microcentury

monos - if you log into your Google account and then use Trends for Websites, you should see the y-axis numbers. The numbers are not shown when you're not logged in.

The traffic lost by the brand sites may not be the same traffic gained by the social networks.

Many thanks wallflower, GavinB and cstross for the advice :-)

Edit: Oops, and xcombinator, just saw your comment!

There are inarguably a lot of people in the world who _do_ make their living as writers, so I think it comes down to your definition of 'reasonable'.

Re asking myself difficult questions, I think that's a fair point, and it's something I think about every day. Each time the answer is 'yes', though :-)

I've just rolled out of bed in a mid-Sunday-afternoon and this article is a bit like a slap in the face. I want to be a writer, and some people who are both likely to know and unlikely to mislead me have said I have a reasonable shot at making my living that way, based on what they've seen.

But for the last five years I've been working in a Giant Corporation, where the money is good and the prospects are good and my parents are delighted that I'm 'doing so well', and it has proved _immensely_ difficult for me to walk away. Our bonuses are paid in March, and every year I say to myself: next March I'm done. That's it. I've been distracted long enough. And every year I don't :-(

Sigh. Who knew chasing your dreams would be difficult?

This kind of over-simplification of complex issues really doesn't do anyone any favours, even if it's supposed to be satire or humour (which I can't be sure about in this case). Technology has _always_ provided a platform for art - where do you think those guitars come from, or the paper you write on, or the paints that people used to paint on cave walls if we want to go back as far as we can?

People develop new things that can be used in various ways. Some of the ways are prosaic, some are creative. Someone develops a computer, and one person uses it to solve an equation, another uses it to create a digital painting - both of these things are both technical and creative. And as technology develops, it becomes more and more accessible to more and more people. I can use a piece of paper without understnading how it was made, just as I can use Photoshop without understanding the mathematics of its underlying algorithms.

This piece seems to spring from the same the-internet-is-killing-journalism mentality that has become more prevalent in recent times. Traditional journalism would be on much safer ground if it wasn't producing this kind of rubbish in a mainstream international broadsheet.

"Rubik's Cube 1. Disassemble Rubik's Cube into all 27 parts. 2. Reassemble inside bottle."

Brilliant :-)

Yup, incredibly weak. And it's written like no-one at Craigslist could _possibly_ have thought about this.

I don't think that guy is trying to be anything. I think he's just completely off his face.

This is _awfully_ similar to Google's 'Don't be evil', which has seemed to get harder and harder for them as they've grown. Could it be that one a company reaches a certain size the financial pressures outweigh the desire to be 'good', whatever the cost?

Oh for God's sake... I admire Doctorow deeply for his writing and work ethic, but he's really venturing into tinfoil hat territory here.

Not too impressed with this article, I have to say.

It seems pretty obvious that people will not switch from the GOOG just because MS has attained search quality parity (which, incidentally, I doubt). If they built a _better_ search engine than Google, then people would go there and use that instead, and the advertisers would follow. Then they wouldn't need to buy Yahoo.

The Yahoo strategy to me seems to imply acceptance that they just cannot equal Google in terms of search quality, so they are looking for another way to compete. Saying they're of equal quality doesn't make it so.

Very helpful thanks :-)

Really, really cool. Would anyone like to explain the outlines for the non-programmers among us?

I can't find the original source now, but the best summary/parody of the original article I read was roughly: "I'm wonderful because I founded a company and made a lot of money. Oh, you haven't founded a company? You suck."

My troll sense is tingling.

I'm just glad we get to see in advance what will be chasing us through the woods in a few years, the thum-thum thum-the-thum music playing the background, firing M15 bursts over our shoulders before the camera pans to the blackened sky.

It's going to be sweet.

I really get the impression he didn't think this working from home thing through _at all_ before he dived in. Surely his points are utterly predictable?

I agree that most non-tech people are much more concerned about form factor. I recently tried to explain to a colleague why a MacBook Pro is faster than a MacBook with the same topline specs - his eyes glazed over after about four seconds, and he said he just 'liked the look' of the black MacBook better. You have to hand it to their marketing guys - the greatest illustration of their success is that they've persuaded teenage girls to care at all.

Reddit is a cautionary tale of social sites. I'm new here, and love it so far: has there been any discussion of how to stop this splendid corner of the internets from being ruined by incoming hordes of morons?

I wouldn't be too convinced it's that close to correct... Usually the set up a handful of experiments, get as close to the original situation as they can (which is often not that close - sometimes they're basing their experiments on movie events and guessing metrics), and give it a go a few times. But that said, the show is about entertainment rather than hard-core scientific vigour, so I'll continue to watch and enjoy :-)

I'm new here, so not familiar with the history, but dude: Google grew from the two founders' PhD work in computer science, and Bill Gates is widely known for his technical brilliance and depth of technical knowledge. So unless there is some confusion on the context of your comment, your examples are just incorrect.

A book that never fails to invoke in me the opposite feeling this thread is looking for.