Wolfram Alpha

If you like to know stuff, you need to try Wolfram/Alpha. Here's a widget to try:



I'm just now trying out this beta widget for fun. If it doesn't work, try the link to the site. It's interesting.

Monetizing Social Media

I have followers who are obviously only following me in the hopes that I will follow them and then buy their product or service. They are using social media just to get people to buy their stuff. Others try to monetize social media by placing advertising on their content.Hopefully they have some content worth monetizing. I just read an article stating that some of the social media IPO's are down as much as 30-40% over their initial prices. The markets are, obviously, unsure of the profit potential of social media.

I find that promoted posts appearing in my stream irritate me much the same as SPAM does in e-mail. Only, this time, I can't avoid them by routing them to a SPAM folder. They are there for me to read -- like I'm really interested in the black friday specials from . . . or the weekly sales from . . . or getting my . . . adjusted. Nope, I'm not. We'll see how social media is monitized in the future as platforms like Facebook are utilized by more and more commercial enterprises.

Finding Friends -- Does it HAVE to be this Hard?

I don't have a lot of friends on Facebook. In fact, my kids laugh at me. But I tried to find a couple of people today and it was difficult. You can put their names into the search box, but, unless they have an extremely rare name, you get hundreds of returns and can't filter them by any other criteria. You can "Find Friends" and enter all sorts of criteria, except the most important one, their NAME. Hey Facebook. How about combining the two in to something really useful?

You shouldn't do everything just because it's available . . . (paraphrase from Louis CK on Conan)

I saw this and thought, "yeah, he's right" Louis hates Twitter. He has an account just so he can tell everyone how much, it seems. He's right about the fact that you shouldn't do everything just because it's available. The idea is to experience life. But it seems that more and more, recording life is experiencing life. Turn off your device and live.

Sharpton on MSNBC

Al Sharpton is hosting the 6PM slot on MSNBC. I heard an interview on NPR with a black journalist in which the premise was, "why Sharpton and not a black journalist?". Although the discussion went on for about five minutes, the answer was given in the first minute of the piece. Ratings were up 18% during Rev. Sharpton's trial period in the slot. And ratings -- read "profit" -- are the name of the game, not good news reporting and analysis. It's the same reason we see people buying wedding dresses -- people watch it. You can dress it up all you want, but ratings are the name-of-the-game in broadcasting because profits are the name-of-the-game in business and broadcasters are profit-driven enterprises.

Social Media Fatigue

Are you suffering from social media fatigue? Take a look at this article.

But what bothered him most was how the site seemed to suck up all his time. Without even thinking about it, he caught himself automatically checking Facebook on his phone while sitting at the bus stop.

It seems that this could be a major issue for some people. The emphasis seems to be on followers or friends -- quantity over quality. But how do you deal with all the stuff that comes from thousands of these? People collectively spend 700-billion minutes per month on Facebook according to the company. That's a little hard to believe. For the 6-billion inhabitants of the planet, that would mean each one spends 116 minutes per month on Facebook. And, consider the number of people on the planet who don't have access to the Internet and of those who do, how many don't have access to the Facebook site(s).

One site estimates that there are 2.1-billion internet users in the world (March, 2011). That raises the time to 350 minutes/month. If these users sleep eight hours per day, then in the average month, the users spend 1.2% of their time on Facebook. And, of course, not every one of the 2.1 billion inhabitants of the planet with Internet access are Facebook members.

Facebook says they have 700-million active members. That means that these users spend 1,000 minutes/month on average on Facebook. That's 3.5% of their waking hours on Facebook. That may be more time that some of them spend with their kids. (We could get into all sorts of analysis of how many have kids, but you get the idea, it's a lot of time.)

And many of us are on other social media sites -- Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. How do you keep up with it all. Or maybe the better question is, DO you keep up with it all?

I mean if you follow thousands of people on a service, how do you keep up with the torrents of stuff that comes your way? I suspect that many of us start to treat social media like much of the other media to which we are constantly exposed. It washes over us, but we don't pay it much attention. It is just there, competing for our attention, but not really noticed consciously. We become numb to it.

The Berlin Wall

The road where the museum is located was divided in two on August 13, 1961, and some 2,000 east German residents were expelled from their houses to allow the communist authorities to secure the new border.

[source] I was there. My dad was stationed in Ulm, Germany, at the time. We had to have bags packed and be ready to leave with 24 hours notice. That was 50 years ago. Things have sure changed in that time. Here I am writing something that is potentially read by people around the world. The dividing line between cultures is being defined by electronic walls and social media is spurring further change. The wall was up for 28 years. It's mind-boggling to think what the world will be like 28 years from now.