the unread written

history internet media

Dennis Baron’s book “A Better Pencil” does not only has a nice title, but going by this Salon Interview it seems to well worth the read.

I tend to disagree with him when he proclaims:


And the funny thing is that you could put anything out there, and somebody is going to read it.

I think there is an awful lot of things that get written today and that will never be read. And not only on Twitter. We tend to apply the existing rules, concepts and understandings for way to long. Cars looked as if you were to put a horse in front of them for way to long. In the past if something got written then it indeed got read. Varying audience. But since publication cost was significant filters on many levels made sure that it was recoverable.

Now publication cost is zero. Yet, we still assume that we publish it and they will view it. This does no longer apply, since their is simply not enough readership to go around.

The corpus of unread things we cared to write is not a bad thing in itself. If we were aware then it would regulate itself.

The error of an assumed audience becomes expensive when you pour resources into something that will never find an audience that justifies the efforts that went into it. That video that you crafted so nicely for your company was not worth it when only a couple hundred people will ever watch it. Company websites cost sometimes 5 dollars or more per visitor. A visitor that most of the time will have forgotten about it after 2 seconds.

post progress

history

Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre

INTERDUBS podcast

interdubs

I would get the New York Yellow Pages from audible if Jeff Heusser would read them. Sorry that do talk so much in this podcast.

what we do for a living

history

nicely visualized

3269 days later

google history internet

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

ssh prime agent

linux

(sorry if this should not make any sense to you. This is a note for me to go back to. Even though I bring new machines online regurlarly I forget the exact steps for this)

on X
ssh-keygen -t dsa

add content of .ssh/id_dsa.pub in the end of .ssh/authorized_keys2 on Y. Only thing we need to do on Y.

after boot of X run

ssh_info_file=~/.ssh-agent-info-`hostname`
ssh-agent >$ssh_info_file
chmod 600 $ssh_info_file
source $ssh_info_file
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_dsa

before login from X to Y
source /root/.ssh-agent-info-hostname