Qual o tamanho da blogosfera? 200 mil a 500 mil blogs?
Sexta-feira, Setembro 13, 2002: Mais um artigo sobre weblogs e jornalismo, desta vez no "Los Angeles Times".[...] A autora do artigo cita "unofficial estimates" para dizer que existirão entre 200 mil e 500 mil weblogs actualmente. Já vi o número noutros lados, nomeadamente neste artigo do "Mercury News" e neste do "Daily Californian", mas ainda não percebi qual é a fonte. Alguém sabe?
Number of Web logs could be overstated: Web log experts admit, however, that there is currently no accurate way to measure the total number of blogs.
Catholics Are ´Blogging´ On the Internet... to Evangelize: "It´s impossible to keep up with them all, but we estimate that there are more than 500,000 Web logs," said Evan Williams, CEO of Pyra Labs, the San Francisco-based company that designed the Blogger Web-based software in the fall of 1999. "There are approximately 1,000 new Web logs created every day," he noted.
Crashing the Blog Party: Though no official statistics exist, unofficial estimates put the number of blogs at 200,000 to 500,000.
Blog bonanza: About 500,000 people have started blogging, according to most estimates.
Blogging for Dollars: Diversity in blogging is good. Conformity in blogging is bad. The last thing we need is 500,000 blogs all written in the same style with the same business model.
Love, Yale, and survival of the Internet: The International Herald Tribune reported this week that three-quarters of the 500,000 accounts created at blogger.com have been abandoned.
Fucked Weblog

CULTURAS IN VITRO
Why Listening Will Never Be the Same: Last Year, for the first time, blank compact discs outsold pre-recorded ones. This statistic has been widely reported in the news media, usually in connection with the fact that sales of pre-recorded CD’s in the U.S. dropped by 10 percent in 2001. To most observers of the music business, all this was further proof that the recording industry is in a state of acute crisis. But nowhere was it suggested that the CD-R (to use the trade name by which blank, recordable CD’s are known) might be anything more than a superior replacement for the now-obsolete audio cassette—much less that its burgeoning popularity is the latest sign of a radical and irreversible change in the way we experience music.
[...] One thing is already clear: hard though it may be to imagine life without records and record stores, it is only a matter of time, and not much time at that, before they disappear. Unlike museums and opera houses, they serve a purpose that technology has rendered obsolete. The triumph of the digit - along with the demise of the record album as culture-shaping art object - is at hand.

Music industry shows a note of desperation: Cheaper CDs
Record company seeking to gum up early releases: Epic Records Group, a unit of Sony Corp., is approaching the sticky problem of prerelease music being traded online with an even stickier solution. Critics receiving review copies of two soon-to-be-released albums - Tori Amos's "Scarlet's Walk" and Pearl Jam's "Riot Act" - are finding the CDs already inside Sony Walkman players that have been glued shut.

Rights issue rocks the music world: Record companies see it as mutiny. Musicians call it an overdue rebellion. Either way, the artists' rights movement has set the stage for combat that could revolutionize the music industry.

Hip-Hop Goes Commercial: On any given week, Billboard's Hot Rap Tracks chart is filled with songs that serve as lyrical consumer reports for what are, or will be, the trendiest alcohol, automobile, and fashion brands.
McDonald's, Intel Pay to Be in Game: The 'Sims' product placement deal with Electronic Arts is a milestone for the video game industry.

Entertainment Sees Dearth of Women Execs:[A]t the top of the leadership positions of 10 entertainment conglomerates, women comprise only 13% of directors on corporate boards and only 14% of the firms' executives.
Locked out of Hollywood’s boys’ club: With more than 90 per cent of its films directed by men, Hollywood is still very much a boys’ club.

Clancy and the overflow: Two books have recently been published with the name of the best-selling author, Tom Clancy, emblazoned on the cover. One is Red Rabbit, the latest in his Jack Ryan series. The other is Mission of Honor, the latest in his Op-Centre series. Both will undoubtedly sell well - Clancy is reported to be the highest-paid author in the world. But the thing is, Clancy wrote only one of these books.

Bribes, threats and naked readings: In a world where more and more new books get less and less attention, authors will do anything to promote their work.

Even pornographers found Lady Chatterley too much

Bath time for Michelangelo's David: The last time Michelangelo's David had a bath Ulysses S. Grant was President of the United States, Queen Victoria ruled Great Britain, Napoleon III died and Jesse James stalked the Wild West. But now, what is probably the most famous statue in the world is to have a seven month-long public wash.

Sticks and Stones and Lemon Cough Drops: From Joseph Beuys to Eva Hesse to Zoe Leonard, many postwar artists make works in unstable or ephemeral materials. Curators and conservators dealing with latex, lard, bodily fluids, and banana peels are coming up with new preservation strategies
Screen Savers: How to preserve an artwork that depends on electronic parts that might be obsolete in a few years? They're working on it

How Mondrian was on right lines and fakes cannot fool the eye: Chris McManus, a psychologist at University College London, took studies by the giant of post impressionism, altered the balance of composition a little with a computer, and tested them on the public. More than half, 55% to 60%, could distinguish the original

Secrets of Digital Creativity Revealed in Miniatures: "Codedoc," an online exhibition of digital artworks that focuses on their underlying computer code, is a daring endeavor. It asks viewers without any programming knowledge to step back from the animated lines and interactive elements of computer art and instead consider the geeky techniques that digital artists use to create those works. This would be like studying the artist's brush and paints and not the painting.

ECO-TERRORES
Stories of Prior Knowledge of Sept. 11 More Than Urban Legend

Virtually Helpless: The Threat of Cyberwar Looms Large. Our Best Homeland Defense May Be Surprisingly Small.
"The concept of 'homeland security' is essentially retarded," says Michael Wilson, a former hacker and current partner in Decision Support Systems Inc., a Reno, Nevada-based consultancy advising sovereign states, companies, and the ultrarich about dealing with cyberwar. "The contracts are going to the very people who got us into this mess to begin with. None of them can tell you what the current cyber-threat is, and they don't know what to defend with."

VITAMEDIAS
www.libel.com: Bloggers beware.
"It's obvious that individuals are unaware of the risks of libel and invasion of privacy, and don't realize that what they're saying on these websites could set themselves up for libel lawsuits from individuals and entities from around the world"

Why your favorite TV shows get zapped: As you sit down to watch the new shows this fall, no doubt you will find yourself wondering about some of your old favorites. Some will have moved, some will be gone altogether, and most aggravating of all to loyal fans, some will be pitted against one another.
"Why?" you might ask, as you mutter: "The old schedules worked just fine for me."

American composers reflect on the state of music criticism in America today
Learning on the Job: Anticipating the New Season, the Critic Reflects on His Role
Much art criticism is adulatory or merely descriptive (some will say I add to this). Many critics have never seen a show they weren't enthusiastic about. There's nothing wrong with being an enthusiast, but enthusiasts can be some of the toughest critics around (Beavis: "This show sucks." Butt-head: "Yeah, it should change"). Future generations will peruse today's art magazines and suppose ours was an age where almost everything that was made was universally admired.

TECNO-HOUSE
The New New Evidence: The smoking gun of the future consists not of fingerprints and gunpowder residue on metal, but of ones and zeroes.
Saving Dying Data

The Coming Virus Armageddon: In addition to being stealthy, experts said, the ultimate computer virus would be polymorphic - able to change its code, message and form to avoid detection.

Issues that will shape the Internet: [1) Freedom to create and innovate. 2) Customer choice and competition policy. 3) Security and liberty.]

New AES crypto standard broken already?

XP Update Is a Failed Attempt at Simplicity
Microsoft's new deal with Uncle Sam: Why does the White House refuse to tell Microsoft to get tough on security?
One explanation for the draft report's marked silence is that there is an unusually close relationship between Microsoft and the White House.

Maid to Order: A little robot called Roomba vacuums your house while you lounge by the pool. Is this the beginning of the end?

CONTAMINANTES
Living Color: Pantone owns the monopoly on every tint, tone, and shade you've ever seen. Now it wants to control the colors you'll see in the future.
Though Pantone doesn't sell inks, dyes, or paints, it has come to hold a monopoly on color. Of course, frequencies of light, like naturally occurring sounds, are free for anyone to use. But Pantone owns their names - or, more specifically, their designated numbers and spectro-photometric descriptions. Ultimately, printers and manufacturers have to translate those numbers into atoms - pigment, dye, or varnish. In order to check that the final product matches the design spec, there needs to be an agreed-upon point of reference. And that's what Pantone sells, to designers of every kind and a thousand ink licensees in 65 countries - a standard reference, in the form of $3,600 cotton-swatch binders, $150 fan decks, and $300 chip books.

More Than Zero [ou porque são más as propostas para a zona do World Trade Center]
The fault lies not with the hapless architects who were asked to dress up this pig of a project, but with the clients themselves, most notably the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. It holds title to the land under the now-vanished structures on which the developer Silverstein holds a ninety-nine-year lease. Loath to stem any of the considerable revenue stream that the WTC poured into its coffers, the Port Authority insisted that the redevelopment schemes replace virtually all thirteen million square feet lost in the Twin Towers' destruction. Given that the bulk of the space had been contained in the megalithic superstructures, it does not take an architecture expert to understand that if you redistribute the same quantity of volume in considerably shorter, safer buildings - deemed prudent by all concerned - then more ground will have to be covered. And because of the considerable - and to my mind justifiable - public pressure to leave the footprints of the towers vacant (a central demand of the missing victims' families and a feature of four of the six LMDC schemes), the gross overcrowding of the site is inevitable.

Are we on top of the world? According to C Northcote Parkinson, the inventor of Parkinson's Law, the final and terminal decline of an institution is often signalled by a move into a gleaming, towering, purpose-built headquarters.

Cloned Food Products Near Reality: Items Could Reach Shelves by 2003

Cow and dog genomes next up: Cows, dogs and a single-celled predator called Oxytricha trifallax are next in line to have their genomes sequenced when the mouse, rat and human projects wrap up within the next year.

.DE!
Speed of light broken with basic lab kit: Electric signals can be transmitted at least four times faster than the speed of light using only basic equipment that would be found in virtually any college science department.

You have been invited to invade Iraq! How the Web can make planning your next war hassle-free and fun for all.
War on Iraq!!

PHOTO-GRAFIAS
Item # 2100456623: Our Christian President-George W. Bush- 9-11

Scientists Hope to Monitor Space Junk Hitting Moon

ZITE
The Sugar Packet Collector's Page