This is my dumping ground for quotes and other stuff relating to the wonderful world of digital & communications.
PAGE 109: A significant number of users still reported creating a web page in 2011 and the leading six countries saw gains between 2007 and 2011. In the majority of countries however, the number of users reporting they had created a web page decreased (Figure 3.10). This fall in website creation activity is linked to the rise in use of weblogs (or “blogs”) and social media such as Twitter
PAGE 111: Nearly 50% of OECD Internet users are active social network users
“It’s Turkey’s major contribution to the Internet,” says professor Ozgür Uçkan of Istanbul Bigli University, of the site ironically called Ekşi Sözlük, the “Sour Dictionary.”
The site has 36,000 authors, and an equal number of users who hope to become authors. It contains more than 10 million entries, gathered into more than 2.5 million topics, and it attracts 7.5 million unique visitors a month, out of a total Turkish Internet population of a little over 30 million. It’s an enormous success that few outside Turkey have heard of.
This is even more surprising, when you consider that the site just celebrated its thirteenth anniversary February 15th.
virtual scrapbooks are created for you automatically after you connect your various social services … and provide the dates for the scrapbook. These books can be private to you and those you specifically invite to view them, or you can allow any of your Facebook friends to see them. Those friends can also collaborate alongside you on books for events where multiple friends were in attendance…. You can even set up the scrapbooks in advance of your trip, and have them automatically created on the fly as you post photos and check-ins
Creating a game with TinyTap – which is free on Apple’s App Store – is a simple matter of adding photos, recording questions and tracing answers. Parents and kids can do it together, and then the game is ready to play
two Pakistani volunteers mapped their home country so well through Google MapMaker that the UN’s mapping agency UNOSAT adopted the maps and provided them to aid workers during the Pakistan floods
For all the cacophony, what I found on my screen was not incoherence or mob rule. Rather, it read like the world thinking to itself, filtered through the gazes of those whose outlooks I have come to trust and respect
Fan fiction is often baffling to outsiders. For the casual reader, it can be hard to see the literary merit of a story in which Harry Potter falls in love with Voldemort, then kills off rival suitor Darth Vader in a duel
advertising is 20 percent idea and 80 percent execution. It’s knowing what ideas are going to be great. It’s knowing how to make those ideas. I always love that great quote, ‘We’re all artists, it’s just that some of us shouldn’t exhibit.’ Just because everybody can do it isn’t to say they should. I get very annoyed when people say to me, ‘We can crowdsource!’ No, we can’t. Anybody can do it? No! I don’t think they can. Everybody can dance, everybody can sing, everybody can play tennis, everybody can kick a football: Are they any good at it? No, not necessarily. I went to art school. I trained, I tried, I had to work at it. I think the idea that you can just pick up a pencil and do it is nonsense. — John Hegarty
(Wikipedia) is ranked fifth in the world, with 480 million visitors per month, over 21 million articles, and almost 1.5 million contributors since its inception. Wikipedia has 88,500 active contributors per month.
Colourlovers makes the art of creating colors and patterns come alive, even for non-designers like me, who’d never had the urge to “create” a color in a world where there are already millions of them. No matter how intimidated by design you are, you can quickly find yourself creating colors, pallattes, patterns, and shapes on Colourlovers and start looking at design in a completely different way. Imagine what people with actual talent can do with these tools… Nearly 1.5 million registered users have shared more than five million colors, two million palettes, two million patterns, and nearly 160,000 templates.
by 1960 it is estimated that 55% of photos were of babies. From 1984 onwards the Silver Institute and PMIA published estimates of how many physical photos the world was snapping each year (silver halide being an important chemical in film)[4]. Year after year these numbers grew, as more people took more photos - the 20th century was the golden age of analog photography peaking at an amazing 85 billion physical photos in 2000 — an incredible 2,500 photos per second.
An amiable, 35-year-old Yale University librarian, Mugaburu spends his spare time mapping the world. He might, for example, outline the boundaries of a hospital in Haiti, while waiting for his bus. Or he might map his dad’s old neighborhood in Peru after dinner.
You don’t have to thank him. It’s what a citizen mapper does…. At this point, he’s completed more than 62,000 edits of digital maps around the world.
“Little by little, our maps are becoming more coherent,” he says. “All you need is a laptop. I help whenever I have a free moment.”
personal manufacturing is currently going through much the same phase as personal computing did in the 1970s. In many ways, that makes MakerBot the MITS of today. It has sold over 5,000 of its Thing-O-Matic 3D printers, which retail for $2,500 fully assembled or $1,299 in kit-form. Meanwhile, a newcomer from the Netherlands called Ultimaker, which costs $1,700 as a kit, is winning fans for its raw speed and ability to handle larger jobs. Some wonder whether the Ultimaker could be personal manufacturing’s Apple II.
Over the past week, Brook Drumm, an internet entrepreneur and workshop tinkerer in Lincoln, California, raised more than $155,000 in “kickstarter” funding on the internet from people who pledged money in exchange for one of his clever little Printrbot machines. Mr Drumm offers everything needed to assemble his basic 3D-printer for $500. Could that be today’s equivalent of the Sinclair ZX81, the world’s most popular PC in the early 1980s?
the Zambia Meteorological Department is tapping remote communities across several provinces to collect climate information. In the past four years, some 3,060 farmers have been provided with rain gauges to take rainfall measurements which are then fed back to the meteorological service’s local weather stations through mobile phones. Farmers are also encouraged to report other local weather observations. To motivate farmers taking part, RANET periodically recharges their phones with free airtime, and project managers are now testing the FrontlineSMS software to help minimize the service cost. This would enable rural participants to send SMS – text messages – to the RANET centre free of charge.
The results have been so encouraging that the Zambian Met Office is now considering providing automatic weather stations and rudimentary meteorological training to rural farmer cooperatives across the country.
Daria Musk has amassed over 24,000 followers on Google+…
Using the live video platform from Google+, Hangouts, Musk has been able to play hours of live music for an always changing audience. … Sure, its not the first live video platform, but its the first platform to have a social networking machine behind it. At any given moment of the day, Daria can play a “show” for hundreds of people over a period of an hour
