A recent survey says that half of all written communication is by e-mail and a whopping 29% is via text messaging:
The results among those aged 15 to 24 who took part showed only 5% of their communications were by pen and paper, a lot lower than the older people.
Yet despite the growing use of the internet and other new media, most people still spend more time watching television and listening to the radio.
...via Smart Mobs
Streaming video of a Bald Eagle nest.
Basically because it's cool
From Firefox developer, Ben Goodger:
It's great when people make contributions in the form of ideas and proposals, but it's even better when they're written for busy people. Here are some examples:
Making important points up front
Clear taxonomy of headings, and lots of them
Writing clearly and succinctly
No long, unbroken paragraphs or tracts of text.
Preferring bulleted lists with clear points to paragraphs.
Use of emphasis in formatting to make important things clear
...via digg
Microsoft delays Windows Vista until 2007:
Jim Allchin, co-president of platform products and services at Microsoft, said in a conference call that the company decided to delay the consumer version of Vista because PC manufacturers required more time to test and prepare their systems.
Windows Vista was hit by quality issues that caused the release to be pushed back "a few weeks". But this prompted manufacturers to ask Microsoft to delay the consumer version until 2007 because they had insufficient time to test and prepare their systems for availability this year.
"Quality is the top-line message, and we needed just a few more weeks," said Allchin. "We will release to manufacturing and sit on the disk for the consumer launch."
Windows Vista was originally promised for the second half of 2006, but delays have plagued the operating system throughout its development.
Podcasts now outnumber radio stations. This isn't really surprising, but I do find it interesting:
There are now more podcasts than there are radio stations worldwide, matching a prediction made on an Irish blog site last year.
In November of last year on his blog Podcasting News Ireland, Brian Greene forecast that, with new podcasts growing by more than 800 per week, they would outnumber radio stations by St Patrick's Day 2006. He said that although podcasts are strictly speaking shows rather than stations, they are independently distributed and subscribed so the comparison holds true to an extent.
Predictions are that Microsoft's new OS, Vista, due out later this yearwill require a minimum of 512M of memory with 1G recommended. Some indications are that 2G will eventually be the new standard configuration.
Samsung’s internal research recently published a figure claiming that the average PC system (including SI, OEM and home built computers) averages 871MB of DRAM in 2005, up from 620MB the year before. The DRAM industry has traditionally seen large growth around the launches of Windows operating system such as Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows XP. With large growth come large economies of scale, and ultimately lower prices for DRAM are on the horizon. Furthermore, with cheaper DRAM prices, system integrators are free to integrate more memory into the magic 6-8% budget. With such favorable trends, seeing 2GB of memory as a standard in every PC by the end of this year would be of no surprise to us at all.
A study recently found that Web users basically visit the same six sites each time they're online:
The study found that half of internet-using Britons (51 per cent) visit just six or less sites on a regular basis.
Three quarters of people questioned say the internet is indispensable to their daily lives and more than nine out of ten (95 per cent) say they go online with a specific destination in mind. People are now using the internet more smartly, visiting a handful of destination websites that have emerged as 'Supersites' due to their importance to people's lives.
The research suggests that using just one banking, shopping, travel information and holiday website is enough for a person to keep their life well-managed.
...via digg
Word is that Mozilla (makers of Firefox) made $72M last year:
The best piece of information I got out of BarCampLA was that Firefox, which is produced by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, made $72M last year and is on target to have 120 employees this year. I have no idea if this is true (anyone?), but it makes sense. I mean, there have to be 72M people using Firefox out there, and making $1 a year seems low to me! Mark Pincus brought this topic up recently.
Mozilla Corporation makes all that money because of the Google Search box on the top right. If you search with that box (which I do all day long) and you click on the Google ads on the results page Firefox gets ~80% of that. They also have Amazon in the search box, and other services that I'm sure kick them back some affiliate fees. Brilliant.
What an amazing business: make a kick-ass browser for $10-15M a year in expense and make $72M (and growing) in revenue. It's such a good business that the folks at Flock.com are trying to do a similar thing by building a wrapper with value-added services (like bookmarking tools) on top of Firefox.
...via digg
From Paul Purcell at About.com
...via Smart Mobs
I also get a variation on this effect (only the top stories) by adding Slashdot to my personalized Google page.