49 Amazing Social Media, Web 2.0 And Internet Stats

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49 Amazing Social Media, Web 2.0 And Internet Stats. I particularly like these:

133,000,000 – number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002

346,000,000 – number of people globally who read blogs (comScore March 2008)

900,000 – average number of blog posts in a 24 hour period

1,750,000 – number of RSS subscribers to TechCrunch, the most popular Technology blog (January 2009)

77% – percentage of active Internet users who read blogs

55% – percentage of the blogosphere that drinks more than 2 cups of coffee per day (source)

81 – number of languages represented in the blogosphere

59% – percentage of bloggers who have been blogging for at least 2 years.

Dell and Carbon Neutrality

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Mark Anderson is riled by media criticism (unspecified) of Michael Dell’s announcement that the company has achieved his goal of making Dell carbon-neutral ahead of the schedule he had originally set.

Following an announcement two years ago that global warming was a critical problem deserving of his own company’s focus, Dell CEO and Chair Michael Dell committed his firm to obtaining what conservationists call a “carbon-neutral” footprint.

Very few firms, in or outside the tech industry, have taken the various somewhat – complicated steps often required to achieve neutral carbon impact.

This last August, 2008, the company announced it had achieved this result ahead of schedule, and Michael Dell confirmed the achievement in a speech in September.

Since then, despite positive statements by those working as outside partners on the project, the company has actually come under fire for not doing more. The basic complaint seems to be: fine, your own company has done this, but until the entire supply chain (suppliers of parts) for each product is also doing it, you have nothing to boast about.

Where do these people come from?

I would like to personally congratulate Michael Dell and his company for, first, having the guts and vision to take a leadership position on the issue of becoming carbon – neutral as a firm; and, second, for committing the company publicly, thereby endorsing the value of this positioning; and then, most important, in following through, using a variety of techniques, from customers arranging for planting trees, to buying and investing in renewable energy sources, to achieve this goal.

Dell would appear to be the first computer company to have done this, although Apple has also been making strong strides in this direction. While this may feel like a competition, it isn’t – it is a race to maintain the climate of this planet, and for each company that “wins,” we all win.

For those weird media types who find an irresistible urge to criticize a process well-done, but perhaps not yet extended, I have a bit of unasked-for advice: why not help publicize what a great job Dell is doing in its own footprint, and then encourage the Dell keiretsu to follow Dell’s example?

It seems to me that there are no negatives here at all, only two steps in the right direction, both of them positive, that every firm will need to go through: first, make sure your own firm is carbon-neutral; and, second, encourage your supply chain to join you.

Right on!

Dell’s Limerick decision

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Astute comment in The Register about the implications of Dell’s decision to close its manufacturing plant in Limerick.

As the shockwaves of Dell’s dreaded but expected withdrawal from Limerick manufacturing reverberate around Ireland’s mid-west region, some lessons are emerging.

The big theme emerging in many reports and commentaries is that the boom in semi-skilled assembly line jobs is well and truly over. There doesn't appear to be any other business likely to come to Ireland and employ 1,000 plus workers on an assembly line. It’s cheaper to do it elsewhere, in a low-wage economy, and ship the goods to the geographies that would be served by an Irish base.

For suppliers like Dell that need a responsive assembly/manufacturing operation in the EU, the accession of Poland and other east European countries into the EU was a godsend; for Ireland, it has been a disaster. Where Dell is going other hi-tech employers may follow – Intel has a chip plant in Ireland, and HP makes printer cartridges there too.

For both of them the annual cost of an Irish worker will be more than the annual cost of a Polish worker. They too will be looking at the numbers and doing a what-if-we-moved-to-Poland spreadsheet calculation. The EU wants a level playing field, and limits what member countries do in the way of bribing businesses to come to them via grants, subsidies and tax concessions.

The conclusion is:

A dawning realisation in Ireland is that it will have to expand university and technical college education. If it’s a white collar future and not an assembly-line one, then that means the current generation of semi-skilled workers have had it. There’s more of them than the country currently needs and they’ll have to do the best they can whilst the country educates their children for the hi-tech R&D jobs.

These jobs will come in dribs and drabs, 20 here, 40 there, not in thousand-plus lumps. The IDA has got to attract many more firms to Ireland. For every Dell with almost 2,000 workers the IDA will need to attract, say, 50 businesses to provide the same number of jobs, and the Irish education system will have to provide 2000 graduates in the right disciplines to gain the jobs.

Googling vs boiling (contd)

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The Google Blog response to those stories about the carbon costs of a Google search.

Recently, though, others have used much higher estimates, claiming that a typical search uses "half the energy as boiling a kettle of water" and produces 7 grams of CO2. We thought it would be helpful to explain why this number is *many* times too high. Google is fast — a typical search returns results in less than 0.2 seconds. Queries vary in degree of difficulty, but for the average query, the servers it touches each work on it for just a few thousandths of a second. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ. For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.

In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2. The current EU standard for tailpipe emissions calls for 140 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven, but most cars don't reach that level yet. Thus, the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those of in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.

Thanks to Jack Schofield for spotting it.

BlackBerry redux

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Sigh. My Google phone is on its way back to T-Mobile. I write this with some regret, because I had high hopes for it. My GPRS BlackBerry (which is by far the best phone I’ve ever had) was beginning to show signs of physical collapse. And I was really tired of trying to access Google via GPRS, which was like going back to the bad old days of dial-up modems. So I thought: what I need is a proper 3G phone.

But which one? The BlackBerry Storm was considered and discarded, even before Stephen Fry demolished it. To me, it looked like something rushed out to compete with the iPhone, but without proper testing. As an iTouch user, I knew and liked the iPhone interface, but felt that I ought to make a stand because of its non-generativity (to use Jonathan Zittrain’s phrase). So how about the Google Android phone?

Research showed that it was offered by T-Mobile (my network provider). And it met Jonathan’s requirement for open-ness. So I ordered one.

It seemed slick enough at first sight. Setting it up to link with my Google account was a breeze. And it had a real QWERTY keyboard, accessible by sliding the screen up, thus:

The keyboard, though small, was useable in twin-thumb mode, just as the Psion PDAs used to be.

So how was it in practice? Answer: mixed. Very mixed. Battery life (like that of the iPhone) is abysmal if one has the phone permanently online, so I turned everything off and just synchronised Gmail when I needed to update. The camera is, well, dire. The GPS facility is good — really good, actually; but it positively eats battery-life. All of which tended to reduce the phone to a rather more humdrum piece of kit. The biggest problem was that its methods of indicating that messages have arrived was, for me, useless — especially compared with the BlackBerry’s ways of doing things. I need to know instantly when messages have arrived — especially when the phone is on silent. (I spend a lot of time in meetings.)

Composing and typing SMS messages on the G-phone is a tedious palaver. First you have to swing out the screen so that you can type. This requires two hands. So effectively texting on the move is difficult/impossible.

The Android software seems stable and effective. The Apps available on the open ‘market’ are, however, pretty tame compared with what’s available for the iPhone. This may change in time and more handsets become available and the commercial opportunities for Android Apps begins to build. But for now the first G-phone available on the UK market is IMHO just an unsatisfactory beta. If it had come out before the iPhone we would have regarded it as a small miracle. But now it doesn’t cut the mustard. What Android really needs is a slick handset from Nokia or Sony-Ericsson.

So I’m returning to the BlackBerry fold. What the episode has taught me is that easy, efficient SMS and email are the key things I need, plus occasional 3G-speed access to web sites.

Ironically, I will be acquiring a new BlackBerry just as Barack Obama has to surrender his.

Work on Stuff that Matters

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Great post by Tim O’Reilly in which he quotes this passage from a Commencement Address he gave.

Some of you may end up working at highflying companies. Some of you may succeed, and some of you may fail. I want to remind you that financial success is not the only goal or the only measure of success. It's easy to get caught up in the heady buzz of making money. You should regard money as fuel for what you really want to do, not as a goal in and of itself. Money is like gas in the car — you need to pay attention or you'll end up on the side of the road — but a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations!

It’s a very good sermon (in the best sense of the term). Worth reading in full, especially in the run-up to Obama’s Inauguration.

OK, so who’s the biggest security risk, then?

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From Wired.com.

For years, members of the military brass have been warning that soldiers' blogs could pose a security threat by leaking sensitive wartime information. But a series of online audits, conducted by the Army, suggests that official Defense Department websites post far more potentially-harmful than blogs do.

The audits, performed by the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell between January 2006 and January 2007, found at least 1,813 violations of operational security policy on 878 official military websites. In contrast, the 10-man, Manassas, Virginia, unit discovered 28 breaches, at most, on 594 individual blogs during the same period.

The results were obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, after the digital rights group filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.

"It's clear that official Army websites are the real security problem, not blogs," said EFF staff attorney Marcia Hofmann. "Bloggers, on the whole, have been very careful and conscientious. It's a pretty major disparity." The findings stand in stark contrast to Army statements about the risks that blogs pose.

Laptops in class

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Interesting post by Eoin O’Dell of TCD law school on an issue that vexes an increasing number of university teachers.

I’ve been on both sides of these laptops, and I’m going to break ranks and admit something to those students reading this blog: from the front of the class, I can often tell when someone is concentrating on the screen for reasons other than the class. For example, it’s pretty obvious if you’re furiously typing away while everyone else is doing nothing at all, studiously failing to answer a question I’ve just posed – gotcha! you’re drafting an email or updating a profile, aren’t you? Now, this is an extreme example, but there are lots of obvious examples short of that, and even if I don’t notice every non-classroom related usage, I do notice a lot of them. And in my class, you run the risk of having a few questions directed specifically to you just when you’re deepest into your online distraction. But I don’t see myself going any further and seeking to turn off the wifi or even ban the laptops. I think that the benefits of technology far, far outweigh the detriments. And, in any event, people who are bored in class will daydream even if they don’t surf.