Skyway Recommended February 18th to 24th

Each Monday we’ll pass on links to articles we thought were well worth reading from the previous week, for those who live where we do (British Columbia, Canada), work like we do (high speed business internet), and think about things we do (internet trends, internet privacy, internet censorship, cutting-edge technology, etc.). If you don’t want to wait ’til Monday, we usually tweet and link to these as we come across them…

Ad Age |  Tracking Your Web Browsing: Web Tags Surged 53% in 2012

The labyrinthine maze of data-collecting technologies that makes the web hum became even more complex in 2012. A Global Tracker report by privacy-services firm Evidon measured sites across the internet and found 987 web-tracking tags from ad servers, analytics companies, audience-segmenting firms, social networks and sharing tools. That’s up 53% from the 645 unique trackers found in first quarter. Read More…

New York Times Bits Blog | Tech Predictions for 2013: It’s All About Mobile

If there is one theme that will be the topic of digital business this year, it is mobile. ComScore, which tracks Web and mobile usage, published a report about what happened in 2012, and what to expect in 2013. Read More…

NY Times Opinion |  Six Things Big Data Does Poorly

The big novelty of this historic moment is that our lives are now mediated through data-collecting computers. In this world, data can be used to make sense of mind-bogglingly complex situations. Data can help compensate for our overconfidence in our own intuitions and can help reduce the extent to which our desires distort our perceptions. But there are many things big data does poorly. Read More…

PC World | Outlook Preps for Mass Hotmail Migration

Hotmail users will be getting a new outlook on email before long. Late Monday, Microsoft announced that the preview phase for Outlook.com, the software giant’s new and improved Webmail service, is over after being used by more than 60 million people in its six months of existence. Now that’s it’s ready for prime time, Microsoft plans to migrate current Hotmail users over to the new interface by the time summer rolls around. Fear not; the transition shouldn’t be too painful, as your mail, contacts, and current account settings will come along for the ride. Read More…

The Atlantic Wire | The Web’s 19 Clicks of Separation

According to the lastest estimate, the Internet consists of trillions of individual pages in hundreds of different languages, but a paper by Albert-László Barabási, appearing in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society argues that it takes no more than 19 clicks to navigate from one page to what it estimates to be the 13,999,999,999,999 other publicly accessible web pages out there. Read More…