It was inevitable, given the sheer ubiquitousness, that .sex is under consideration for use by ICANN for domains.
“You can almost guarantee the most highly sought-after one will, unfortunately, probably be dot-sex,” said Bryan Glick of Computing Magazine.
“All the meaningful words and meaningful names in the English language have been bought up already,” Glick said.
True. While some companies have been clever in branding their organizations with a quirky name so they can have a unique domain, it’s become a little difficult to identify a company with it’s product or service because of its deliberately misspelled or derivative name (Google being the glaring exception, obviously).
As the article states, it will create a new gold rush for prime Internet real estate for anyone with the time and money to scoop up as many words as possible… quickly.
I suspect that most of the best words will be gone in the blink of an eye and be worth a fortune. Still, with even a little imagination, there’s a lot o’ words in the dictionary.
To get some perspective on how much has changed in a relatively short period of time, check out the following video. Among the statistics mentioned are:
In 2006, there were 1.3 million college grads in the US, 3.1 million in India and 3.3 million in China; 100% of the Indian graduates speak English and, it is predicted, that in 10 years, China will be the largest English-speaking country in the world.
The US Dept. of Labor estimates that today’s learners will have 10-14 different jobs… by their 38th birthday.
1 out of 8 couples married in the US in 2005 met online.
As technology becomes increasingly interwoven into every aspect of daily life, means of connecting with anyone, anywhere grows at an exponential rate; one stat says that 230,000 people sign up for MySpace everyday.
Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia is placing his bets on an online office productivity suite that aims to compete with similar offerings from Microsoft and Google.
Instant Collaboration Software Technologies (InstaColl), a Bangalore company co-founded by Bhatia, unveiled Live Documents on Wednesday, an online service that allows users to access and edit documents using a Web browser, and collaborate and share documents with others.
Based on the review, this service looks promising. While, as of this writing, it’s not available yet (but will be offered for free for individuals and fee-based for corporate users when launched), it is poised to offer Google more competition, as well as challenge Microsoft’s off-the-shelf Office Suite (although the article says that “Even power-users of Microsoft Office can use our service”). Read the rest of this entry »
Last night I watched one of the more interesting DVDs I own: Pi, a bleak film about brilliance, madness and obsession. The outside plot centers on the endeavors of Max Cohen, a mathematician who is haunted by what he believes is a pattern to be found in the numbers of the stock market. In his pursuit he stumbles upon a 216-digit number; this number, while initially discounted by Max, becomes coveted by both a Wall Street firm as well as Hasidic Jews, both of whom see great value in this number but seek it for different ends.
As with most well-written movies with a misunderstood and complex protagonist, there is a mentor character who acts as a both challenge to the protagonist’s motivating action as well a vessel for offering an exposition to us, the audience, in an attempt to help us understand the backstory as well as the reason for the need for resolution following the build up of “Act 1″.
In this movie, Sol (Max’s mentor) comments that the 216-digit number is really meaningless because,
“You’re connecting a computer bug I had with a computer bug you might have had and some religious hogwash. You want to find the number 216 in the world, you will be able to find it everywhere. 216 steps from a mere street corner to your front door. 216 seconds you spend riding on the elevator. When your mind becomes obsessed with anything, you will filter everything else out and find that thing everywhere.”
I was thinking about all the blogs out there — all 106 million of them — and how there seems to be an in-crowd of powerful “A-listers” and hordes of second- or third-tier authors who, while they may write great content and have even, perhaps, attracted a respectably-sized audience and number of backlinks, they just can’t get admission to this exclusive club of people who are the titans of the blogosphere.
Sometimes blogging can feel like waiting in line, hoping to get into the coolest new nightspot: a limo pulls up, the bouncer opens the ropes to admit the dapper passengers to the club — and everyone else goes back to trying to catch the bouncer’s eye.
In a twist of irony, the largest information-gathering company in the world is calling for privacy laws to be established (and, presumably, enforced) by governments and corporations.
Maybe I’m a glass-half-empty kind of person, but doesn’t it seem odd that a huge company like Google – which gathers more and more personal data every second of every day and stores it on it’s growing network of computers for reasons it won’t reveal – would appeal to the least-trustworthy sources, governments and corporations, to be the gatekeepers of all the personal data harnessed from the Internet?
, a bleak film about brilliance, madness and obsession. The outside plot centers on the endeavors of Max Cohen, a mathematician who is haunted by what he believes is a pattern to be found in the numbers of the stock market. In his pursuit he stumbles upon a 216-digit number; this number, while initially discounted by Max, becomes coveted by both a Wall Street firm as well as Hasidic Jews, both of whom see great value in this number but seek it for different ends.
