Oh yeah, Blogs... Soooo passé

"Douglas Quenqua reports in the NY Times that according to a 2008 survey only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days meaning that "95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled." Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it's probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views. "There's a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one." Many people who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged. "I did some Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month," says Matt Goodman, an advertising executive in Atlanta who had no trouble attracting an audience to his site, Things My Dog Ate, leading to some small advertising deals. "I think I made about $20 from readers clicking on the ads.""

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html

Slashdot | The Big Bang Vs. the Big Rumble

Slashdot | The Big Bang Vs. the Big Rumble WBUR radio in Boston hosts a talk with two physicists, Alan Guth and Neil Turok, who represent, respectively, the consensus theory of the inflationary Big Bang and an upstart theory of the initiation of the universe in the collision of two three-dimensional "branes." Turok and Paul Steinhardt developed their "Ekpyrotic proposal" out of the mathematics behind string theory. In the audio the two physicists are perhaps more respectful of one another's views than the host wishes them to be. If you ignore the "let's you and him fight" framing of the debate, you will hear some interesting physics elucidated.

I wanted to hear the discussion before posting on my blog... but haven't had the time yet to listen, but before the links get lost in a big pile of /. newspostings.. I blog it anyway.

Small, smaller, ...

*~A Tiny Glimpse~* is where you can see something about why, well.. ehrrr... ehmm... we are quite small. This is a GIF-animation and quite short.

The one below takes 9 minutes, but worth watching:

(this is supposed to be the video "Powers of Ten", made in 1977. Unfortunately, the video is hard to find at the moment, due to copyright issues of the Eames-heirs, but if you are willing to share your email address at powersof10.com you can still see it)