Celebrating the "40th anniversary of the first stirrings of the internet," the British Guardian newspaper asked its readers to send in their experiences of online life, and used the response to create what it calls an "interactive people's history" of the world wide web from 1969 until today. Full of trivia and truth, it's accompanied by a series of articles about the history of the internet. Go and see why we should maybe consider YouTube more than just a source of timewasting amusement, every now and then.

A people's history of the internet: from Arpanet in 1969 to today [Guardian.co.uk]

From the story:

When Ed examined the traffic, he realized that Google was doing more than mapping the digital universe. Google doesn't merely link or point to data. It moves data around. Data that are associated frequently by search requests are locally replicated—establishing physical proximity, in the real universe, that is manifested computationally as proximity in time. Google was more than a map. Google was becoming something else.

I've heard many webbish futurists speculate that A.I. is going to come from search algorithms and user-generated content, but this is the first time I've ever seen anybody explain it in a plausible way. Excellent read. Image via Modern Life is Rubbish.

Engineers' Dreams [Edge via BoingBoing]

This scene leads into what is probably the most metal-esque moment in the show so far, with Dr. Horrible singing about how he's totally certain he's going to become an evil killer now that Hammer has taunted him to the point of mania. Plus, he has Bad Horse to please — the leader of the Evil League of Evil wants Horrible to prove himself to gain entrance to the League.

As ever, the show centers on Dr. Horrible's videoblog, which he has now discovered is so popular that the police watch it, as well as Captain Hammer. Which makes it hard for him to pull of heists he's talked about a lot in the previous entry. (The Freeze Ray didn't work out so well, because Hammer was waiting for him at the "secret demo" and threw a car at his head.

So far Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog has succeeded in toying with the online medium in a way that few online serials have save for perhaps Homestar Runner. Homestar's Strong Bad Email segments always remind you that what you're watching is on the internet rather than TV. This is sort of the opposite approach of most online video, which generally tries to be as close to TV as possible. This show is unapologetically a blog, however, and it's exciting to see television creators paying tribute to a web medium for once, rather than the other way around.

If online video is ever going to become a medium that challenges network TV, that challenge is going to start with shows like Dr. Horrible. Shows that aren't afraid to be what they are. You know, blogs. Where people sing and wear rubber gloves and take over the world.

Watch the new segment free here or buy it on iTunes. Get ready! The final episode airs Saturday, and then Sunday at midnight it will no longer be available until the DVD arrives.

While plenty of studies have already shown that friendships have become much more casual in an era of "friending" random people on MySpace, this new study takes that idea further. Its authors describe how reality TV and social networking sites feed into each other, creating a world where many people think of themselves and their friends less as real people and more like iconic celebrities. The researchers call this a shift toward having "mediated" selves, as if all social interactions take place via the media.

According to PhysOrg:

These heavy [reality TV] viewers also produced a significantly larger number of mediated selves and had a greater intimacy toward, and urge to interact with, the mediated social images of others.

All of these, say the researchers, are commonly considered celebrity behaviors . . .

"Promiscuous frienders may be reproducing the fame-seeking behavior that is modeled by reality TV characters," [researcher Michael] Stefanone says, adding that these behaviors are believed to reflect the systematic processing of messages and behaviors modeled within the [reality TV] genre.

But if you regard this study as picking up on an early stage in a greater social change regarding friendship, it's easy to see how the good kind of real-life promiscuity might be involved too. If we all begin to see ourselves as mediated people, as celebrities, we're less likely to need intimacy before taking the plunge into the sack. We'll imagine that we "know" somebody already because we've seen them online and so we don't need all those "take me out to coffee" preliminaries before getting busy.

We're All Stars Now [via PhysOrg]

Also, you can check out a PDF of the study.

You can see more videos shot during the blackout here, including one by Hutchins' fellow podcasting novelist Mur Lafferty. But as the inclusion of pros like Lafferty makes clear, this isn't going to be pure user-generated madness. Hutchins has lined up contributions from frequent Star Wars novel writer Michael Stackpole, as well as Scott Sigler, podcaster and author of Infected. Yes, it's a giant circle of SF podcasting goodness.

And you can play along too. Writes Hutchins:

How can you play? You gotta believe in this conceit: On November 19, 2007, the U.S. suffered a coordinated terrorist attack, and was plunged into a nationwide blackout. The country devolved into chaos. Power and order were restored two weeks later. You are invited to be a participant in that blackout. I'm opening the gates and empowering you to create content that will appear in the OBSIDIAN podcast and YouTube experience. You can record video of yourself suffering through this mayhem. You can call a voice mail number and leave a panicked message, or a news report from the field.

Become a Victim of the Obsidian Blackout [JC Hutchins]

Here's a snippet from the story's opening:

We stood on a hill overlooking the meadow. A bunch of other kids ambled behind us, rags and bones, scruffy faces, some little ones on the shoulders of the bigger. Bit by bit, as Uxo and the damn machine cleared the meadow, we'd advance to the new safe zone for a better look.

It was a comical sight, if not for the stakes: Volkovoy, dull gray heap, like a breaching whale, trundled and pivoted, roared and smoked, extruding claws and spades and hammers. It plowed up the sod. Now and then, if it couldn't defuse a dinger, Volkovoy flashed and shook, encasing and detonating the thing, then dropping it out the back, busted metal dung. Meanwhile, Uxo, sweetie, his tail curled back like the tongue of a letter "Q," walked and sniffed and walked. His smart flat face was matted and dirty, but when he yipped and looked back at me and the kids - "A bomb here, boss!" he seemed to say. "Look how good I am!" - his eyes were full of light. Then I'd tiptoe out to fetch the dinger and disable it. He knew not to lick me then.

The whole story is free online. Check it out. Photograph by Sarah Pickering.

"Uxo, Bomb Dog" [via Futurismic]

Choosing a main image was especially difficult because here's this amazing crashed FedEx plane with a bridge for a wing, these enormous turrets that look like they've grown out of the landscape, or this massive coastal battle.

Korean developer Reloaded Studios has only been open for a month, and this ambitious massively multiplayer action game is scheduled for release in 2010 and will be their first.

Set in the near future, The Day finds mankind discovering a way to travel between two connected parallel worlds. Players will face a changing world never before seen in an online game as they travel back and forth between the past and present, accomplishing critical missions that extremely influence and affect their present-day world. With the fate of mankind at stake, players are thrown into brutal warfare and a fight to keep humanity from slipping into self-destruction across time.

The Day screenshots [Gamers Hell]