Internet Category
Unplugging Becomes a Movement Author: Bilig May 13,2008
Blogging in your sleep and other signs that you may be too connected
Spending a little too much time on the Web? Now there are a few movements afoot to encourage the tech-obsessed to take vacations from connectivity. Here’s Ariel Meadow Stallings, a blogger and Microsoft part-timer, on realizing that she’d become a little too hooked:
“I love technology. I’m not a Luddite. But I realized it was a problem when I would sit down to check my email and it was almost like I would wake up six hours later and find I was watching videos of puppies on YouTube . . . I’d try and think what I had been doing for the past two hours and I had no idea. I associate that kind of time loss with blackouts when you’re drunk.”
Stallings now unplugs one night each week, and has recruited thousands of others to do the same. Meanwhile, a pair of developers in Canada are trying to get people to shut it down for a single day next month.
Via Reuters
Second Life Prepping for a Second Boom Author: Bilig May 13,2008
The founder of the popular online world says technology will drive a jump in the number of regular visitors
The knock on popular virtual world Second Life has been that it’s a little slow, and not entirely easy to use. Sure, it has roughly 13 million registered citizens, but only a few hundred thousand are actual devotees who spend a fair amount of time in the alternate universe.
Part of the reason Second Life hasn’t gotten to that level yet, says Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab founder and former chief executive, can be attributed to the popularity of laptops, most of which don’t have the kind of 3-D graphics chops to properly render his virtual universe. But Rosedale believes that improvements in computers and connection speeds in the next decade should produce a boom in the game’s popularity. If Rosedale is correct and Second Life is merely ahead of its time, it’s unclear whether the promise of future improvement will be enough to keep the virtual world afloat in the present.
Via Reuters
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Still Reigns Author: Bilig May 13,2008
The founder of the online retail giant is on top of his game. So when is he going to step away to focus on truly important things, like space tourism?
Fortune has an interesting profile of Amazon.com CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, who has persisted, and seen his company grow, through the ups and downs of the dot-com economy. Presently he’s worth around $8 billion, which isn’t too bad. In addition to recounting his rise to prominence, the piece also details his plans to transform Amazon into the Web’s biggest retailer of digital media. Hence Amazon’s e-book reader, the Kindle, and the company’s push into the MP3 space, where it’s trying to unseat Apple as emperor. Apparently this is a pretty heated competition: According to the Fortune piece, he refuses to use the word “Apple.”
The story details a few Amazon mis-steps as well, but overall, the point is that the company is growing, and Bezos is still on top. Which kind of makes you wonder: When is he going to ease off on this Amazon business and focus on the really important stuff. That would be space tourism, of course. Bezos has a quasi-secretive venture called Blue Origin, and we’re hoping that company can help turn space tourism into a real industry in the next few years.
