Sunday, August 1, 2021

Friendship Day

 Friendship Day (also International Friendship Day or Friend's Day) is a day in several countries for celebrating friendship. It was initially promoted by the greeting cards' industry; evidence from social networking sites shows a revival of interest in the holiday that may have grown with the spread of the Internet, particularly in India, Bangladesh, and Malaysia. Mobile phones, digital communication and social media have contributed to popularize the custom. Those who promote the holiday in South Asia attribute the tradition of dedicating a day in honour of friends to have originated in the United States in 1935, but India celebrates Friendship Day on the first Sunday of August.[1] In Nepal, Friendship Day is celebrated on 30 July each year. In Oberlin, Ohio, Friendship Day is celebrated on 9 April each year.

History

Friendship day was first proposed in Paraguay in 1958. It was originated by Joyce Hall, the founder of Hallmark cards in 1930, intended to be 2 August and a day when people celebrated their friendships by holiday celebrations.[3] Friendship Day was promoted by the greeting card National Association during the 1920s but met with consumer resistance – given that it was too obviously a commercial gimmick to promote greetings cards. In the 1940s the number of Friendship Day cards available in the U.S. by had dwindled and the holiday largely died out there.[4] There is no evidence to date for its uptake in Europe; however, it has been kept alive and revitalised in Asia, where several countries have adopted it.[5]

World Wide Web Day


 There is no denying the importance of the World Wide Web. In fact, most people rely on the World Wide Web in order to find out information and carry out tasks online every day. It is integral to a lot of jobs as well. Therefore, it is only right that we have a day to honor the World Wide Web, and that is what World Wide Web Day is all about.

Have you ever found yourself saying “where would I be without the Internet?” – This is something that a lot of people remark all of the time! This is especially the case when you have an unexpected Internet outage, and you can’t get online. You don’t know what to do with yourself. The World Wide Web has made it possible to do so many things that were simply not achievable before. This includes catching up with friends and family members that live on the other side of the world, as well as finding out information about virtually any topic! It really is quite remarkable to think about the power that the Internet has today and how it has enriched our lives in so many different ways. 

If you do some digging online, you will see that there are some really interesting facts about the World Wide Web, and you can spend some of your day finding out more about these. It is incredibly insightful! For example, you can take a look at the first-ever image that was posted on the World Wide Web. This was uploaded in 1992 by Berners-Lee. It was a photo of Les Horribles Cernettes, which is a parody pop band that was founded by employees at CERN. 

You have also probably used the term “surfing the net” a lot. Did you know that this was created by a librarian called Jean Armour Polly? She is credited with coining the term. This was as a consequence of an article she published called “Surfing the Internet” in March of 1992. This article was published in the Wilson Library Bulletin at the University of Minnesota. 

Here are some other facts that you may not know about the World Wide Web…

The first computer used by Sir Tim Berners-Lee as a web server was a NeXT computer.

This computer was also used to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb. 

It was announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone in 1993.

The launch of the Mosaic web browser in 1993 was a major turning point for the World Wide Web. It is credited with popularizing the World Wide Web.

While the first popular search engine is known as Yahoo! Search, it is believed that Archie was the first of its kind. This was the first tool for FTP archive indexing, enabling people to locate specific files.  

History of World Wide Web Day

In order to understand the history of World Wide Web Day, it is vital to understand the history of the World Wide Web. A lot of people think that the World Wide Web and the Internet are the same things, and so they use the terms interchangeably. However, this is not actually the case. The history of the Internet goes back a lot further than that of the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is actually a worldwide information medium whereby people can access it using their computers when they are connected to the Internet.

The World Wide Web was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 at the CERN center in Geneva, Switzerland, as a way for him to communicate with co-workers via hyperlinks. A quarter of a century later, WWW has become the main means of interaction, transaction and communication among humans, opening the door of opportunity for people in ways that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.

It is certainly interesting to look back at the history of the World Wide Web, as it has grown significantly over the years. There was significant growth in 1993. At the start of the year, there were only 50 servers around the world. However, this number had grown to more than 500 servers being online by October of the same year. Two of the earliest webcomics also started during this period as well: NetBoy and Doctor Fun. 

Advances in data compression made it possible for practical media distribution and media streaming to happen over the web. This is because of the impracticality of the high bandwidth requirements for uncompressed media. 

The number of websites that were live at this point were still very small in comparison to the number of sites that are live today. However, there were some notable websites that started during this period. For example, Yahoo! Directory was launched in January of 1994, and this was then followed by the search engine – Yahoo! Search – in 1995. It was, therefore, the first popular search engine on the World Wide Web. We also saw the start of web commerce in 1995, as Amazon and eBay were both founded. 



Celebrate about World Wide Web Day

We celebrate World Wide Web Day by getting online, taking hasty selfies to post on social platforms, arguing with trolls on blogs, taking notes from podcasts, holding VoIP conferences to discuss the weather, backing up our data to servers across the world, syncing photos for the whole family to see, booking our doctor’s appointments online and generally expressing our opinions in discussions which are oftentimes much ado about nothing.

You can also spend your day learning more about the World Wide Web. This includes the history of the web, as well as discovering more about the capabilities of the web today. There are so many different things that are now possible to do online. A lot of people simply do not realize the full potential of the World Wide Web. This is why World Wide Web Day presents you with the perfect opportunity to delve deeper and make sure you are using the web to its fullest. 

There are also a lot of events that go on around the world on World Wide Web Day, and so it is worth doing a bit of digging into this. Some major establishments around the world have conversations and interviews with major players in the creation and development of the World Wide Web. There are also different talks and activities going on involving technology leaders, entrepreneurs, and creators, and so you are bound to find a lot of exciting things going on online, as well as potentially at businesses in your local area too. In fact, you could even decide to run an event at your local business yourself; it’s a great day for marketing.