Month: December 2006

While reading this post in The Blog Herald (don’t you just love the title?), I had an enlightenment.

Blogging is so popular and fast spreading because its based on text. And text is natural for human beings. We’ve learned how to produce text thousands of years ago. We’ve been cultivating the skill since than. Images and sounds are cool too, but they don’t have a few characteristics, which make text so popular.

• Text is easy to reproduce. If I read something smart, or thought of something myself, I can reproduce it many times. I can write it down on a sticky note. I can type it on my laptop. I can scratch it on the wall of the public restroom (it’s not something that I practice myself, but the possibility is there). Images are way harder. The more complex the image, the better skills I must possess to reproduce it. Sounds are even harder. I’ve heard a million songs, but I can’t sing one of them.
• Text is easy to analyze. This is important for a whole range of applications – translations from one language to another, aggregation and reports, understanding meanings, etc. There is a certain degree of symbolism and structure in images (shades, proportions) and sounds (rhythms, loops), but neither of these are based on symbolism and structure.

(I had a couple of more in mind, but lost them while writing this post.)

So, blogging is just a tool for people to do something they’ve been doing for years. Blogging makes it easier to produce text, to analyze text, to link text together, to quote text, and to search text.

For the same reason, that’s why podcasting and videoblogging are developing slower. They are all about other formats. Rich and much needed formats, but not text.

One of these days I was doing some minor shopping – getting stuff that I needed for ages but never had enough time, money or will to actually buy. While walking from shop to another, I was passing by the “Germanos” office.

“Germanos”, for those of you outside of Cyprus, is a large local distributor (reseller?) of mobile phones and accessories. They have a few shops in each city around the island, and I was passing by one of those shops.

I was planning to visit them for a couple of month now. The keyboard of my Sony Ericsson P910i was smashed a few times, and the digits of the numeric pad don’t work anymore. Dialing is still possible with the touch screen keyboard, but it’s not very convenient for numbers that are not in the address book.

So, I came in and asked for the technician. The sales lady pointed me towards a man, who was occupied with another customer. I came closer, and the guy stopped his conversation and asked me what I wanted. I showed him the phone and asked if it was possible to replace the keyboard (I know it’s possible, I was just wondering if they can do it). He said that, of course, they can fix my phone, but for that they will have to confiscate it and send it to the service center in Nicosia. He mentioned that it will take at least 8 business days.

Oops.

I was standing there totally confused and puzzled. 8 business days. Like people don’t call each other on weekends. So, it’s more like 14 days. Plus a few for that “at least” bit. Plus a few for the Christmas season’s excuse “but you know, we are very busy right now”. I can’t even count that far…

In the agony of the last hope, I asked if they can provide any replacement for that time. Something. I don’t need the same model. Not even the same brand. But just something that can accept and place calls with my SIM card inserted. The answer I got was a firm “No!”.

Oh, well. I better have a damaged phone than no phone at all. The same way as I would rather have a dial-up connection or even an expensive and slow GPRS connection, than no Internet at all. No matter how bad it is, it’s still better than nothing.

Am I a web worker? Yes, I am.

I had this tab open in my browser for nearly a month now. I wanted to blog about web working, but there weren’t just enough words in my head.

How do I understand the “web worker” position? I don’t. Who are web workers? I don’t know. Is there any similar term or title that they can be called? Not that I know of. But what I know for sure is that I am one of them. And it made all the sense the moment I read the title of that post. This is one of the terms that I don’t like that much, but which describes the nature of things so well, that I can live with it.

I work on the Web. I work with the Web. I believe in the Web. I have lots of fun with the Web. I can’t live without the Web. I am addicted to it and I make money on it too. And those two are independent of each other and of everything else. And that what makes me a web worker.

Here is a quote picked up in this thread on Slashdot:

Google searching “microsoft”: 39,500,000 results
Google searching “google”: 52,800,000 results
MSN searching “microsoft”: 80,139,835 results
MSN searching “google”: 648 results

I ran the test myself and got slightly different numbers. Here they are:

• “microsoft” via Google – 534,000,000 results
• “google” via Google – 782,000,000 results
• “microsoft” via MSN – 80,461,360 results
• “google” via MSN – 751 results

These results suggest two conclusions:

1. MSN search results are tainted, and thus are less useful.
2. Google indexes an order of magnitude more pages, and thus is more useful.

I had one of the longest weekends ever. It seemed that I did everything I wanted, then some more, and some more, and then a bit more, and I still had a whole Sunday ahead of me. I guess, my perception of time changed once again. It happens sometimes.

How was your weekend? Did you guys watch any movies worth going to or went somewhere I should go to too?