The Internet

It's an oh-so-basic blog feature that's been missing from Blogger since the beginning of time.  Finally, they caught up with the rest of the world and announced they now support static pages.  Until now, poor Blogger users had to hack their templates half to death to build static pages and even then, they would still pop up in your blog's feed and other odd places.

Representatives from Google, Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia are meeting at the Vatican to help the Church better understand the Internet.  That’s good since the Vatican seemed unable to do a basic Internet search.

Criticisms of Google data aggregation and privacy policies abound.  In hopes of stemming some of that negative press, Google recently announced the Google Dashboard, to “offers a simple view into the data associated with your account.”

While cleaning my office – a once-a-decade event – I came across a receipt from 2 Dec., 1998. It was for a 10.1 GB hard drive costing $245. Last week I bought a 1TB drive – 100 times the capacity – for just over $90. Though Moore’s law originally predicted processing power, it’s often quoted for any tech-related increases. In this case, storage per dollar increased 27,000% over roughly 11 years – it doubled every 16 months – even faster than Moore predicted!

I haven't had time to more than twiddle a few buttons but I sure was hyping it earlier, so I hope it lives up to expectations.  I did try a few queries, such as "Drupal", an open-source content management framework I've been doing a ton of work with recently.  Instead I got information about "Rukai," I dialect spoken in Taiwan by 10,543 people.  Very precise yet exactly wrong.

In late March, Kodak Gallery (neé Ofoto) changed its terms of service, now requiring a minimum annual purchase to keep your photos safely stored on their servers.  That got me thinking: how much does it cost to host all of Kodak Gallery's photos?  What if I were to build a Kodak Gallery site and host it myself?  I got out my calculator and sharp pencil to find out.

Let's start with some basics:

Stephan Wolfram recent announced his latest endeavor: Wolfram|Alpha.  Where Google will search the Internet to answer your queries, Wolfram|Alpha will calculate the answer.  Where Google gives you 287,000 results for "what is the longest straight road in America," Wolfram|Alpha will give you one: the answer.

At least, that's the plan.  We won't really know until May.