Time for Word to die?

From Slate: It’s time to give up on Microsoft’s word processor.

Not only is it bloated, but it was designed for printing, not for publishing on the web, a task that perform very poorly.

The Philippines

Every once in a while I check quantcast.com to see what they have to say about my website. I was puzzled by what I saw this week (Click on the graph to see it all):

The brown part of the graph shows visits from the Philippines, and in June my site was getting as many visits from the Philippines as it was from the U.S. I have do not know why, though I suspect that some course there was using the site for class assignments.

Usage of the site reflects what happens at school. Use is heavy from Monday through Friday and drops off dramatically on Saturday and Sunday. Visits are lower in the summer than they are during the school year. Christmas and Thanksgiving vacations are evident, though not shown on this graph. Visits for the first semester have been higher than visits for the second semester.

The most recent report says that 157584 websites sites have bigger U.S. audiences.

Is anyone really this stupid?

I get a lot of Nigerian scam letters, some of them well done and some not very well done. This one is in the not well-done category. Are there really people who would send money after getting this?

United Nations Assisted Program
Directorate of International Payment
United Nations Liaison Office - Africa

To The Attention Of Beneficiary,

This email is to notify you about the release of your outstanding payment which is truly $2.500,000.00 Million Dollars The Federal Government scheduled a time frame to settle all foreign debts which includes Contract/Inheritance/Lottery (Sponsored by Microsoft and Shell Petrolum Lottery) and other international loans. News had it that over the past, numerous individual(s) who happen to be impostors (claiming to beindividuals, banks and organizations) are claiming to release numerous sums of fund via numerous ways.

You have two options to receive your payment which is either a Pin Based ATM card or Certified Cashier’s Check. You are advised to select one out of the two options on how you wish to receive your $2.500, 000.00 Million Dollars through ATM card or Check which will be shipped via Ups Express Shipping Courier Company and would get to you within 2 to 3 working days at most.

DO NOT SEND MONEY TO ANYONE UNTIL YOU READ THIS MASSAGE:

The actual fees for shipping your ATM Card/ Check is $125.99 Dollars but because Ups Express Shipping Courier have temporarily discontinued the C.O.D which gives you the chance to pay when package is delivered for international shipping as stated on their

We had to sign a contract with them for bulk shipping which makes the fees reduce from the actual $125.99 Dollars to $98.99 Dollars nothing more and no hidden fees of any sort! You are advised to contact the dispatching officer responsible for the shipping of your Check or ATM Card with the following information for shipping of your payment through Check or ATM Card.

Contact: Mathew Benson

United Nation Dispatching Officer

E-Mail: ( deleted )


Phone Number : deleted

Make Sure you provide him with the following information:

1,Your full Name.
2,Your Address where your payment will be dispatch to you:.
3,Home/Cell Phone:.
4,Preferred Payment Method (Check or ATM):

The dispatching officer will provide you with instructions on how you are to make the payment of $98.99 Dollars only for the shipping of your ATM Card or Cashier’s Check. Remember that you are not paying any fees extra no matter what. Once again note that the actual Ups Express Shipping Courier Retail Price is: $125.99 Dollars Your Price (Because of our contract signed): $98.99 Dollars ($27.00 Dollars Savings!)

Respectfully,

Dr. Gee Pascal
UN Envoy (African Region)

What is a website worth?

Quantcast.com ranks Huffington Post as the 27th most visited website with 30.5 million monthly U.S. visitors and 39.5 million monthly global visitors. AOL is buying it for $315 million. Quantcast.com currently ranks ingrimayne.com, which contains the on-line Cybereconomics textbook, as the the 49,853rd most visited website with 30.9 thousand monthly U.S. vistors and 57.3 thousand global visitors. Both are Quantified, which means that more visits get recorded by Quantcast than would get recorded for sites that is not Quantified. Based on these numbers, ingrimayne.com is roughly 1000 times smaller than Huffington Post. Is it worth 0.1% of what Huffington Post is worth? Anyone willing to make such an offer will find a very receptive audience.

Update: AOL collects $250 million dollars each year from people who do not understand that it is free, but keep paying for it:

A friend of mine has an AOL e-mail address, so I called her and gently asked if she is still paying the AOL subscription fee.

“Well, yes, I like the service, and everybody already has my AOL address,” she said.

I tried explaining that all this is free, but I’m sure she was skeptical. How can something that’s valuable now be free?

AOL’s paid subscriptions are declining each year, down from about 8 million five years ago. Folks are getting the message, but not a certain group that basically doesn’t care to understand how the Internet works.

The world according to Facebook.

Here. Explanation here.

Precocious

From the Wall Street Journal:

A 23-year-old Russian man accused by U.S. authorities of generating nearly a third of the spam e-mails worldwide is expected to be arraigned Friday in a Milwaukee Court.

The quotation is from the article in the print edition, which goes on to say that he used 509,000 infected computers to send as much as 10 billion spam e-mails a day that sold items including fake Rolex watches and counterfeit Viagra.

I am so impressed that I cannot get too angry, even though his operation has cost me wasted time deleting unwanted e-mail messages. At 23 I was unable to earn a living, so I went to graduate school.

Who is using the web?

Video will rule the web:

Netflix's streaming service has become so popular that it is now the largest source of U.S. Internet traffic during peak evening hours, according to Sandvine Inc., a Canadian company that supplies traffic-management equipment to Internet service providers.

Streaming by Netflix subscribers accounted for about one-fifth of that peak-time traffic, more than double the volume flowing from Google Inc.'s YouTube, Sandvine said.

Wikipedia on climate change

Lawrence Solomon has an interesting article on the climate change administrator for Wikipedia, who made sure that the Wikipedia articles on the topic had the proper viewpoint.

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.

The comments are interesting, and there is also a long discussion in the comments climateaudit. Here is the bottom line:

Whilst Wikipedia is pretty good on non politically contaminated issues such as mathematics it is a largely useless s minefield when it comes to highly contentious issues.

econ blogs for students

The best blogs for economics students:
http://www.onlineuniversities-weblog.com/50226711/100-best-blogs-for-econ-students.php

The end of e-mail

I was at a conference in August of 2007 and was told that e-mail was old fashioned, and that the young no longer used it much. It was being replaced by social networking. Now it is not just the young that are dumping e-mail according to an article in The Wall Street Journal.

The future of education

At Pajamas Media Richard Fernandez looks at the problems of Hollywood and then wonders if higher educations is next:

The current woes of higher education have been ascribed to declines in endowment and a much more competitive market for intellectual capital. People just aren’t willing to pay huge amounts of money for a credential that doesn’t give them real marketable skills any more.

Those are serious factors, but there’s a bigger threat. The process of knowledge exchange and mentoring is rapidly going online, not only through posted documents but over collaborative platforms. People are learning skills for which no degree granting course exists and without going to universities. I’ve seen projects formed, software built, meetings held and mentoring proceed apace without the participants ever meeting each other once in person. Sooner or later this process will reach a critical mass and begin to rival the formal schooling system, at least in certain spheres. How much longer before students begin wondering whether the Ivy League model will be ripped apart by the digital revolution?

I teach more economics on-line than I do in the classroom.

Farewell, Geocities

A few weeks ago I received the following e-mail from Yahoo:

Dear Yahoo! GeoCities customer,

We're writing to let you know that Yahoo! GeoCities, our free web site building service and community, is closing on October 26, 2009.

On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files.

I checked quantcast.com to see how much traffic it got, and it was still getting almost 12 million visits from the U.S., down about 3 million from six months ago, but still big enough to rank as 58th biggest site. It is remarkable that yahoo was not able to make money on that much traffic, but that may say a lot about why yahoo has not done well.

A comment on the closing at techcrunch.com:

There are plenty of other Website creation and hosting services out there, including blog platforms such as Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad, as well as Website creation and hosting services such as Ning, Webs, Jimdo, Snapages, Weebly, and countless more. GeoCities never really kept up with the times, but always remained a decent pageview generator.

Geocities was founded in 1995 Yahoo purchased it in 1999 for several billion--the number differed. Wikipedia has a good history of the site.

A PC World blog was rather snarky, but pointed to the problems the site had:

GeoCities grew weaker by the month. The proliferation of low-cost hosting options, combined with the increasing popularity of social network-style services in place of personal home pages, only contributed to its demise.

GeoCities is survived by two cousins, Angelfire and Tripod, along with an uncle, Jeeves. All three are believed to be terminally ill.

Others will follow, including, in time, this site. I have (soon had) a page there, along with pages at tripod and angelfire. Since angelfire and tripod put google ads on the pages, they may actually be making some money.

John Stossel

John Stossel is now blogging.

I got mail

I was a bit surprised when I got e-mail about a past post After all, the daily readership of this blog is rarely hits double digits.

Hey Robert,

I remember reading your post last week mentioning the Wall Street Journal article arguing that there are as many 450,000 professional bloggers. I recently came across an item that indicates a more peculiar trend --some people are being hired as full-time, 40-hour-a-week Twitterers:

http://bloggasm.com/screw-professional-blogging-become-a-professional-twitterer

Anyway, I thought this was something you and your readers would find interesting.

take care,
Simon

--
http://bloggasm.com
http://twitter.com/simonowens

Blogging, twittering, tweeting, youtubing, facebooking, myspacing, texting--the ways we communicate are changing. Last summer I attended a conference at DePauw University and was told that e-mail as a way of communication was old-fashioned. I thought my grandparents had experienced the greatest technological revolution early in the twentieth century with the internal combustion engine, the electric motor, and radio, but maybe the changes caused by the computer chip will be as profound.

Check the comments on a post on another of my blogs for an example of innovative advertising. I wonder if it is also effective.

Youtube and the democracy of the press

One of the fascinating things about youtube is that it allows anyone to be a video journalist. Here is an clever example of someone explaining the $100 million dollar budget reduction that President Obama recently proposed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWt8hTayupE

Youtube is 4

http://www.suntimes.com/technology/1540126,CST-NWS-youtube23.article

It is hard to believe that it is only four years old. It certainly has changed the face not only the Internet, but of the way we learn about the world.

The perils of misusing statistics

There has been a lot of reaction (here, here, here, here, and many more) on the blogs to an article on blogging in The Wall Street Journal. The article says:

It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year.

The author reacts to feedback at the end and states:

The question of how much traffic it takes to make a living also comes from the Technorati report. We say it takes "about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year" and Technorati states those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors the average income is $75,000

The original source for the numbers is http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/blogging-for-profit/

Among active bloggers that we surveyed, the average income was $75,000 for those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors per month (some of whom had more than one million visitors each month). The median annual income for this group is significantly lower — $22,000.

The huge difference between median and average says that there are a few very high numbers out there. It also says that if you are getting “only” 100,000 unique visitors per month, you will be getting a lot less than $22,000 since that is the median of all those getting 100000 or more uniques per month. Half of them are getting less than that amount.

It is good to know something about statistics when writing about them.

(Since its start, this blog has had 4124 page impressions and has earned me a grand total of 65 cents.)

A good story

I recently heard a story about a professor using grades to illustrate socialism, and then saw it on a blog. However, it is only a story, according to http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/socialism.asp

While we can't as yet pin down the origin of the grade averaging piece, anecdotal evidence indicates it's at least fifteen years older than its 2009 outbreak would tend to indicate, in that one of our readers says he heard it at bible college in 1994 from a professor teaching world civics.

It is a good story. Too bad it is not actually a true story.

Viral video

Here is a video with over a million views. I think it qualifies as a viral video.
Update: It was over 10 million views on April 15. Wow.
Update 2: There are a lot of blog reactions. For example, here and here.
Update 3: Even the mainstream media has noticed.

The video of Boyle's performance in the reality show "Britain's Got Talent" has set the record for the number of views in a week -- and shows no sign of slowing down.

Is Youtube doomed?

Youtube seems to be for Google like most of the divisions of Microsoft are for Microsoft, a money pit. It costs a lot of money to run, but it does not generate much revenue. So one observer who runs a competing site believes that Youtube in its current form is doomed. He thinks the user-created material will have to be axed. Comments to MarginalRevolution's link to this article think the future of Youtube may be brighter.