Here is a quick run through the things that I consider interesting that happened during 2007. These are things I blogged about and there are plenty of more interesting things that I didn’t blog about that also happened. Here is the run down by month:
January:
MySpace Power: MySpace used it’s power to shut down a website without any real authority or legal paper work for it.
February:
Canon PowerShot A550: I finally bought a digital camera that still delivers today and at a great price.
Lupe Fiasco and Rahzel Concert: A great concert where I saw the legend Rahzel perform and where I learned more about the talent of Lupe Fiasco.
March:
Life: Sometimes we need a movie to make us think more about life. I always love understanding things and in that topic I talk about euthanasia and its controversy.
300: I saw the epic movie 300 which I still love today probably even more than when I wrote about it.
April:
Gym Class Heroes: I got to see one of my favorite band Gym Class Heroes at Alfred University, great road trip and concert.
May:
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, together: A great interview with both of them at the same time and place. Something that everyone wanted to see.
June:
Sicko: Another great Michael Moore documentary that shows us that the U.S. is flawed and still needs things to be better.
July:
The Simpsons Movie: It’s The Simpsons, in a movie… what more can I say?
Voting Machines Cracked: More proof of why electronic voting machine are no good because they are extremely insecure.
August:
The Facebook Economy: A great view at how Facebook is getting all of its money and why it will be around for a while.
SuprNova Is Back: For all of the old bittorrent users, y’all know how much SuprNova meant to us.
September:
The Jena 6 Incident: A sad story about what is happening in our world and that racism still exists in this world, it’s just not very visible.
October:
Facebook Still Growing: Facebook was declared the 5th most valuable U.S. internet company…
November:
Kanye West, Graduation: Kanye West comes out with one of the best albums of the year and beating 50 cent with their dispute over who was going to sell more.
December:
Netscape Dies: The end of one of the oldest browsers and very important one in the development of internet.
Lupe Fiasco, The Cool: Lupe Fiasco brings back the definition of being Cool. And joins Kanye with the best albums of 2007 (my opinion).
Those are some of the news that stand out to me during 2007. Goodbye 2007, lets see what 2008 brings.
The Australian government has agreed on filtering internet content from the people living in Australia. They join China who has been censoring their internet for a long time now and has created lots of controversy. The reason why Australia wants to censor its internet is because they had supplied Net Nanny to every consumer but were afraid that not everyone was using it correctly or using it at all. The content that they plan to censor are pornography, casino style internet gambling, hate speech and R rated computer games. The problem is that in the future they could add many other things to this filter and end up censoring a lot more, like unwanted media.
Source: TechCrunch.com
I just read the sad news that AOL is discontinuing the Netscape Browser. This might not mean much to many because they don’t know the importance of Netscape in web development. Netscape was one of the biggest, most used browsers back in the day and it was more popular than internet explorer. Netscape once had what IE has today, over 90% of the market. But as time went by and Microsoft used it’s power, Netscape started dying. From now on Netscape will be part of the history books and will no longer be something present, but more of a legend.
Yasser
I’m very happy to be in Dominican Republic for my Christmas vacation with my family. New Years is around the corner which doesn’t mean as much to me as it does to others. It is always seen as the time of the year to have a “fresh start”, make everything better and make big changes. I believe it’s kind of sad if you have to wait so long for new changes and make a difference. If you really wanted to make a big change you would of done it as soon as possible. But new years is a good time to think back and see all the mistakes we did during the past year and everything we should do better. I hope I could dedicate more time to this blog and keep it more up to date but college takes away a lot of time. I hope everyone has a great New Year and that they are able to do there new years resolutions.
Yasser
I had talked about this awaited album called The Cool by one of my new favorite artist’s Lupe Fiasco. He just keeps delivering all the time, with his nice beats and his smooth lyrics. In this new album he introduces his “Cool” side and defined as The Coolest Nigga. It’s now one of my favorite albums of this year with Kanye’s. Don’t overdose on the cool…
The new hot topic on the internet is the announced Google Knol which is meant to be a Wikipedia “killer”. Wikipedia has been announcing a search service that would be able to compete with Google in most categories since most people already look in Wikipedia for “accurate” information and homework. But they have had a long time developing it and we still haven’t seen anything. Another plausible reason why Google wants to do Knol is because Wikipedia doesn’t have advertisement in their site. If they would Google would of probably be used or would of made an offer to put their adds in their site.
Because of all of this and maybe some other reasons Google has announced their project Knol. It’s supposed to be better than Wikipedia in terms of finding content and creating content. Users who post content can make a profit out of what they write. This is a great motivation for Knol to get content quick. But not only will the users make money by putting add on what they write but Google would make a profit because it’s its ads that it’s showing. It is a small monopoly where Google is the winner no matter what. So read some more info about Google Knol and then take your personal decision of what Google is doing and how it’s working.
Yasser
It had been a long time since I’ve gone to the movie theater but yesterday I decided to go with a couple of friends to see I Am Legend. The story is very similar to 28 weeks later. The population has been infected with a virus and there seems to be only one person alive which is Will Smith. The story itself it’s a bit played out but this brings a bit of a difference to the infected people. I personally think this movie would of done bad in the box office but thanks to Will Smith it is selling and it will continue to sell. It’s not a bad movie but it’s not as great as the trailers looked.
Yahoo recently announced that they will be putting contextual advertising in PDF files. As if we didn’t have enough adds and pop-ups in the internet. This is great news for advertisers, horrible news for the regular people that read these PDF files. It’s no secret that one of the new big markets in internet is advertising and while it keeps at a good level people will try to exploit it and get the most out of it, by even putting ads in files. Sooner or later there might be ads on images or doc files or any other type of files. I wonder if the PDF will still have ads even if it’s downloaded…
Yasser
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