During all those crashes due to faulty hardware I must have forgotten to fix the mysql database for BlogsNow before I used it. I had to remove som 800K blogs that all had insanly high index ids. Now I am trying to be a good boy and set the auto increment correct via:
alter table blog AUTO_INCREMENT number_here
Just that it seems to take for ever. The temp file and index file grow very erratic since one hour. I will let it cook for a couple of hours, but this looks fishy. 30 million entries should not be that much for mysql …
“stone age”, “bronze age”
these terms align the history of mankind along the materials being used. While these segments are still valid it is also worth noticing that they have been establlished during the ‘steel age’. It was when technology had reached yet another pinnacle in the industrial use of metals.
Hundred fifty years later information technology shares the same fate: It’s frenetic paced development seems to change the world in unprecedented ways. It is only natural to ‘re-segment’ history along the current dominating paradigm of progress. A very broad separation could be:
1. Language
2. Reading/Writing
3. Printing press
4. Internet
It is certainly provocative to put the WWW in one line with those other three steps of human progress. The importance of each step compared to its predecessors is without a doubt declining. Language separates people from animals. Reading/Writing invented societies that are bigger than a couple of hundred people. The printing press established the domination of the european culture over the entire world. And the internet? Nobody knows. Still, I think it’s importance justifies to put it in one list with the three earlier ones. Human history can indeed be interpreted as the acceleration of the means of communication.
1. Language
Language allowed for a completely new and improved social interaction. Complex schemes could be planned and executed. Ask the average sable tooth tiger: he knows all to well how a couple of monkeys can make your life not only hell, but bring it to a sudden end. In parallel to language tools came into existence. Nobody would attempt to kill said tiger with bare hands. The argument can be made that only language allowed for the making of the tools. If you would try to make a weapon out of a couple of stones you would quickly realize that even though you are much stronger than the average ice age joe you will fail. No matter how many stones you have at your disposal, you are not more than lunch that happens to make funny noises. What you are missing is somebody to tell you how to make a weapon out of a stone. Since mankind seemed not to have hit the branches of the stupid tree over the last couple of thousand years, it seems that language is what brought tools into our world and kept them there.
2. Reading/Writing
Being able to ‘unrealtime language’ allowed for the next jump in human development. Without accounting nobody could have build a pyramid. All non tribal mass societies that I can think of have established a system of writing. Written language can travel in room and unidirectional in time. The commands of a ruler far away can be read thousands of miles away. And thoughts can be inherited. They can even outlast their thinkers. As a kid you see some magic in a treasure map or a message in a bottle. This magic is simply the power of reading and writing.
3. Printing press
What one person writes could be read by many, but only the printing press invented real mass communication. It allowed the word to spread. With this infinite multiplication concept ideas became ultimately powerful. The moment a printing press was churning out the first book all oppressive societies were doomed. Burning books became a sign of the desperation of the powerful people to maintain the un-maintable status quo of their rule. China and Europe were more or less on the same level of development in the midst of the last millennium. If there was a difference then China probably had the edge in many areas. Still, three hundred years later the entire world was ruled by a few european nations. The printing press allowed Europe to leap ahead in the global competition.
4. Internet
Since the internet is so new and evolving so quickly I am on the grounds of pure speculation now. Looking at the first three steps of culture technology advances each one spured a gigantic leap in human abilities. The Wright brothers could read about physics and metal technologies in books. Augustus could write laws for his far reaching empire that many people could read and copy. Many people that names we will never know lived a couple of years longer because of a story they have heard.
The internet allows knowledge to be shared in an entirely new ways. Knowledge wants to be shared. Even this text will be read by somebody.
The hype around google and very certainly it’s stock price have reached ridiculous dimensions. However, in the core this almost religious feeling towards an ugly website has a sound core: “Organizing the worlds information and making it accessible” is a pretty good glimpse on the real potential of the internet. We are only at the beginning here. The possibilities can only be guessed.
Just returned from a short trip to Rome. Via Craigslist we ended up in this Appartment in the Via Laurina. It’s just around the corner from Corso and Piazza del Popolo and worked well for us.
Best Coffee I ever had just across the street in a ‘BAR’ that really looks like nothing.
I will be offline until 3/30. No internet. No phone. No nothing. A first for almost ten years.
I am sure that everything that can go wrong will.
Almost as long as Vista is delayed.
I think that the PS3 and Vista will both come out together: Never. They share the sickness of the incumbent king. Too fat and saturated to really move. Sony is dreaming about 100 Million PS3 sold, only because they did so with PS1 & 2. And likewise Microsoft thinks that everybody will have to have Vista. Both are in for a surprise.
The same patterns can be found elsewhere: Google Video is not really amazing. It’s outright lame. Google is the incumbent search engine. Not their core business sucks yet. But new launches like Video or base or personal pages are less than great.
google maps This planet, really.
It must suck if your capitals skyline is dominated since fifteen years by a gigantic failure. I wonder if the leadership of North Korea has ever considered flying a passenger jet into it. Isn’t it that tall buildings will collapse if that should happen?
Just crossed the thirty Million weblog mark at BlogsNow tracks. Jason installed new memory, CPU and motherboard on the machine eight hours ago. I hope that the random crashes (MCE …4 ) it had are now a thing of the past. But it still could be the raid controller that causes the troubles. We will see.
Thirty million blogs! It’s online since almost two years, ran on three different machines in three different hosting situations.
There are about a quarter million web-pages in google with the term BlogsNow. popurls has roughly the same number. I think popurls started two weeks ago.
I find it very interesting to compare BlogsNow and popurls. The later one shot to internet fame instantly while BlogsNow only caters to a small and very slowly growing audience. Popurls is better than what I wrote in many many hours. The actual implementation of popurls would have taken me a week. Of course I did BlogsNow and not popurls. And also obviously I have hoped for instant internet fame when I wrote the fastest memetracker possible.
Technically I achieved my goal. BlogsNow’ performance is unsurpassed: It will reliably track _everything_ that people talk about. I still like it better than all others.
But let’s have a look why popurls got what BlogsNow wanted so badly and could never get. Popurl’s author is the first to say that the concept of a meta meta tracker is hardly new: diggdot.us paved the way into the mainstream, but I think there have been others.
The implementation of popurls works, it’s simple and nothings gets in the way. The design is what matters. It turns out that the idea of a meta-meta-track added with decent-design adds up to go over the threshold to become a meme in itself.
In the new attention economy you have to raise the interestingness of something above an imaginary threshold. It is almost impossible to push something there. Not even the biggest media buy will get you there. If your concept is not worthy then every person in the chain works against your piece (work, meme whatever it is). The resistance will become infinite. Many companies have wasted millions of ad dollars in the last years by ignoring this simple fact. If your idea raises above this threshold then it will attract more multipliers along the way. It’s too bad that ‘viral marketing’ became such a bad rep, since all agencies attached it to their failing attempt. Real meme’s do indeed work very much like a virus. The big difference is that every ‘host’ has the ability to alter the ‘virus’. We give those links, files and words new meaning when we pass them on. We comment them and make them our own. I could not say that from that last cold I got from someone and also probably gave to somebody else. The term ‘viral’ already contains the arrogance of agencies: They think they just can ‘infect’ the audience and then save their client some money in the media buy. Of course that’s now how it works: Most of their ideas are simply not good enough to compete with what is out there. There were some single incidences where commercials got some viral traction. None of them made room for a follow up. ‘Viral Campaigns’ by their definitions are one hit wonders. With the broadening of the tools and people getting more connected every day the odds move against the traditional marketers use of viral campaigns. Does this have anything to do with a BlogsNow vs. popurls comparison? Hardly. How did we get here?
Popurls became an instant ‘meme’, BlogsNow did not. I think in very simple terms I think it comes down to the fact that design matters. Popurls is an instant hit since it instantly communicates. The natural reaction is :”this is nice. I want to use this.” Within those 2 seconds a website has with a new visitor it is able to convey what is different about it. It tells it’s story well. The ‘elevator pitch’ of the internet must be over before the user blinks another time. There are always ten real and hundreds of potential other sites comparing with the one you are looking at.
My son is seven. He wants to write a computer game. He found google, and was very frustrated, that could not find ANY instructions how to make a computer game for seven year olds after he entered his request into google. I never told him to google it, or even to research it on the internet. His experience is that the internet might as well contain all the answers to everything. It’s this unprecedented amount of instantly available content that is the evolutionary pressure on every meme out there. The pace in that online (media) experiences grow in their quantity, variety and maybe even quality is equally unprecedented. So is the spread of the audience and their level of engagement: 1 person, 1 computer with internet connection, 1 hour. To say that the range of experiences is huge would be an understatement. It is awing. And spreading. We have the user on dial with internet explorer trying to get some news about balinesian dancing to the CEO on a laptop playing WOW while being on a plane. These are not the two extremes. These are two random points in an infinitely complex cloud of usage patterns. Hundred people watch a movie in the cinema. Their experience is pretty similar, they don’t even need to have seen it the same place or at the same time. Watching an old black white movie is almost a time travel experience. Hundred people what the movie on TV and the possibilities broaden. It used to be that the whole country watched the same stuff. There was the concept of a “Straßenfeger” in Germany in the 60s. It meant that a specific radio or TV series had such a big draw that it would ‘clean the streets’ (from people). There are only few events left that can obtain this mass attraction. Hundred people watching the same movie on TV might do so from a DVD, on the seventieth rerun, because their Tivo thought they should be watching it, or just because they are waiting for the show that follow this program. These hundred people might pay attention or might not. Since TVs tend to everywhere and just run after you turned them on, it is also one of the most ignored media outlets there is. Hundred people watching a clip that they got on a computer one way or another will have the most diverse media experience.
It is in this jungle of possibilities that the ability to communicate your idea between two blinks becomes mandatory. The idea needs to be decent, and then it needs to be easy to understand. Popurls instantly tells you that it’s a decent looking meta-meta tracker. Just when you think, ah so many links it kicks some pretty pictures your way. Your peaking ‘into it’ will be rewarded. By the time you have seen the entire page (2.5 seconds into your visit) you will have glimpsed over nine headlines, at least three or four are known items. popurls is a good mix of known and the new. All known is boring and will be clicked over quicker then you can say ‘boring’. All new is confusing. People are usually not curious enough to give new things the time to understand them.
The good design of popurls makes it work. As an engineer I thought that people would understand the aspect that BlogsNow is faster and more comprehensive than anything else. Even though it is, I did not manage to communicate this. And maybe it does not even matter. The first meme trackers got the webs attention, because they were a new concept. The fastest one is not a big deal. It’s functional difference needs repeated use an comparative analysis to understand. Memetrackers are not that important that people would do this sort of analysis. BlogsNow is a classic example for the fact that people and projects overestimate their own importance. Many web 2.0 startups think that they are Moses coming down from the mount Sinai. BlogsNow first goal was that it would keep me up to date with what is going on on the internet. And BlogsNow I can trust and, if needed, even tweak to let it behave better. Enough reason to let it keep going for next thirty million blogs. Popurls is not the first too and certainly not the last tool that will surpass BlogsNow in the amount of web attention it gets. It just is such a clear case that engineering does not really matter. The upside is that it was and is fun to code the fastest Memetracker there is. That, my constant use, and the fact that I have a neat copy of what mattered on the web in the last two years is enough reasons to keep it going. Despite the fact that nobody cares 😉
The accidental hit that is not so accidental. A movie that takes 1 second in your head. From start to finish.
Also a first is that the fan base alters the actual piece. Curious how this one develops.
As the HR article points out: the actual movie website is probably not worth mentioning. I never been there.
The real discussion happens everywhere. Or nowhere. Which also means that you can not buy it.
Of course I am sure there are 20 wannabees “SoaP” clones being pitched: “Spiders in an Elevator”, “Lions on a Boat” wait a minute, “Crocodiles on a Bus”.
An idea sometimes only needs four words. And then there are millions and millions of words around it.
Just copying the original thought and altering randomly by 2%. Till something else hits.