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A few days ago, a link fell in my mailbox, covering the 50 significant moments from the internet history. While reading it, I thought how would be nice to have this information in one, read once, graphical timeline. And since I love to design timelines, I decided to get my hands dirty and create one:

tip: click the image above to see it in a larger version.

I extended it to 65 moments, based on the honorable mentions by the original article and my own opinion. Feel free to use it, has anything else publicized in this blog, is licensed in a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Thomas Baekdal wrote a highly insightful article, powered by a very interesting diagram, about the history (and future) of information sources for the average user:

For a in-depth analysis of the diagram, jump to the original article.

The new creation from Dr. Stephen Wolfram, named WolframAlpha, is being heralded as possibly the most important technological invention of the the last decade. And why is that? The scientific community is referring it as an "answer engine" or "knowledge engine", rather than a search engine, since it provides users with the ability of typing a question and being given an answer. Note, that's an answer and not a list of websites.

It doesn't simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn't just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions - like questions that have factual answers such as "How many Internet users are in Europe", "What is the weather in Lisbon?" or "What is the 307th digit of Pi?".

The service will opens to the public on May 18. Meanwhile, you can take a peek on this blurry video from Youtube:

Is Google in danger due to WolframAlpha? There's a growing discussion about it in the community, some call it the next Google, others say they complement each other. And since WolframAlpha as (yet) no known business model, I guess we'll have to wait and see...

Just a kick post to tell everyone excentric is on the short list for digital agency of the year 2008 by Meios & Publicidade (only in portuguese).

It's not me, but Microsoft itself who's saying it on his "Europe Logs On" study, released yesterday. In 18 months, people will spend more time browsing the web than watching TV. Other key findings of the study are:

• Europeans spent on average 1.5 days a month on the Internet in 2008, and by 2010 will spend 2.5, which represents a 66% growth
• Internet use on PCs will drop from 95% today to only 50% over the next 5 years due to increase usage of IPTV, games consoles and mobile phones accessing the web
• Online video is the most popular online entertainment application
• Content and communications services represents 65% of all time spent online, and commerce represents 33%
• Being one of the European countries with lower penetration, Portugal has today more than 4 million people using the Internet</ul>

  This and much more is available in the study.