From Cave Paintings to the Internet An Annotated Interactive Timeline on the History of Information and Media 2005 to 2008 Timeline

By Spring of this year it is estimated that over 100,000,000 people in China use the Internet.

The Internet Archive  has archived forty billion web pages from 1996 to this date.

The National Science Foundation funds research headed by Gabor Forgacs at the University of Missouri-Columbia on what is called "Organ Printing," to "further advance our understanding of self-assembly during the organization of cells and tissues into functional organ modules."

From ABC News 2-10-2006: "In what could be the first step toward human immortality, scientists say they've found a way to do all of these things and more with the use of a technology found in many American homes: an ink-jet printer.

"Researchers around the world say that by using the technology, they can actually 'print' living human tissue and one day will be able to print entire organs.

" 'The promise of tissue engineering and the promise of 'organ printing' is very clear: We want to print living, three-dimensional human organs,' Dr. Vladimir Mironov said. 'That's our goal, and that's our mission.' "

"Though the field is young, it already has a multitude of names.

" 'Some people call this 'bio-printing.' Some people call this 'organ printing.' Some people call this 'computer-aided tissue engineering.' Some people call this 'bio-manufacturing,' said Mironov, associate professor at the Medical University of South Carolina and one of the leading researchers in the field."

"The Century of Science initiative makes hundreds of thousands of older, twentieth century scientific journal items available in one place and on one platform for the first time. Approximately 850,000 fully indexed journal articles have been added to Web of Science, from 262 scientific journals published in the first half of the twentieth century. This comprehensive collection is fully searchable, with complete bibliographic data, cited reference data and navigation, and direct links to the full text."

The video sharing website, YouTube, is founded.

Lawrence Lessig launches Code 2.2 wiki: "Lawrence Lessig first published Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace in 1999. After five years in print and five years of changes in law, technology, and the context in which they reside, Code needs an update. But rather than do this alone, Professor Lessig is using this wiki to open the editing process to all, to draw upon the creativity and knowledge of the community. This is an online, collaborative book update; a first of its kind.

"Once the project nears completion, Professor Lessig will take the contents of this wiki and ready it for publication. The resulting book, Code v.2, will be published in late 2005 by Basic Books. All royalties, including the book advance, will be donated to Creative Commons."

Sony's PlayStation and PS 1 reach "a combined total of 102.49 million units shipped", becoming the first video game console to reach the 100 million mark.

The U. S.- China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC.gov) issues the report of XIAO Qiang on The Development and the State Control of the Chinese Internet . 

At the Plenary Session of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO held at Georgetown University, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington offers a Proposal for a World Digital Library."The invention of the printing press with movable type fanned religious wars in the 16th century. The onset of telegraphy, photography, and the power-driven printing press in the 19th century created mass journalism that fulminated nationalistic passions and world wars in the 20th century. The arrival in the late 20th century of instantaneous, networked, global communication may well have facilitated the targeted propaganda, recruitment, and two-way communication of transnational terrorist organizations more than it has helped combat them.

We are now discovering—painfully and much too slowly—that deep conflict between cultures is in many ways being fired up rather than cooled down by this revolution in communications, as was the case in the 16th and 19th centuries. Whenever new technology suddenly brings different peoples closer together and makes them aware of certain commonalities, it seems simultaneously to create a compensatory psychological need for the different peoples to define—and even assert aggressively—what is unique and distinctive about their own historic cultures."

Beth Noveck, director of New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, issues “Peer to Patent” (PtoP): A Modest Proposal in her blog. The proposal "would shift the patent-application process away from individual examiners to an internet-based, peer-review method." would shift the patent-application process away from individual examiners to an internet-based, peer-review method."

Wikimania 2005: The First International Wikimedia Conference is held in Frankfurt am Main.

In response to copyright problems Google announces a moratorium on the scanning of copyrighted books for its Google Print Library Project.

Classes begin at the University of California, Merced. The library of this new campus, focused on math, science, and engineering, includes approximately 10,000 journal subscriptions all available online, with no print journals. This "21st century research library" contains a limited collection of about 30,000 physical books, and offers interlibrary loans from other University of Calfornia libraries. It emphasizes providing access to digital books and the "deep web"-- databases available by subscription:

"The Internet is wide-ranging, but the bulk of the information needed for scholarly study and research is not freely available and cannot be found in a Google search. The UC Merced Library acquires and manages subscriptions to millions of scholarly articles in electronic journals, tens of thousands of electronic books, and hundreds of databases. Thanks to the Library, UC Merced students and faculty can access these scholarly electronic resources at any time with a connection to the Internet.

"The collection has what you want.

"The Library has many books and DVD movies on the shelves to support study in the areas of UC Merced specialization and to also provide a break from study with recreational reading and viewing. If what you need is not in the building, then use the University of California systemwide library catalog to request free, overnight courier delivery for any of the 32 million volumes at the other UC campuses."

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) selects Lockheed Martin Corporation to build the Electronic Records Archives (ERA) system, a permanent electronic archives system to preserve, manage, and make accessible the electronic records created by the federal government. The ERA system will capture electronic information – regardless of its format – save it permanently, and make it accessible on whatever future hardware or software is currently in use. Development of the system will continue over the next six years, and cost $308,000,000.

Second International Conference of the Preservation of Digital Objects takes place in Gottingen.  (The first international conference in this series took place in 2004 in Beijing.)

Google Print morphs into the Google Print Publisher Program and the Google Print Library Program.

Every day during this month 1,500 new articles are added to the Wikipedia.

The Open Content Alliance in association with Yahoo and the Internet Archive announce plans to build a universally accessible digital archive of published information.

Global sales of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter book series surpass 300,000,000 printed copies.

Scientists at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology decipher the genetic code of the 1918 avian flu virus H5N1, which killed as many as 50,000,000 people worldwide, from a victim exhumed in 1997 from the Alaskan permafrost. They reconstruct the virus in the laboratory and will publish the genetic sequence.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt speculates that it may take three hundred years to index all the world's information and make it searchable. " 'We did a math exercise and the answer was 300 years,' Schmidt said in response to an audience question asking for a projection of how long the company's mission will take. 'The answer is it's going to be a very long time.'

"Of the approximately 5 million terabytes of information out in the world, only about 170 terabytes have been indexed, he said earlier during his speech."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation decodes printer tracking dots.

Microsoft announces that it is joining the Open Content Alliance.

he National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announces that the BlueGene/L supercomputer built by IBM performs at 280.6 trillion operations per second (teraflops) on the Linpack benchmark, the standard by which major supercomputers are measured. This shatters the previous high mark of performing at 135.3 teraflops. "IBM said in a statement that if every person in the world had a handheld calculator it would still take decades to perform the number of calculations Blue Gene performs every single second."

Alluding to Wolfgang von Kempelen's eighteenth-century automaton, The Turk, which purported to automate chessplaying when this was impossible, Amazon.com launches the Amazon Mechanical Turk, "a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do."

It is the first business application using Collaborative Human Interpreter, a programming language "designed for collecting and making use of human intelligence in a computer program. One typical usage is implementing impossible-to-automate functions."

At the UC Berkeley School of Information Mitchell Kapor delivers an address entitled Content Creation by Massively Distributed Collaboration. "The sudden and unexpected importance of the Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia created by tens of thousands of volunteers and coordinated in a deeply decentralized fashion, represents a radical new modality of content creation by massively distributed collaboration. This talk will discuss the unique principles and values which have enabled the Wikipedia community to succeed and will examine the intriguing prospects for application of these methods to a broad spectrum of intellectual endeavors."

The Library of Congress announces a plan to create the World Digital Library of works in the public domain. Google donates $3,000,000 toward the costs of planning this project.

At this time the Wikipedia contains about 3,700,000 articles in 200 languages.

By this time the Google Print project has morphed into Google Book Search.

The British Library with about 150,000,000 physical items on 625km of shelves may be the world's largest physical library, though the U.S. Library of Congress also makes this claim. The British Library adds about 3,000,000 physical items per year, which occupy about 12km of new shelving. At the end of 2005 the Library of Congress holds about 130,000,000 physical items and has more than 8,000,000 digital items online.

A peer-review comparison of selected science articles in the printed Encyclopedia Britannica with 65,000 articles by 4,000 contributors, and the online user-edited Wikipedia, conducted by the journal Nature, rates the Wikipedia nearly as accurate as Britannica.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opens PIXAR: 20 Years of Animation. "The Most Extensive Gallery Exhibition that MoMA has ever devoted to Animation along with a Retrospective of Pixar Features and Shorts." Notably MoMA finds it unnecessary to characterize the exhibition as "computer animation" since by this time virtually all animation is done by computer. They publish a 175 page printed catalogue of the exhibition.

Google issues their first monthly newsletter for librarians, the Google Librarian Newsletter. "Librarians and Google share the same mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. The goal of this newsletter is to highlight ways that we can work together to fulfill that mission, for patrons, students, and users."

The Wayback Machine, a digital time capsule at the Internet Archive, contains almost 2 petabytes of data and is growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month, a two-thirds increase over the 12 terabytes/month growth rate reported in 2003. Its growth rate eclipses the amount of text contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress.

Google announces the planned opening of the Google Video Store, "the first open video marketplace enabling consumers to buy and rent a wide range of video content from a major television network, a professional sports league, cable programmers, independent producers and film makers."

Having initially registered the domain name for free, and then temporarily losing it to a con man, Gary Kremen wins a lawsuit and sells Sex.com for $14,000,000. This is the highest price obtained for a domain name.

The Digital Curation Centre at the University of Edinburgh and the Wellcome Library, London, hold a Workshop on Future-Proofing Institutional Websites.

Free file-sharing of digital music on the web exceeds the sale of digital music downloads by many fold: "Total music sales - including online - are off some 20 percent from five years ago. Songs traded freely over unlicensed Internet sites swamp the number of legal sales by thousands to one."

The Walt Disney Company, born in the days of manual animation, acquires Pixar, the computer animation company, making Steve Jobs the largest Disney stockholder.

Apple launches iTunes U, a service that offers college-level lectures via podcasts.

In D-Lib Magazine researchers at Cornell University from the departments of Computer Science, Information Science, and the Cornell Theory Center describe plans for A Research Library Based on the Historical Collections of the Internet Archive.

By some estimates 92 percent of all cameras sold are now digital.

Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, former Microsoft executives and founders of Expedia launch the online real estate service company, Zillow.com.

"Zillow allows users to see the value of millions of homes across the United States, not just those up for sale. In addition to giving value estimates of homes, it offers several unique features including value changes of each home in a given time frame (such as 1, 5, or 10 years), aerial views of homes, and prices of homes in the area. Where it can access appropriate data, it also provides basic information on a given home, such as square footage and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Users can also get current estimates of homes if there was a significant change made, such as a recently remodeled kitchen. Zillow provides an application programming interface (API) and developer support network^.

"As a part of its API, Zillow assigns a numerical integer to each of the 70 million homes in its database, which is plainly visible as CGI parameters to the URLs to individual entries on its website. The identifier is not obfuscated and is assigned in sequence for each house or condo on the side of a street. Zillow reports on individual units, such as providing street address, latitude and longitude. When integrated with the features of a typical online reverse telephone directory and wiki-mapping services such as WikiMapia, it allows for nationwide "seating assignments" of U.S. neighborhoods for each house that has a listed phone number with a real human name." (quotations from the Wikipedia article on Zillow.com.)

Using object detection technology, researchers at the University of Buffalo, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the Adaptive Information Cluster at Dublin City University, in association with Google, develop software for scanning historical manuscripts in a way that recognizes handwriting to make electronic texts of these manuscripts searchable.

Vital US infrastructure, including power grids and banking systems, are put under simulated attack in a week-long security exercise called Cyber Storm. "The government concluded its "Cyber Storm" war game Friday, its biggest-ever exercise to test how it would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and bloggers."

Bloggers?

On the 60th anniversary of the public announcement of the ENIAC Computerworld publishes a previously unknown interview with J. Presper Eckert on the origins of the ENIAC.

Apple iTunes Store surpasses one billion iTunes downloads.

RLG opens ArchiveGrid, a new search engine providing access to nearly a million archive collection descriptions in thousands of libraries, museums, and archives.

Marc Weber and William B. Pickett found the World Wide Web History Center.

D-Lib Magazine publishes a special issue on "Digital Library Evolution."

Reflecting the influence of the Internet on physical library access and usage, the Library of Congress publishes The Changing Nature of the Catalogue and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools by Karen Calhoun.

Carmen Bambach of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York discovers on the priceless manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus an extensive invasion of molds of various colors, "including black, red, and purple, along with swelling of pages." Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, then the head of the Ambrosian Library, now head of the pontifical Council for Culture at the Vatican, alerts the Italian conservation institute, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, in Florence. In October 2008, it  will "be determined that the colors found on the pages weren't the product of mold, but instead caused by mercury salts added to protect the Codex from mold."

Representing the Library of Congress Professional Guild, Thomas Mann publishes A Critical Review of Karen Calhoun's paper published on March 17. This review rebuts various assertions in the Calhoun report.

Apple's iTunes Store is acknowledged as the biggest music retailer in the world, able to dictate its 99 cent per track retail price to music wholesalers.

In the New York Times Magazine Kevin Kelly publishes Scan this Book! -- an account of current developments working toward the "universal" digital library on the Internet.

In an article published in Wired Jeff Howe coins the term Crowdsourcing "for the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine an algorithm or help analyze large amounts of data."

The Chairman of Cisco systems, John Chambers, compares telepresence to teleporting in Star Trek, and says it will be potentially a billion dollar market.

Borrowing a technique from genetics, Blair Hedges describes the "print clock" method for dating examples of printing, including books and copperplates, issued from hand-operated presses.

OCLC merges with RLG. Combined programs and services are expected to "advance offerings and drive efficiencies for libraries, archives, museums and other research organizations worldwide."

A 1,200-year-old Book of Psalms is found by a construction worker in a bog in Ireland. This is the first discovery of its kind in 200 years.

"Fragments of what appear to be an ancient Psalter or Book of Psalms were uncovered by a bulldozer in a bog in the south Midlands. It is impossible to say how the manuscript ended up in the bog. It may have been lost in transit or dumped after a raid, possibly more than a thousand to twelve hundred years ago." The Director of the National Museum of Ireland, Dr. Pat Wallace, commented that "it is not so much the fragments themselves, but what they represent, that is of such staggering importance. In my wildest hopes, I could only have dreamed of a discovery as fragile and rare as this. It testifies to the incredible richness of the Early Christian civilization of this island and to the greatness of ancient Ireland." The find has even been compared with that of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The pages recovered appear to be those of a slim, large format book with a wraparound vellum or leather cover from which the book block has slipped. Raghnall Ó. Floinn, Head of Collections at the Museum, estimates that there are about forty-five letters per line and a maximum of forty lines per page. While part of Ps 83 is legible, the extent to which other Psalms or additional texts are preserved will only be determined by painstaking work by a team of invited experts probably operating over a long time in the Museum laboratory. Dr Bernard Meehan, Head of Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, has seen the discovery and has been invited to advise on the context and background of the manuscript, its production, and its time. He reckons that this is the first discovery of an Irish Early Medieval manuscript in two centuries. Initial impressions place the composition date of the manuscript at about 800 AD. How soon after this date it was lost we may never know."(quoted from the Society of Biblical Literature website)

MySpace, founded in August 2003, has 100,000,000 users.

Le Document a la Lumiere du Numerique (The Document in the Digital Era) is published by collaborating group of information researchers under the collective pseudonym, Roger T. Pedauque. The surname of the pseudonym means "web-footed."

The journal Nature announces that it is opening the peer review process to comments online in the form of a blog.

IBM, the largest patent holder in the U.S., announces that it "will publish its patent filings on the Web for public review as part of a new policy that the company hopes will be a model for others."

The start-up company Obvious launches the social networking and micro-blogging service Twitter: What are you doing?. Twitter "allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length."

Twitter will be increasingly used as a method of distributing brief news information.

Sony announces the Sony Reader, another attempt to provide an acceptable reading device for eBooks. A feature of the reader is that it only uses power when a page is turned. Thus theoretically 7500 pages may be read on the device with one battery charge.

The Royal Society of London announces that The Royal Society Digital Journal Archive, dating back to 1665 and containing the full text and illustrations of more than 60,000 articles, is available online.

The Walters Art Museum reports through The New York Times that the Archimedes Palimpsest, the unique tenth century source for two treatises by Archimedes: The Method and Stomachion, and the unique source for the Greek text of On Floating Bodies, also contains ten pages of previously unknown speeches by Hyperides, "one of the foundational figures of Greek democracy," "illuminating some fascinating, time-shrouded insights into Athenian law and social history." The palimpsest includes parchment from seven texts including two texts which remain to be identified.

This manuscript was purchased by a private collector at an auction at Christie's in New York on October 28, 1998. It has been characterized as one of the most important scientific manuscripts ever to appear on the market.

There are more than 100 million websites on the Internet. Between January and November of this year 27.4 million sites have been added to the web. (According to Netcraft.com there are 101,435,253 sites on the Internet.)

Google and various print newspapers, including The New York Times, announce that they will test a modified version of Google's AdWords program to place advertisements in print newspapers.

Google completes the purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock.

"A consortium of seven newspaper chains representing 176 daily papers across the country is announcing a broad partnership with Yahoo to share content, advertising and technology . . . . In the first phase of the deal, the newspaper companies will begin posting their employment classified ads on Yahoo’s classified jobs site, HotJobs, and start using HotJobs technology to run their own online career ads.

"But the long-term goal of the alliance with Yahoo, according to one senior executive at a participating newspaper company, is to be able to have the content of these newspapers tagged and optimized for searching and indexing by Yahoo."

The Boston Globe reports that the The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has begun closing its nationwide network of scientific libraries, effectively preventing EPA scientists and the public from accessing vast amounts of data and information on issues from toxicology to pollution. Several libraries have already been dismantled, with their contents either destroyed or shipped to repositories where they are uncataloged and inaccessible.

Ranking members of congressional committees write to Stephen Johnson, Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protectional Agency, demanding that the agency desist from destroying its libraries:

"Over the past 36 years, EPA's libraries have accumulated a vast and invaluable trove of public health and environmental information, including at least 504,000 books and reports, 3,500 journal titles, 25,000 maps, and 3.6 million information objects on microfilm, according to the report issued in 2004: Business Case for Information Services: EPA's Regional Libraries and Centers prepared for the Agency by Stratus Consulting. Each one of EPA's libraries also had information experts who helped EPA staff and the public access and use the Agency's library collection and information held in other library collections outside of the Agency. It now appears that EPA officials are dismantling what is likely one of our country's most comprehensive and accessible collections of environmental materials.
The press has reported on the concerns over the library reorganization plan voiced by EPA professional staff of the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA), 16 local union Presidents representing EPA employees, and the American Library Association. In response to our request of September 19, 2006, (attached), the Government Accountability Office has initiated an investigation of EPA's plan to close its libraries. Eighteen Senators sent a letter on November 3, 2006, to leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee asking them
to direct EPA "to restore and maintain public access and onsite library collections and services at EPA's headquarters, regional, laboratory and specialized program libraries while the Agency solicits and considers public input on its plan to drastically cut its library budget and services"
(attached). Yet, despite the lack of Congressional approval and the concerns expressed over this plan, your Agency continues to move forward with dismantling the EPA libraries. It is imperative that the valuable government information maintained by EPA's libraries
be preserved. We ask that you please confirm in writing by no later than Monday, December 4, 2006, that the destruction or disposition of all library holdings immediately ceased upon the Agency's receipt of this letter and that all records of library holdings and dispersed materials are being maintained."

In 2006 publishers in the U.S. sell 3.1 billion books. This is up just 0.5 percent from the 3. 09 billion sold in 2005. Of the 3.1 billion, 263.4 million are religious books, the fastest growing category in U.S. book publishing.

Yahoo and Reuters introduce programs to place photographs and videos of news events submitted by the public, including cell phone photos and videos, throughout Reuters.com and Yahoo's new service entitled YouWitnessNews. Reuters says that it will also start to distribute some of the submissions next year to the thousands of print, online and broadcast media outlets that subscribe to its news service. Reuters also says that it hopes to develop a service devoted entirely to user-submitted photographs and video.

Time Magazine names "You" as the Person of the Year:

"The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that 'the history of the world is but the biography of great men.' He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

"To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.

"But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes."

The Library of Congress launches a series of news feeds using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology.

The Wikipedia contains 1,543,119 articles in English.

Henry M. Gladney issues his monograph, Preserving Digital Information, as a printed book.

The Universal Digital Library has scanned over 1,000,000 books, surpassing its original goal set in 2001.

It has been estimated that more than 4.7 billion Bibles (in whole or in part) have been printed. That is more than five times the estimated number of 900 million printed copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, the enormous distribution of which occurred becuase it was "an unoffical requirement for every Chinese ciitzen to own, read and carry it at all times under the latter half of Mao's rule, and especially during the Cultural Revolution."

The Universal Digital Library estimates that there are "no more than 10,000,000 unique book and document editions before the year 1900, and perhaps 300 million since the beginning of recorded history."

The oldest currently published newspaper in the world, Post- och Inrikes Tidningar (Post and Domestic Newspaper), the government newspaper and gazette of Sweden, published on paper without interruption since 1645, switches over to a website exclusively.

Kevin Kelly writes in Wired Magazine: "Information is expanding 10 times faster than any product on this planet - manufactured or natural. According to Hal Varian, an economist at UC Berkeley and a consultant to Google, worldwide information is increasing at 66 percent per year - approaching the rate of Moore's Law - while the most prolific manufactured stuff - paper, let’s say, or steel - averages only as much as 7 percent annually."

In the February issue of Wired James Gleick writes: "Is the universe actually made of information?
Humans have talked about atoms since the time of the ancients, and ever-smaller fundamental particles of matter followed. But no one even conceived of bits until the middle of the 20th century. The bit is a fundamental particle, too, but of different stuff altogether: information. It is not just tiny, it is abstract - a flip-flop, a yes-or-no. Now that scientists are finally starting to understand information, they wonder whether it’s more fundamental than matter itself. Perhaps the bit is the irreducible kernel of existence; if so, we have entered the information age in more ways than one."

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project about 12 million Americans now maintain a blog.

On his main website, barackobama.com Presidential candidate Barack Obama launches my.barackobama.com. It is a social networking site that will build an online community of over a million members before the presidential election.

"Following their march from standard processors to dual-core and quad-core designs in 2006, Intel Corp. researchers have built an 80-core chip that performs more than a trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS) while using less electricity than a modern desktop PC chip ... 80 cores [on] a 275-square-millimeter, fingernail-size chip ... Intel ... [is] using the chip to explore new forms of tera-scale computing, in which future users could process terabytes of data on their desktops to perform real-time speech recognition, conduct multimedia data mining, play photorealistic games and interact with artificial intelligence.
Shrunk onto a single chip, that power would allow average consumers to use their PCs in new ways. They could use improved search functions on the vast amounts of digital media stored on home desktops, searching large photo archives for specific attributes such as all the shots where a certain person is smiling, or where that person is posing with a friend."

A new technology developed at Keio University carries with it the possibility that bacterial DNA could be used as a medium for storing digital information long-term--potentially thousands of years.

"Keio University Institute for Advanced Biosciences and Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus announced the development of the new technology, which creates an artificial DNA that carries up to more than 100 bits of data within the genome sequence, according to the JCN Newswire. The universities said they successfully encoded "e= mc2 1905!" -- Einstein's theory of relativity and the year he enunciated it -- on the common soil bacteria,  Bacillius subtilis."

According to an article in The New York Times entitled History Digitized (and Abridged), which points out that economic and copyright considerations require the digitization of library and archival collections to be very selective, the U.S. National Archives estimates that at the current rate of digitization of its 9 billion text records, it could take 1800 years to convert the paper text records in the National Archives to digital form.

The Walters Art Museum reports through  BBC News  that through the technique of multispectral imaging a previously unknown commentary on Aristotle has been discovered in the Archimedes Palimpsest, which was purchased by a private collector at Christie's in New York on October 28, 1998.

The genome of James D. Watson, co-discover of the double-helical structure of DNA, is sequenced and presented to Watson. It is the second individual human genome to be sequenced. The first was that of J. Craig Venter, which was sequenced in the human genome project completed in 2001.

Apple introduces the iPhone, an internet-connected multimedia smartphone with a virtual keypad and a virtual keyboard.

According to an article in LeMonde.fr the virtual reality site, Second Life, is being used for teaching foreign languages.

There are more than 2,000,000 articles in the English language Wikipedia. The Wikipedia exists in more than 100 languages. More than 75,000 active contributors edit a total of around 5,300,000 articles in the various versions of the Wikipedia.

MySpace has over 200,000,000 accounts. Within approximately one year it has gained 100,000,000 new accounts.

"An innovative tool to analyse and identify computer file formats has won the 2007 Digital Preservation Award. DROID, developed by The National Archives in London, can examine any mystery file and identify its format. The tool works by gathering clues from the internal 'signatures' hidden inside every computer file, as well as more familiar elements such as the filename extension (.jpg, for example), to generate a highly accurate 'guess' about the software that will be needed to read the file. . . .

"Now, by using DROID and its big brother, the unique file format database known as PRONOM, experts at the National Archives are well on their way to cracking the problem. Once DROID has labelled a mystery file, PRONOM's extensive catalogue of software tools can advise curators on how best to preserve the file in a readable format. The database includes crucial information on software and hardware lifecycles, helping to avoid the obsolescence problem. And it will alert users if the program needed to read a file is no longer supported by manufacturers.

"PRONOM's system of identifiers has been adopted by the UK government and is the only nationally-recognised standard in its field."

The Watchtower has an average semi-monthly printing on paper of 28,578,000 copies in 161 languages. This may be the largest and most linguistically diverse circulation printed on paper of any periodical.

Amazon.com introduces the Kindle.This unconventially-named e-book reader differs from other e-book readers because it incorporates a wireless service for purchasing and delivering electronic texts without a computer. The 6 inch electronic-paper screen is limited to grayscale at 167ppi resolution. 90,000 titles are available for download to the 10 oz. device at its introduction. The device can store about 200 books.