Not as crisp as it should be. Bah!
Narcissism 2.0
Like many people, I subscribe to Jakob Nielsen’s ‘Alertbox’ newsletter, partly because it’s good for the soul to be annoyed by people with whom one often disagrees, and partly because he sometimes has interesting things to say. (The current issue argues that “Web 2.0 can be dangerous”, btw.)
I’ve just noticed that his site includes a link to a page of downloadable hi-res photographs of the great man. There are, er, 61 such photographs.
No hiding lights under bushels there, then.
Webbed wheels
Everywhere I look this morning there are webs I didn’t know existed.
Web 0.1
In our garden this morning.
The marriage market
This striking photograph taken by US photographer Stephanie Sinclair in Afghanistan was named Unicef Photo of the Year yesterday. It’s a wedding picture. The cadaverous cove in the turban is a bridegroom; the kid next him is his new 11-year-old wife. The blurb says that the chap is 40 years of age, but he looks about 70 to me. The photograph vividly encapsulates life for millions of girls in this day and age. Unicef claims that upwards of 60 million under-age girls are married every year. Barbaric.
Later: Another Unicef prizewinner here. Thanks to Pete for the link.
Digital Footprints
Hot off the digital presses at the Pew Internet & American Life project…
Internet users are becoming more aware of their digital footprint; 47% have searched for information about themselves online, up from just 22% five years ago. However, few monitor their online presence with great regularity. Just 3% of self-searchers report that they make a regular habit of it and 74% have checked up on their digital footprints only once or twice.
Indeed, most internet users are not concerned about the amount of information available about them online, and most do not take steps to limit that information. Fully 60% of internet users say they are not worried about how much information is available about them online. Similarly, the majority of online adults (61%) do not feel compelled to limit the amount of information that can be found about them online.
In addition to providing national telephone survey data, this report includes quotes from online survey respondents as well as experts in the fields of privacy, online identity management and search.
Full report (pdf) from here.
DIY routes to stardom
From today’s New York Times…
Cinderella is alive and well and living on Staten Island.
Ingrid Michaelson, a 28-year-old singer-songwriter whose self-produced album “Girls and Boys” reached No. 2 on the iTunes pop chart, is enjoying an enchanted transformation as a recording artist.
Ms. Michaelson’s climb out of obscurity started, as is so often the case these days, on the Internet. Now she is known to many “Grey’s Anatomy” fans for her quirky, heartfelt songs that were featured over the past year on the ABC television series. After a cross-country music tour, she is performing on Wednesday at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan, and she pointed out that the concert sold out a month ago without any advertising. (She has added a concert on Feb. 15 at Webster Hall.)
Not bad for someone who, until May, was teaching in an after-school theater program in the Stapleton neighborhood of Staten Island, where she still lives with her parents, a dog and a pet rabbit in the house she has inhabited since she was born.
“It’s so uncool, it’s cool,” said her mother, Elizabeth Egbert, the executive director of the Staten Island Museum…
Happy Birthday ‘weblog’
It’s ten years to the day since Jorn Barger coined the term ‘weblog’. Now he offers Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers…
My favourites:
2. You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility.
3. If you spend a little time searching before you post, you can probably find your idea well articulated elsewhere already.
[…]
6. Always include some adjective describing your own reaction to the linked page (great, useful, imaginative, clever, etc.)
7. Credit the source that led you to it, so your readers have the option of “moving upstream.”
IBM now has 73,000 employees in India
Wow! Technology Review reports that
IBM Corp.’s expansion in developing countries shows no sign of relenting. The technology company revealed Friday that it now has 73,000 employees in India, almost a 40 percent leap from last year.
IBM did not provide updated figures for its work force in the U.S., which has held steady around 125,000 people in recent years.
Nor did IBM project its total head count. It had 355,766 employees worldwide at the end of 2006.
If the total has risen by the same rate as in 2006, almost one in five IBM workers now is in India, its second-largest center…
Google vs. Microsoft
Useful New York Times review of the current state of play.
“For most people,” [Google CEO Eric Schmidt] says, “computers are complex and unreliable,” given to crashing and afflicted with viruses. If Google can deliver computing services over the Web, then “it will be a real improvement in people’s lives,” he says.
To explain, Mr. Schmidt steps up to a white board. He draws a rectangle and rattles off a list of things that can be done in the Web-based cloud, and he notes that this list is expanding as Internet connection speeds become faster and Internet software improves. In a sliver of the rectangle, about 10 percent, he marks off what can’t be done in the cloud, like high-end graphics processing. So, in Google’s thinking, will 90 percent of computing eventually reside in the cloud?
“In our view, yes,” Mr. Schmidt says. “It’s a 90-10 thing.” Inside the cloud resides “almost everything you do in a company, almost everything a knowledge worker does.”