We're delighted that Michael Geist will be opening Museums and the Web 2008. A leading Canadian Internet theorist and advocate, Michael will challenge our pre-conceptions about how institutions should act in an inter-connected world.

Hands On the Internet

Michael Geist, University of Ottawa, Canada

While many Internet advocates have long supported a hands-off government and policy approach to the Internet, Michael will make the case for a hands-on approach, citing the role that the museum and archival communities should play in contentious issues such as digital copyright, network neutrality, and access to public domain works.

Following up on Brewster's MW2007 keynote, the Internet Archive has planned The Big Crawl, a plan to capture 1 billon web pages in a crawl starting June 1, 2007.

To make sure that your museum site is included, enter your URL as a start page. See http://wa.archive.org/aroundtheworld/index.html for details.

And don't forget to enjoy some time travel on the Wayback Machine!

/jt

Barry Wellman spoke last night at the University of Toronto about his ongoing research into the 'Internet in Everyday Life'. It was an interesting, but somehow dissatisfying presentation of some significant research into the role of communications technologies in maintaining social ties. If that doesn't sound like the 'Internet' to you, it's because it isn't.

Though Wellman casts his net widely, and talks about researching the Internet as a whole, his work focuses on e-mail (which when the first of these studies was conducted was the major source of traffic on the net). The most interesting set of statistics presented last night were about the inter-relationships between the use of fixed phones, mobile phones, email and SMS and how their use breaks down across type of social ties, and the distance between communicants. He found a group of people who are very heavy communicators, high users of all types of media. Communications technologies enable communication. Wow.