It's rare for me to be impressed by a website, but this site really impresses me. Just Hear It is simple in features and is simply just a place to listen to music but it makes up for that through an amazing library. I put in Phil Ochs and instead of getting 1 or 2 albums, it presented me with pretty much all his songs including one I hadn't heard before! I tried a few other artists who aren't well known and it found them too! It's definitely a great place to listen to music, especially for those lesser known artists. Now to figure out where it stores temporary files...
Troy, a beautiful city as long as you're uphill of it.
You walk into Troy and you'll either end up mugged in a back alley or mugged by a crazy black woman named Shirley (or rather her security guards) at a certain college. I'm still not sure which is preferable. The worst part of Troy isn't the poverty, or the lack of activity, or even the hills. No, the worst part of Troy is public transportation.
At RPI there are 2 ways to get around in the winter: walking and the shuttles. The shuttles are notorious in terms of their schedule, to the point where you'll have a 10 minute wait followed by 5 minutes standing in a mini-sized bus (with handrails if you're lucky). In order to minimize the wait, the glorious student union had the brilliant idea of setting up a shuttle tracking service! Which you can check easily with your laptop, before spending 3 minutes turning off your computer because you need it for class and then a 10 minute wait because the shuttle you were planning on was already full. But despite the Shuttle's inability to be on time, it's not too bad for one simpe reason, the drivers are nice.
The other forms of public transportation in Troy are cabs and CDTA buses. The cabs are pretty much the stereotype of cabs. My biggest complaint about them is the dispatchers are assholes, I don't mind them too much though since I've only had to use them twice. CDTA is the worst bussing company I know of. They serve all around Albany and sometimes have high-tech busses, which usually have cut up seats and leaking A.C. units. The only thing I can say in support of them is they're usually pretty close to schedule. Which is useful if you can figure out when they're where... Especially since most of their timetables end hours before the bus stops doing its run. They have this useful Trip Planner tool on their website, which I think they call a Trip Planner because the time it should take you to do the entire trip you spend waiting between busses.
I wouldn't mind CDTA too much if the drivers were nice or smart or cared or even had a brain period. That'd be too much to ask... All this general knowledge brings me to my real story. If you're reading this on the frontpage, click the Read More link.
So I had my first lab today in university physics 1 today. For all who don't know it like physics+calculus- fun. All we talked about was sig. figs. However it was worth it because my "genius" friend Danger (who brags all the time missed 60% of the problems. Looks like I do have a purrpose other than dropping the car down the ramp. I just wish that the class would get more exciting. We can onl hope it will. Well maybe I'll do weekly updates on physics (and more importantly dangers mistakes) Just think we could create a vast collection of physics knowledge and share it with the world or horde it for ourselves.
A person has been asking for my advise with getting started with a website for the last few days. Personally I don't consider myself a great authority. I administer an awesome Zune Forum, but I just mostly handle staff and make sure nothing too horrible happens. This site is the only one I personally own/run and it's pretty bad. But anyways, he asked me a question somewhere along the lines of, "how do websites get revenue?" Well, I basically just told him most sites get 99% of their money from advertising, the only real exception is ecommerce sites who get their money from selling products (although you could argue they're just advertising for themselves).
Keep in mind that in this article I express my own opinion. I am a college student, I have no authority so don't go betting all your money on me. I also say some things without references to studies or data, I may be inaccurate, if you wanna prove me wrong go ahead, but most of the data I reference in support of my thoughts are ones I believe are pretty widely accepted.
That is the simple answer. To really consider it is more indepth. For a closed system on a big enough scale you wind up with a common property famous in mass and energy, but nearly applicable for money, preservation. Money can only be created by banks and governments, and on a wide scale it isn't really destroyed (yes, I know this isn't true, but macro-ly speaking it's close enough). So money is basically just being passed around. The famous Economics 101 version of the Circular Flow of money is shown at the top right. It's pretty simple, they give us money and we give them labor and land, and simultaneously they give us goods and we give them money. It's the barter system hopped up on caffeine and crack. But for this to take place in a capitalistic society, the Companies need to be getting in as much money as they are giving out. If they can't make money, companies won't enter a market. The banking collapse came because companies failed to ensure their income. The internet is driven by the advertising market. Clicks are traded for money, in the hopes that clicks will translate into money. And sometimes they do... The sites that buy advertising come in two types, ecommerce sites and advertising sponsored sites (as well as charity npp sites, but they are an exception). Clicks to advertising sponsored sites are bought because the owner is trying to build a following and get traffic, in hopes that the ads he has on his site will give him money. Ecommerce sites buy advertising in hopes that those who visit their site will buy their product. However, due to a variety of reasons, this is becoming less common. At the same time more and more people are entering the advertising market and as such, driving up PPC and clogging up the internets with their spammages (if only it were a truck). So simultaneously we have higher prices and higher quantities of advertising but lower yield with the advertising. Classic advertising methods like banner ads are less and less effective as most users don't even look at banner ads (evidenced from most every eye tracking study I've heard of) and with adblock getting more popular...
A logical market would decrease inefficient advertising, but not in the internet... Instead we have clicksors, fullpage force ads, ads in flash games... So what's going to happen?
I love that video.
And no, I'm not forecasting the death of the internet. I'm forecasting a crash, of 1983 proportions. I think the internet will change, dramatically. The solution I foresee is one many people would consider unconscionable, and for good reason. I forsee the development of a subscription based internet. One where the subscriber pays a subscription fee to a webring organizer and in exchange, get good, advertisement-free websites. The webring organizer would then pay different websites in their ring based on the traffic they draw. The simple reasoning being the more traffic they have, the more popular and the more reason for someone to subscribe to that ring. The thing people most fear is being exploited by the system. However, many websites will stay free and there won't be just one subscription ring, there will be hundreds if not thousands of different subscription groups. They also won't be in competition just by the fact that smart websites will join not just one ring, but several rings. So why would you subscribe to that more expensive ring when most of their sites are available through this other cheaper ring?
This sort of situation brings many pluses and many minuses, too numerous for me to get into.
The main issue people fear is monopoly or oligarchy. They fear things like getting locked into overexpensive plans like the telephone industry. But this industry has no roots it will form from. Unlike ISP or telephone services that require infrastructure to be in place and due to high barrier of entry forces oligarchy and monopoly, this would have a low barrier to entry and as such, competition will be rampant. High competition is good for the end-user, as it encourages innovation and lowers prices.
I admit it sounds outlandish, but it is my belief that the current internet system of advertising ads for sites that ad ads for sites that sell crap with ads whose prices are way above what they should be, cannot last. I love the internet as it is, I just don't feel it will last.
And I wish I had the entrepeneural spirit, to form such a company myself, I could make billions. But bleh, too lazy.
