Joho the Blog » abundance

[2b2k] How much info per minute, per an infographic

davidw — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 16:07:11 +0000

There’s a fun infographic — and aren’t all infographics fun, one way or another? — at Visual News about how much information is made every minute.

It’s poorly sourced (a list of sources at the bottom without references to which data came from which sources, and no links, but, heck infographics are fun!), but let’s assume/pretend that it’s accurate. Beyond the pure massiveness of the amount of data, a couple of “facts” leap out (and these are especially unreliable since they probably come from different sources so the comparisons are likely to be apples to orangutans, but it’s all about putting the “fun” into infungraphics!):

There are three times as many tweets as Facebook Likes, even though one is just a no-thought reaction (and the other requires pressing the Like button — heyo! I kid Twitter ’cause I love it. I’ll be @dweinberger all week.)
There are 80x more posts on Tumblr than on WordPress
There are 2,000x more emails sent than Tweets posted, and 100x more emails sent than search queries received by Google. This seems plausible if I look at my own usage, but I’m old and thus more attached to email than are today’s Digital Youngsters with their IMs and their hiphop ringtones and 4Gs. Nope, email remains the volume leader in terms of number of units (as opposed to the number of bytes, which I cannot figure out).

Info fun! With air quotes around each of those two words!

Gig U

davidw — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 21:26:27 +0000

The plan to provide ultra high speed Internet connectivity to universities (mainly in the heartland) is exciting. And it’s got some serious people behind it, including Lev Gonick and Blair Levin.

The NY Times article, seeking to find something negative to say about it, finds someone who doubts that providing significantly higher speeds will lead to innovative uses of those greased-lightning pipes. Does history count for nothing?

Our new instinct

davidw — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:07:21 +0000

MacWorld ran an article on how to set up Apples Pages to print out Avery labels. This is helpful information because Avery doesn’t have nearly as many ready-made templates for Pages as it does for Word. So the article walks the reader through the page and table settings. Excellent.

But MacWorld left out one crucial step: When you’re done, share it on the Web.

Avery doesn’t have a Pages template for its Beige Design Filing Label, Clear, 30 per sheet (#5029), so you made your own? Great! Why should we all have to re-do your work? Share it on the Web. Thanks!

By this time, “and then share it on the Web” should be a reflex on its way to becoming an instinct. The work of one can now remove a task from the checklist of millions. This is of evolutionary importance. Do it once and let the species move on.

Please. Thank you. And share it on the Web.

Mechanical Turk for do-gooders raises over $1M

davidw — Thu, 20 May 2010 20:45:39 +0000

The Extraordinaries a couple of weeks ago completed a second round of funding and now has over $1M in venture money to build their business on. The backers include Mitch Kapor and Esther Dyson.

The site is like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: you can sign up to do some fairly mechanical task that some organization has advertised. Unlike the Turk, though, you don’t get paid, because you’re doing it for a non-profit like the Library of Congress or Smithsonian.

The Extraordinaries only takes non-profits as their clients, but it does charge them. (Or it will charge them in the future. I’m not sure of the current status.) If that makes the service sustainable, then why not?