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The Importance Of Getting Away

March 29, 2009 By George Leave a Comment

This weekend, I discovered why taking a few days away is such a great idea. I went to a golden wedding anniversary, and while I was there, had no internet and minimal connection to the outside world. It was brilliant.

As well as having a great time there, and a great meal out with the family, it gave me a chance to get away from everything, look at what I’m doing and critique it, and also provided me with time to come up with some awesome new ideas – many of which I’m going to try out in coming months.

I also came up with some good ideas for blog posts too, all of which are drafts on here now, and will come up in the next few weeks – and even better, I didn’t miss much while I was gone.

It seems that taking a break is something I should do more often, some of the stuff I came up with could make me a lot of money in the future :)

Filed Under Ramblings Tagged With away, break, internet

CDs

December 13, 2008 By George 1 Comment

I bought a CD today. An actual, real CD. For the first time in over a year. I got it in the liquidation sale at the local(ish) Woolworths. It’s a pity that their going.

I bought Avril Lavigne, Under My Skin. And that’s not the point. It says something about CDs, if normal people my age (16, the age where music is most important, arguably) don’t ever buy CDs anymore (not just based on me, I was with a bunch of friends and they looked at me funny when I picked it up). Their outdated technology now, like VCR’s and Floppy Disks. Or at least, their outdated technology to the younger generation, there are still people like my father who buy CDs for the car :P

It lead me to wondering (on the bus home) as to how long it’ll be before all physical portable storage in the form of a disk (cd, dvd, bluray, etc) will be obselete, and everything will be distributed online. Except console games, which no doubt will always be on cds. I’ll give it 10 years before the internet is the primary distribution for everything except food and that. Making us all the more reliant upon it.

And then I have a feeling that the internet will implode not long after that. The sheer traffic making it unstable and causing blackouts, and then we’ll regress to some old-school storage media, maybe? I read articles that the Internet is already struggling under the load, so why shouldn’t this happen? Of course, we could just increase the routing capacity of the ‘net, but there are limits to that too.

There are lots of scare stories about the future, and I think there is merit in some of them, especially about the internet collapsing as we enter the exabye era.

I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes :) I wonder if the failure of the internet could cause a recession of it’s own? I reakon so.

Filed Under Ramblings Tagged With cd, exabyte, internet, media, Music, storage, woolworths

Is Google Taking Over?

January 5, 2008 By George 1 Comment

I’m starting to wonder if Google is getting too big. I mean, they collect information on everyone and everything, it’s pretty difficult to use the Internet at all without them picking up some sort of information about you, every time you view an Adsense banner, they collect information, and now that they own DoubleClick, there’s very little we can do without triggering Google in some way.

This might not be the worst thing ever, but it gives Google information on everyone. They know what you like to look at, how often your online, what you search for, what’s in your emails, what RSS feeds you read, and so much more. Is it really fair for one corporation to have all this information on us?

I mean, my website shows Google ads, so just by looking at this website, you’re helping Google build up a profile of sorts on you. Do you really want that? I mean, is it fair that we have no say in it, something like 50% of all the websites on the internet connect to Google or something owned by Google, in some way, and it’s probably more now. I don’t know the exact figure, but I’ve heard it somewhere.

Google also have around 60% of the Search Engine market, which must be their primary method for building up information on us, as well as owning networking sites, video sites and god knows what else.

Information isn’t the only thing. Google recently announced a project which would rival one of the largest ad-free websites on the ‘net, Wikipedia, and they are advancing into pretty much every internet field there is. Google run services in Blogging, Video, Advertising, Search, Personal Space (Google Pages), Knowledge (Coming soon, Google Knol), and even Word Processing, with their upcoming online Google Docs, or whatever it is :P

I’m not saying that Google is bad, it’s my homepage and the site I use most often, but I’m wondering if what they are doing is fair? Google the search engine is the best, there’s no question about that, but is the rest of Google really playing fair?

-G

Filed Under Ramblings Tagged With ethical, fair, Google, internet, over, taking