Category: Technology

Netcraft has been tracking the number of web sites on the internet for many years. Every month, they publish their latest numbers. As of May 2012, their chart shows close to 700 million sites (the blue line is the number of unique domains, the red one is sites with unique HTML which excludes placeholder templates like landing pages for newly purchased domains):

As you can see, the growth is impressive and unimpeded. Also:

• The total number of web sites seems to follow Moore’s Law and double every 18-24 months.
• At the current rate, we will hit 1 billion sites in 2013 and 2 billion sites in 2015.
• Over the years, the number of web sites seems to be roughly equal to the number of people on the internet.
• If WordPress continues on its current trajectory, there will be 300-500 million WordPress sites by 2015.

Congratulations to Om for breaking the Skype-Microsoft news, which must be among the very biggest tech stories ever broken by a blogger. And as Om told me this morning, this is the kind of day when you are glad to be hosted on WordPress.com (GigaOM is a WordPress VIP and is currently seeing record traffic spikes due to their Skype coverage).

My favorite online video app has launched!

John Battelle articulates what makes mobile apps both great and terrible.

After reading a couple of excellent posts about online identity/privacy by Om Malik and John Battelle, I decided to sign up for Rapleaf to see just what they know and track about me. My reactions:
– Their data about my location, jobs, age, etc is accurate
– Seeing that someone collects that data about me isn’t as creepy as I expected (since it’s all public data I’ve shared elsewhere)
– The interest data they have about me is pretty generic: Music, TV, photo sharing, auctions, online shopping, blogging, business networking, web personalization, social networks (these “interests” fit millions of people, they’re too broad to feel engaging or interesting to me)
– Their influencer score made me want to become more influential 🙂

Great post by Clay Shirky about what’s happening to newspapers and publishing as we transition to an increasingly digital world.

Some choice quotes:

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data.

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word, as books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, expanding the market for all publishers, which heightened the value of literacy still further.

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

This is just totally fun:

I wonder how AdSense effectiveness will change with their addition of behavioral targeting. This part is particularly smart:

And by visiting the new Ads Preferences Manager, users can see what interest categories we think they fall into, or add and remove categories themselves.

The Preferences Manager also allows people to opt out of being behaviorally tracked by Google. Will that be enough to satisfy privacy concerns?

Change.gov is putting IntenseDebate to great use.

Robert Scoble shows how various services are causing online conversations to become more real-time and less permanent.

Yahoo’s new open strategy looks promising.

Is this for real? Sounds too good to be true.

Forget MySpace Music, this is the future of music on the web.

From Bandcamp’s FAQ:

We’re a publishing platform for bands, or, anthropomorphically/arthropodically-speaking, your fifth, fully geeked-out Beatle — the one who keeps your very own website humming and lets you get back to making great music and building your fan base.

Here’s a review by Andy Baio.

Disclaimer: Bandcamp was started by former Oddpost colleagues of mine and I’m an advisor/board member.

I’ve driven several thousands of miles across the US in the last 4 weeks, much of it aided by a Dash GPS device. Overall, I’m quite happy with it. It’s certainly made our road trip less stressful.

The pros:

• It’s web connected, the killer feature for me has been to be able to send addresses from my laptop to the device. I can research our route on my laptop at night – hotels, sights, restaurants, etc – and send them all to the GPS. The next day we get in the car, and I can just tap on the addresses and go.
• Another web connected feature that we’ve used a bunch is web search – you can search Yahoo Local from the device. For example, one evening we rolled into Columbia, South Carolina, searched for nearby restaurants (3 clicks), and blindly trusted Yahoo’s top rated recommendation which turned out to be a great Japanese restaurant.
• The UI and touchscreen work well.
• The road data and software updates have been seamless.
• The directions work well most of the time (though I don’t have anything to compare them to).
• We’ve not hit much traffic at all, but the few times we did, the traffic warning system worked pretty well. I’ve also not yet used any add-on apps, though the Weatherbug weather reports and the speed trap app look promising.

The cons:

• The device is a little slow, the screen only updates about once every other second or so, which gets tricky when you’re supposed to make immediate turns.
• A handful of times the directions have been strange with the device recommending routes that are clearly not the most direct way of getting somewhere.
• With the full touch screen, two large buttons at the top, and the on/off button on the side, it can be difficult to grab the device (for example to adjust its angle) without inadvertently activating something.
• The device/software have locked up a few times, requiring a reset.

As the debate on data portability rages, I’m learning some interesting things:

1. Marc Canter is painting a fence in his backyard with an open data mural. I love that. What a great reflection of his personality and passion and of Silicon Valley as a place. There’s something cool about the collision of the abstract world of data sharing and the real world of a wooden fence.

2. Eric Schonfeld has it right, the data has already left the barn. Real apps pulling your data out of places when you need it will beat out abstract data sharing schemes any day.