siegfried Sassoon, however, you'll still have to make the trip to Euston Road.

British Library photo by Steve Cadman | other sources: ResourceBlog

Run by Europeana, the European archive, the project began in March and will end in July. It combines online uploading with real-life roadshows to assemble an enduring, highly-personalized Web archive of the war.

Europeana explained the inspiration and goals of the project.

"The First World War archive is based on an initiative at the University of Oxford where people across Britain were asked to bring family letters, photographs and keepsakes from the War to be digitised. The success of the idea - which became the Great War Archive - has encouraged Europeana, Europe's digital archive, library and museum, to bring the German National Library into an alliance with Oxford University to roll out the scheme in Germany. The collaboration will bring German stories online alongside their British counterparts in a 1914-18 archive."

At the roadshows - still to be held at Dresden, Kiel and Regensburg - the objects brought are digitized on the spot.

The archive is already up and running and you can use their search page to look for specific artifacts or types of artifacts or images.

Among the objects already digitized, the editors point out a "delousing chit" (above).

"Looking rather like a cartoon bank note this informed the bearer that he was now clean and free of the vermin of the trenches. Most likely a completely unofficial document, this comic piece of memorabilia was probably limited to one unit, and may therefore be quite uncommon. However it is also good documentary evidence of the cleaning up process, soldiers being communally bathed, or perhaps more accurately dunked and rubbed down, in disused breweries, or washed by the efforts of mobile bath units with their own traveling water heater."

Another is the heart-breaking "red stripe" card. When a medic triaged an injured soldier, he affixed a card to the person. The cards were no-stripe, for walking wounded; a single stripe for the seriously injured but movable; and two stripes for too seriously wounded to be moved and likely to die. The one to the right, with one stripe, belonged to a soldier named Schroeder.

Europeana is partnering with Oxford University and the German National Library. So far, over 350 people have attended the roadshows and more than 15,000 objects have been digitized.

The goal of Starkey's app -- Kings and Queens -- is to bring his book, and history, to life. If you are familiar with the history of the British monarchy, it is one of the most fascinating tales of intrigue, betrayal, politics and power in the history of the world. The topic was begging to be brought to interactive life. Starkey's app is not just a splendid way to blend documentary and books but could signal the future of literature by looking into the past.

"It's a case of the technology catching up with what I wanted to do," Starkey said in an interview with The Guardian's Apps blog. "Television is a performance, but apps actually reflect thought processes."

Starkey told The Guardian that the app, created by Trade Mobile, "reflects the creative processes of a writer." It gives him the ability to take certain aspects of history and his writing and give them digital life, as opposed to leaving them on the cutting room floor if he were making a documentary.

"All those things you've had to level out to make the line of narrative ... you can put back in," Starkey told the Guardian. "I no longer have to take these decisions that involve sacrifice. The reader can arrive at the judgement for themselves."

Kings and Queens is interactive history at its best. It provides timelines, family trees and lineage and the themes that have emerged in tracking 2,000 years of British royalty. Starkey provides audio and video of the abridged text of his book. Oh, there is also feature footage of the most recent royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton (if you are into that kind of thing).

Here Professor Dan Bailey and his crew have created Visualizing Early Washington D.C., a project to use today's technology to recreate yesterday's national capital. It was inspired by a request from PBS to create a 3D version of Capitol Hill for a documentary on the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe. But it has grown over four years into a project to map the entire city, from 1790 to 1820.

Watching the project come alive online is analogous to watching the city come alive through the work of the IRC. It is so patently a Symbol these days that it is refreshing to see it again as a city.

According to Bailey, the tech has reached a point where it is not the problem.

"The task of visualizing the nascent city has proved to be more challenging than we'd anticipated, not due to the limits of technology, but due to the sparseness of reliable historical evidence."

The steps involved ran the gamut from hand drawing off a database of DC drawings, paintings and documents to advanced 3D modeling.

The project is not just about DC. In a sense, it is, to use Bailey's phrase, "proof of concept" that a dynamic computer rendering of history is a useful tool, responsive, detailable and here to stay.

Other sources: io9, OpenCulture, The Washington Post