Category: history
September 26th 2000 I started to count how many pages google had for specific terms. I am moving some data around, so while it was going by on a terminal window it caught my eye. Here some excerpts:
Peace
was: 6,290,000 today: 258,000,000 41x
War:
was: 16,000,000 today: 865,000,000 54x
Sex:
was: 24,200,000 today: 650,000,000 26x
Love:
was: 24,900,000 today: 1,500,000,000 60x
Apple:
was: 5,920,000 today: 342,000,000 57x
Microsoft:
was: 15,000,000 today: 503,000,000 33x
Linux:
was: 27,500,000 today: 301,000,000 11x
You know you are old when one of your favorite albums gets re-released in a 25th anniversary edition and it takes you three years till you get around to actually listen to it. But even in hindsight I could have made worse choices for the soundtrack of what I did when I was sixteen.
An interesting look at actual web usage of news papers. I like how the author takes abstract numbers and puts them in a meaningful context.
Newspapers used to run things. They used to be everywhere. In Paris a couple of weeks ago I realized at some point that we had not seen anybody reading a paper. Even books were rare. It was not only a sudden but also a complete change of habits.
I think we have no actual idea what this means and will mean for the future. Technology develops in a certain pace determined by the problems to be solved and the momentum and financial interests behind it. Peoples use and application thereof is a completely different story.
In hindsight things seem to make sense. But actually only if you choose to ignore facts that don’t fit the pattern. Texting for instance, now a billion dollar revenue stream for cellphone carriers, was never intended to be used by people. It was considered a byproduct of some engineering mode for cell phones.
The invention of the Kinetoscope preceded the existence of movies as we know them by more than a decade.
Technology for pre – internet media was unable to adopt. It took great efforts to shoe-horn color into black and white TV signals. 35mm was the dominantly width in use of film strips used in movies as long as movies existed, and before they became digital.
The internet connects mostly computers with each other. This simple fact puts it into its own league as far as media technology is concerned. MySpace goes and Twitter comes at break neck speed. Limited only by peoples imagination and their willingness to adopt.
Trying to apply mechanisms and rules from ‘old media’ in the Internet space will be as successful as the applications of lessons learned from WW1 was helpful to France when they felt save behind the Maginot line.
I often wondered what would be wrong with Rupert Murdoch. And I don’t mean that fact that the mother of his 6 year old youngest kid is ten years younger than his firstborn. I wonder why somebody who is worth billions can not think of anything better than to go to work.
Running an almost proverbial media empire is probably not a smooth way to spend a day. News Corp announced their ‘numbers’ a couple of days ago.
They had to correct a couple of billions in ‘Good Will’ that they had previously on the books.
Following suit is now the plan to charge for content. It does not take sybillic powers to see that this will fail royally. Allot of News Corps page views are based on content that is -let’s say- somewhat shallow. There is no shortage of that on the net. I doubt people ever will pay for that.
And content that might be worth paying for is already non-free. The problem with that is that I rather pick up the WSJ in paper and enjoy the resolution, large display size and fast and easy navigation than to sign up for some thing with an existing media company. Not that paying for content would be bad. The problem is that so far no media company has managed to create a system that works well enough for me to pay for.
I don’t think that Rupert Murdoch will try his pay systems himself and enter his credit into the form that his IT mignons will drum up for this.
In 2007 GM lost $4,589 on each car they sold, in 2008 $4,670. Imagine any GM car, then remove things from it that cost four and a half grand*. This is the car you would get when would try not to loose money on making them. What do you care? Well you should, since next week you will probably own GM. And their losses will (continue to) come out of our (tax) pocket.
* OK, I got those numbers from the Internet and did the division myself, so all sorts of things could be wrong here. And you can also put back about one thousand dollar worth of parts into your imaginary Escalade: That’s what gets spend on marketing to convince you to buy the thing. How about a spare tire, seatbelts, a radio and a fan on the passenger side?
This is a nice visualisation of how the world developed.
Tools for people to create content of any kind are widely available since a long time. Still it feels rare when there is something like this.
"We have trade missions back and forth, we do" said Palin. "It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there, they are right next to our state. "
So the current one could not talk straight. But people wanted him anyway. twice. Or maybe 1.5 times. Turns out that running the country on stupidity got us in the biggest bubble ever. The US / Russian relationship is still the one with the most potential for danger. Hearing this women talk like this about it is scary. With the dumb president people thought / hoped that the VP would take care of things. He might even have. Who knows. This women could technically run the show.
That is scary.
Bush running things was scary. And we see now how much they let things slide in the wrong direction. This bubble is Bush made. It got created by turning the interest rate screw in the wrong direction for to long. Simple as that. A more intelligent administration could have avoided this problem quiet easily from building. Just don’t let the housing prices inflate that much. Interest rates are controlled by the fed. Carefully raising them would have cost a couple of fractions in growth. Maybe. But it would kept the system in the healthy zone, not where we are right now.
DVDs are cheap. They can be. I picked up the habbit to have lots of unwatched DVDs around. My very own Netflix. With the upside that I get to pick from 50 unwatched DVDs one that I feel like and watch it right away. Last night I watched ‘Lolita’. Funny how black and white can feel more real than color flicks. Maybe it’s because color in movies was always exagerated. Pleasing to look at, but hardly a truthful representation of reality. Black and white does not even try to be real.
To contrast that long Kubrick flick I watched “Something Wild” today. Actually it was much better than I remembered it. Maybe I should write a web application that picks up all 48 tracks from the soundtrack and buys them via AmazonMP3. For about 30 seconds they fade in and out to “Pili Pili” by Jasper van’t Hof in the movie. It’s 15:44. iTunes wants only to give it to you if you buy the entire album for $11. Amazon has it for 99 cents. The way it should be. Actually I will be buying mp3s now from Amazon. Having no DRM is how things should be. Collecting DVDs is nice. Specially since they are no longer hindered by DRM. Being able to get music right away, and actually have the file and not some DRM-locked-crap is really nice. I guess I like collecting things.