Collection of Insane and Fun Facts
France had a “proto-internet” called Minitel, to which half the population had access. It allowed for buying plane tickets, shopping, 24-hr news, message boards & adult chat services. It was used to coordinate a national strike in 1986. Some believe it hindered the internet’s adoption in France.
Free services like Craigslist have decimated the classified advertising departments of newspapers, some of which depended on classifieds for 70% of their ad revenue. Research has shown that Craigslist cost the newspaper industry $5.4 billion from 2000-2007.
The Soviet Union lasted long enough to be given it’s own internet domain name, .su, which it received only 15 months before dissolving.
100% of Iceland’s population has the internet, the only country in the world.
In 2016, North Korea accidentally leaked its DNS data, showing they only have 28 “.kp” domains. In comparison, there are 10 million “.uk” domains.
The Internet has a patron saint named Saint Isidore of Seville. He compiled the knowledge of the ancient world and made it accessible for his own and future generations around 600 AD.
In 2001, Neopets was the fourth most trafficked website on the internet, 8 spots in front of Google.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project study, published in Aug. 2011, found that 8 percent of Internet users do not use email or search engines. Somehow, this sizable portion of the online population manages to surf the web some other way… perhaps by typing in URLs by hand?
France banned mentions of Twitter and Facebook on TV and radio, as in “Follow us on Twitter” or “Like us on Facebook” because they were deemed as promotion and unfair to other sites.
In an experiment, a Google A.I supercomputer was given free access to the Internet and the ability to examine the contents of the network. There were no restrictions or guidelines, the powerful super intelligence was simply allowed to explore the entire human history and experience. And what do you think this supercomputer has chosen out of all this wealth of information? It began browsing though images of kittens.