Posted on 05/04/2005 10:14:57 AM PDT by dead
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - Whether Al Gore did or did not invent the Internet, the former vice president will be recognized for playing a substantial role in its development at next month's 9th Annual Webby Awards.
To be held in New York June 6, the event at Gotham Hall will also recognize Websites in more than 60 categories for excellence and popularity.
Gore will receive the Webby Lifetime Achievement citation "in recognition of (his) pivotal role in the Internet over the last three decades," the awards organizers said. Vint Cerf, a founder of the Internet, will make the presentation.
Website winners include big and small: Mercedes-Benz USA (automotive), Google (GOOG: news, chart, profile) (Best Practices) and Dogster (community). "The winners reveal how the Web has become the driving force shaping popular culture, the marketplace, and society as a whole," said Tiffany Shlain, founder and chairwoman of the Webby Awards. http://www.Webbyawards.com
Another Internet-related get together is in the planning stages. Backers of PodcasterCon.org are trying to raise about $2,800 to produce a weekend event at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
And BillyJeff won a "Woody"...
Al Bore has always struck me as someone who couldn't find his butt with both hands and the lights on. I would almost bet he can't even find the internet--LOL!
And BillyJeff won a "Woody"...
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Yes, Clinton really had a BEAUTIFUL cabinet and VP didn't he? Makes you proud to be an American...all birds of a feather.
Give me a damn break. Gore has about as much to do with the invention of the Internet as he had with the invention of the transistor. The Internet arose for DOD research (during a time when Gore was young and stupid. This Cerf fool is likely some girlie man, wanting to kiss up to the left. The Internet exploded in growth precisely BECAUSE of NO government interference. I gather when this award is presented it will be a huge event with the MSM. They will fall all over themselves to idolize the genius of Gore. I can't wait to see what Gore states is his role. It is absolutely astounding, the utter gall of the parasite class.
The question is, which Al Gore will show up? Deadly dull Al, or Al who pounds the lectern and rants like a mental case?
His 'President Bush betrayed us' speach is a classic.
Oh wait!
Nevermind.
The recount from Florida just came in, and poor old Al lost again.
Did Algore invent these awards?
LOL. Thanks.
"Did Algore invent these awards?"
Yes -- it was the only way he could win!!
Al Gore says he invented the Internet. What does he mean?
It was a gaffe worthy of Dan Quayle, but with Clinton-style grandiosity. In a March 10 interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN, Al Gore bragged about his record. "During my service in the United States Congress," he said, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Wow. Al not only writes turgid environmentalist tomes, he also writes computer code. He created the Internet. What a 21st-century guy!
By the next day, the ridicule was flying - mostly through Gore's supposed brainchild. Declan McCullagh broke the story in the online Wired News and his Politech e-mail news service, pointing out that Gore was just 21 years old when the Defense Department commissioned the original ARPANET in 1969. By the time Gore got to Congress in 1977, wrote McCullagh, "Email was flourishing. The culture of the Internet was starting to develop through the Jargon File and the SF-Lovers mailing list."
Republicans jumped to mock the veep. "If the Vice President created the Internet, then I created the Interstate highway system," said Dick Armey, the House majority leader. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, a notorious neatnik, claimed to have invented the paper clip. Lott's press release included his supposed early designs and a final version dated April Fool's Day, 1973.
But Al Gore was not lying to Blitzer. The vice president almost certainly believes that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet." His claim reflects a particular understanding of the world and of recent technological history. As such, it reveals more than mere grandiosity and spin.
To understand Gore's bizarre boast, you have to know a lot of details about the history of the Internet. It's not enough to say that ARPANET started in 1969. A self-contained network for Defense Department researchers would be of interest only to military historians and a few techno-geeks. The Internet grew beyond ARPANET because of two related developments.
First, the Internet community developed the underlying programs - the "protocols" known as TCP/IP - that allow wildly different computers to communicate with each other. This programming infrastructure was what let "the Internet" evolve to encompass a bunch of independent networks, both public and private. TCP/IP's creators wisely left those protocols very generic, enabling future innovators to build other structures, including those that made the World Wide Web possible, on top of them. ARPANET itself converted to TCP/IP in 1983.
Second, in 1985 the National Science Foundation agreed to fund a "backbone" network among five supercomputer sites. Academic institutions could connect to the backbone if they organized regional networks of their own; the NSF provided two-year grants to cover the regional networks' startup expenses, after which universities paid their own way. Combined with the communications power of TCP/IP, this NSFNet boosted the number of interconnected computers to critical mass. It displaced ARPANET as the driving force in the development of a worldwide network of interlinked computers.
In this important sense, "the Internet" dates not to 1969 but to the early 1980s. Gore enters the picture a bit later - in 1987, when he supported a drive by universities to expand funding for NSFNet. That drive became law in the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, which gave about $1 billion to high-performance networks and computers; about $150 million of the funding was new money, with the rest consolidated from other programs.
"Gore gets credit for cheerleading on networking from '87 on, and for getting the agencies to get off their behinds and coordinate things a bit," says Mike Roberts, who lobbied for NSFNet funding as vice president of networking at Educom, an association of universities. "But [he's] not exactly the father of the Internet."
So Gore was there in 1987, long before most politicians had any notion that the Net existed. But the basics - the software and hardware infrastructure on which the Internet grew - were already in place. His "initiative" (which wasn't actually his idea) may have speeded its development a tad, but Gore's work did not create the Internet.
The history of the Internet is not, as some people have tried to make it, a libertarian just-so story. It is a messy tale in which the government played a significant role. That role was, however, far more subtle than the plans of industrial policy gurus or techno-boosting politicians.
In fact, we have a pretty good example of what sort of Internet we would have gotten if Al Gore, or someone like him, had created an "information superhighway" on his own initiative. It's called Minitel - the French state phone company's system of terminals. In true French fashion, Minitel was grand, comprehensive, and carefully planned. It was state-of-the-art in the mid- 1980s. And it has barely changed since then. source
Oui oui.
No, the Webby is a real award. My company was a finalist in the Religion/Spirituality website category.
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