More than a 100 million registered domain names, according to Netcraft
According to Netcraft the internet has more than a 100 million websites. This news was brought to my attention by the newsbar in my gmail account, which let me to the Tweakers net website where google apparently found the news. I then googled (!) Netcraft and found the same news article there!
Now ofcourse it is very important to check what websites have been added to the list; just like blogs there is a huge cemetery of websites that were once started and then abandoned by its creator. And a lot of popular domain names have been registered by companies who want to sell that domain name to companies or just private people for a huge profit. Another example: I once registered the website www.heleenvanderklink.nl and used it for a while. When I stopped using it and canceled the hosting contract, the website provider kept the domain name, so if I wanted to use it again I would have to continue using their services. But when I wanted to make a new personal website, I rather used another hosting service, so instead of www.heleenvanderklink.nl I registered www.heleenvanderklink.com and the .nl name is now still available, but it only has a link to my old website host.
The above mentioned examples shows that there may be more than a 100 million registered domain names, but how many of them are actually active? According to the statistics that Netcraft lists on their website half of these website (almost 51 million of them) are active. Unfortunately it does not say how they have calculated these numbers and what prerequisites Netcraft has draught in order for a website to be active. My gut feeling tells me that the actual number of active websites is a lot lower percentage of the 100 million registered domain names than 50%.
However, I think it is hard to come up with the actual number of active websites, and even sending a survey to a number of websites may not be a sufficient way of trying to estimate the number of active website.
But perhaps someone can propose a method, anyone?
References:
Anthony Townsend argues in his essay ‘Locative-Media Artists in the Contested-Aware City‘ that the technology of context-aware computing (of which locative media is a part):
will be characterized by an interplay between top-down systems for command and control and bottom-up systems for collective action.
In response to the article published below concerning the current telecom situation in Serbia, I let Dr. Djukic read the article. He was quite critical about its content. I recorded his response here.
Dr. Djukic created the smallest electronic device known to man. The results from Dr. Djukic’s research are the foundation/cornerstone for all experiments and theory in nanotechnology. It must be said that Dr. Djukic is not working for the telecommunication market, nor does his research have any affiliation in this field. However, Dr. Djukic is Serbian and is well informed in multiple fields concerning the Serbian commerce market.
A few days ago I was having a conversation that is worth noting. The talk was with Marco, who was visiting The Netherlands as a tourist. Marco works for Telecom, the state owned telecom provider in Belgrade, Serbia. Marco has an Engineering degree in electro-technical science from Belgrade University. Currently he has a high level management position in the IT department.
I asked Marco about the present internet situation in Serbia. He answered that because of the geographical condition in Serbia there is an unequal spread in internet connection possibilities. It is very difficult in the mountain regions to even get access to a proper telephone line. In the urban areas internet is more common. Yet internet speeds that we have in The Netherlands are unusual. Most people use a dial-up connection, with a maximum speed of 56 kb/s. This, however, is still considered very fast (for a dial-up connection). When people want a faster access, they can get an ADSL connection. The cost is about 15 euros per month for a speed of 128 kb/s. The maximum speed available (via cable) is 2 mb/s and is only affordable by big companies, multi-nationals and the very rich.
Downloading films and music is not as ordinary in comparison to Western countries. Streaming videos via GoogleVideo or YouTube is also considered exceptional. Warez are available at almost every street corner in Belgrade. Illegal Dvd’s and Cd’s are big business. Most people in Serbia only use internet for checking their mail and to read through news sites. The average income in Serbia is currently about 500 dollars per month. For most people it is too expensive to get a 128 kb/s connection for 15 euro’s (19 dollars). Because the difference between a dial-up connection is relatively small, it is more common people make use of this type of internet access.
Developing the communication infrastructure in Serbia is very costly. Placing new cables to households takes high investments by the government. In a country that is still tormented by a civil war, Nato bombing, and a fraudious regime, it is difficult to imagine new media technology to be a priority. It is therefore to be expected that private companies supply and empower urban areas in Serbia with cable. However reality disagrees.
Locative media is about as vague a term as web 2.0. Essentially, locative seems to be about connecting ‘third nature’ information to real world places and/or objects. But there are a number of ways this can happen.
Below I suggest some basic categories of locative projects, based on techniques (e.g. localizing web content, embedding data in specific places) rather than uses (educational, artistic, community-building, etc.). Making an taxonomy like this is bound to fail, but I think helps put perspective on our work of analyzing developments in that all too hip phenomenon of locative media. Please comment and suggest changes…
So I take it everyone has started researching their paper for new media theories? I’ve decided to tag all the useful papers and articles i find with nmtheories, while tagging related artwork or projects with locativeprojects. Anyone up to sharing their resources with these tags is welcome, hopefully this way we can find more useful stuff without having to sift through the thousands of pages tagged with ‘locative’ or ‘mediatheory’.
Just a reminder that the databodies event is in paradiso tonight. Also there are some short articles about databodies in the new issue of cut-up (including those written by fellow masters Esther, Jasper and myself), for those that just cannot get enough.
And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror – from The Book of Mozilla, 7:151 (type about:mozilla in the address bar)
Microsoft and Mozilla just released their new browsers: Internet Explorer 7 was released October 18 and Firefox 2 was on October 24. What can we expect?
I’ve been thinking a bit what to publish about my research on my weblog, and went to search for other examples of research blogs to give me some guidelines.
I stumbled upon this website jilltxt.net/txt/researchblogs.html by Jill Walker who has written a valuable paper on blog usage and research together with Torill Mortensen. A very good read for anyone who is in doubt on what to blog and what not to. The following quote presents an interesting view:
“Blogs exist right on this border between what’s private and what’s public, and often we see that they disappear deep into the private sphere and reveal far too much information about the writer. When a blog is good, it contains a tension between the two spheres…”
The paper by Walker and Mortensen can be downloaded from the website, or directly from here: Jill Walker and Torill Mortensen, Blogging Thoughts: Personal Publication as an Online Research Tool (February 2002, PDF).
If you’re going to run a research blog or already have one up and running, what will you be posting and also what not? On the one hand you want to discuss things with your readers, on the other hand maybe you don’t want to have them run off with your ideas? Where is that balance?
(also posted on newmw.wordpress.com)
The thirty year old game industry is peaking at this moment and the top of the mountain is still far away. Also in the Netherlands the future seems nothing less then positive. Games have become new territory for researchers. In the corridors people are already dropping the term ‘game studies’. Contemporary research areas are the interaction between the virtual and the real economy, violence in games, gender studies, narrative, psychological impact, and the game industry itself. The latter is the fastest growing industry in the world. The game industry has surpassed the film industry.
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Dear all,
I recieved this announcement from Jeroen Jansz of ASCor:
ASCoR, the Amsterdam School of Communications Research (University of Amsterdam) advertizes a new PhD position in research about digital entertainment games. The project is supervised by Prof. Dr. Ed Tan and Dr. Jeroen Jansz. For details see: http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/ascor/ under ‘vacancies’.
jj
Jan Simons
Masters of Media presents another audio book review:
Indonesian Transitions. Editor: Henk Schulte Nordholt. June 2006
The book review focuses on an essay by Bart Barendregt: Mobile modernities in contemporary Indonesia; Stories from the other side of the digital divide.
Please tune in:
an inventory of future warning signs is funny: should the masters make stickers and distribute accordingly? Of course, the warning signs we have now are not so bad, either.
via Schneier
UN envoy for Sudan Jan Pronk has to leave Sudan because of a weblog post about the Sudanese army. The post in question can be read here: www.janpronk.nl/index120.html.
Pronk states that the army has lost a lot of soldiers in fighting the rebels in the country. The Sudanese army now claims that Pronk is trying to set up a psychological war against them, and says he has to leave the country in 72 hours.
Democracy on weblogs seems to be as democratic as the country you live in. The CNN article can be found here: Sudan orders U.N. envoy to leave.
How to keep up as schools in a world where even e-mail is outdated and social networking is the new big thing? Some schools say that the answer is setting up a MySpace page. Can it be that education has sunk to a new low? Or is this the new high in school/student communication? Nate Anderson wrote an article on arstechnica.com about this.
But the question how to communicate with the younger generation is also very actual for parents, they just don’t know what can be done with a computer. Jonathan Duffy wrote an interesting article on the BBC website called IT-support for your parents.
Today various Japanese media companies forced YouTube to remove 29,549 videos from its archive because of its copyrighted disposition. Google, which recently attained YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars, will most certainly have to do this more frequently. In my reticent analytical judgment YouTube will be wrecked by judicature. In the first place, it will most probably be prosecuted endlessly and eventually lose some vital cases, resulting in the removing of all illegal/copyrighted material, forcing advertisers to draw back their initial interest.
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As I was getting ready to turn off the computer, I decided to do some last minute browsing through YouTube. Wondering if there would be any drastic changes after its takeover by Google, I came across an intriguing title: internet killed the video star. A video(?) by a band that consists of members who never met in real life, yet jam together via the internet. They are called the Clipbandits. The three band members live in three different states and time zones in USA.
Mauri is “hello!” in I-Kiribati. Why are you telling me this? You probably ask yourself. Well, let me explain…
I was just checking out our statistics and the first three countries on the “visitors per country list”were no surprise: The Netherlands is first, then the U.S.A. and then the Indeterminable countries, whoever they are ;-). The big surprise was number four. Beating out France, the UK and China is a small group of islands with the name of Kiribati. Although most of the population does understand English I did think it was a good idea to give all those MoM fans a nice welcome in their own language.
The information I give you now will put things into a different perspective, nonetheless, I learned a new word and found a new tropical island to put on my “43 places to visit before I die” list. Mauri! (more…)
While reading through Plato’s conversation with Socrates in his classic writings of the Republic, I noticed an almost utopian allegory in Book VIII in which they discuss the decline of the state. The decline discussed by the ancient Greek philosophers resembles the history of the web untill now very precisely. I will give you my view of how I see this -maybe unorthodox- allegory.
You can download it in a PDF here: Plato’s Republic: The decline of the state and the history of the World Wide Web. Or just press more to read in directly in the blog.
I’ve only been using MySpace for about half a year now and I can’t say I’ve been using it intensively. I’ve “only” got 39 friends of which thirteen are artists and six are venues I often go too. I use it as a notification tool or as a substitute of the mailinglist. Artists and clubs used to have mailinglists to notify their fans about upcoming events, but nowadays MySpace is used for that same purpose.
Why are there so many pro-ana blogs? What makes them so attractive to people who suffer from anorexia nervosa? I would like to make clear that this post is not going to answer these big questions, but I will try to offer an interesting view on some of the philosophical developments that have had influence on the phenomenon. (more…)
In the book Profiling Machines, new media theorist Greg Elmer looks at how consumers are tracked and how their data is fed back to them, affecting change in the spaces they navigate. His examples include recommendation systems like those on Amazon and TiVo. On either, your behavior or ‘movement’ is recorded and analyzed along with that of every other user, generating various profiles and thereby recommendations. I think that the key point is that these systems generate change in the user’s environment while promoting uniformity in users’ movement.
Below I wonder aloud, “What would be the effect of applying this model more generally?” (Note: 75% of readers ultimately choose Chuck Norris after viewing this item.)
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