The Open Content Alliance (OCA) was launched in August 2006 to build a
world public permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and
multimedia content. The project started in October 2005 as a group of
cultural, technology, non profit, and governmental organizations
gathering around the Internet Archive to digitize public domain books
around the world. The first 100,000 ebooks were available in December
2006 in the Text Archive of the Internet Archive, with 12,000 new
ebooks posted per month. Unlike Google Books, the Open Content Alliance
(OCA) has made them searchable through any web search engine, and has
not scanned copyrighted books, except when the copyright holder has
expressly given permission. The first contributors to OCA were the
University of California, the University of Toronto, the European
Archive, the National Archives in United Kingdom, O'Reilly Media, and
the Prelinger Archives. One million ebooks in December 2008 and two
million ebooks in March 2010 were available under OCA principles in the
Internet Archive.
August 2006 > A version of the union catalog WorldCat for free on the
web
In August 2006, WorldCat, the union catalog run by OCLC (Online
Computer Library Center), began migrating to the web through the beta
version of its new website worldcat.org. OCLC was created as early as
1971 as a non-profit organization dedicated to furthering access to the
world's information while reducing information costs. In 2005, WorldCat
had 61 million bibliographic records in 400 languages, provided by
9,000 member libraries in 112 countries. In 2006, 73 million
bibliographic records were linking to one billion documents available
in these libraries. Through the current WorldCat, member libraries have
now provided free access to their catalogs, and free or paid access to
their electronic resources: books, audiobooks, abstracts and full-text
articles, photos, music CDs, and videos. In April 2010, WorldCat
provided records linking to 1,5 billion documents.
2006 > Twitter, or information in 140 characters
Founded in 2006 in California by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz
Stone, Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging tool for users
to send free short messages of 140 characters maximum, called tweets,
via the internet, IM (Instant Messaging), or SMS (Short Message
Service). Sometimes described as the SMS of the internet, Twitter has
since gained worldwide popularity, with 106 million users in April
2010, and 300,000 new users per day. As for tweets, there were 5,000
per day in 2007, 300,000 in 2008, 2.5 million in 2009, 50 million in
January 2010, and 55 million in April 2010, with the archiving of
tweets by the Library of Congress as a reflection of the trends of our
time, and their inclusion by Google in the results of its search
engine.
October 2006 > The Sony Reader, a new ebook reader
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account