Where's The 114,000,000 Channel Guide?

On This Day In History
1993: World Wide Web launches in the public domain

Quote Of The Day
"The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for."
(Douglas Adams)

One of my favourite contemporary authors is Neal Stephenson. I began reading one of his early novels today, Snow Crash. I was surprised to see how long ago he wrote it; 1992, one year before the World Wide Web went public! In the author's note, Stephenson explains that he used the term "avatar" in the sincere belief that he had made it up, but only after publication did he discover that it was already in use on a virtual reality system called Habitat developed by F. Randall Farmer and Chip Morningstar that ran on Commodore 64 computers. 

It is going to be interesting to see how Stephenson's thirty-one year old ideas of how the internet would develop will match it's actual development. I wonder, for example, if he will predict the rise of something like the YouTuber? Apparently there are now 114,000,000 YouTubers on the internet, and I know that many of them are very popular with the children in my class. They have almost replaced pop stars and movie stars as teen idols. The two guys in my blip today are YouTubers, Koyakky's Studio, and they currently have a small exhibition showing in Loft, Umeda. I went there today. They are even popular enough to have dolls of themselves. 

The Man Who Married A Robot