Goody Bag Vol. III

Welcome to the third edition of the Goody Bag, a collection of miscellaneous musings and likeable links. These are thoughts that aren’t really meaty enough to turn into a full post, but are still worth mentioning anyway. Maybe you'll learn something, maybe you won't; the nature of the Goody Bag is inherently mysterious! 

The internet is old (and so are you)

I noticed the other day that eBay's copyright tagline reads “(C) 1995-2013” – making it eighteen years old. That just seems bizarre, right? In Australia, eBay becomes a fully-fledged adult this year, able to buy its own alcohol and vote in elections (I’m sure it would keep to the right of the political spectrum, free markets and all that). It also means that next year there will be people of a legal age that have never lived in a world without eBay. By comparison, it won’t be until 2022 that Facebook turns 18 and becomes mature, although some may argue that it probably never will.

History of domain names

Here’s a bizarre fact to mildly impress your friends. Before gmail.com was the domain of the ubiquitous mail program we all know and love, it belonged to Garfield.com, who used it as a site where you could sign up for a Garfield themed newsletter. I tried to find the history of other well-known domain names, such as facebook.com and google.com, but it’s actually quite difficult to find out without paying through the nose for a service that will give you access to the histories. It’s worth remembering how valuable domain names are, and if you’re the owner of one that some gigantic company happens to want (the previous owner of fb.com, for example) it can make you very rich. It’s the 21^st century equivalent to discovering your property has vast amounts of oil reserves (although, you know, in the 21^st century it’s still quite profitable to discover that you’re sitting on massive oil reserves).

The success rate of search engines

When’s the last time a search engine failed to return something that you wanted? I bet it doesn’t happen all that often – provided that the thing you want actually exists and you have at least a vague idea of some keywords that might help you out. The other day I spent far longer than I should have searching for an obscure kids’ album that I used to listen to. All I knew was that the album was about dinosaurs and a couple of the track names. Granted it did take a little while, but I eventually located it: ‘The Dinosaur Album’ by Glynn Nicholas and the Funky Fossils. During the course of my search I also learned that the titular Glynn Nicholas once co-wrote a television show with Australian comedy stalwart Shaun Micallef. If Nicholas and Micallef got together and performed a live recording of the album, I would be able to die a happy nerd.

The digital neighbourhood

Despite the fact the internet has vast amounts of content (one estimate puts the amount of active websites at over half a billion) I often find myself visiting the same handful of sites for the majority of my browsing. It’s interesting that despite the amount available at my fingertips, just like in the real world I have a ‘neighbourhood’ that I frequent regularly. These sites include my online banking, email, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, a couple of forums and one or two sites with articles and other content. Aside from these, I do make trips ‘outside’ the neighbourhood when required, but generally only if I actually want something – it’s rare that I’ll wander away just on a whim.

Map of the internet

And speaking of wandering and neighbourhoods and the size of the internet, here is a really cool site that provides a visual representation of the internet. It’s interactive, meaning you can zoom in on certain parts and see the connections between the various sites (the site uses the same engine as Google Maps). What I really like about this is how quickly it gives you an impression of the major players of the internet (guess who), and also a nice colour-coded representation of the geological location of the sites (USA is blue, India green, China yellow etc). I wonder if it is just a coincidence, or a conscious design choice, that the map appears to look very much like most conceptions of the universe itself. I don’t understand enough about maths or physics to know the answer; however the website does give some analogies which draws on terms like ‘electrified bodies’ and ‘gravitational quantum’ to make it all seem very impressive.

And last, but most infuriatingly

The Steve Jobs biopic starring Ashton Kutcher is due out later this year, and is already a frontrunner for the ‘Worst Film Title of the Year’ award. It’s called ‘jOBS’, and before you go and check IMDB, that is not a typo. It doesn't even make sense, apart from the fact that a lower case 'j' kind of looks like a lower case 'i', what with the little dot and all. But, because they're going for the whole 'iPod, iTunes' thing, shouldn't it really be spelt jObs? The title is an infuriating combination of laziness and marketing bullshit; obviously you can’t call a film just ‘Jobs’ (unless you’re making a Marxist propaganda film) but the film producers obviously couldn’t come up with anything snappier so they decided to go with the wAcky sPelling instead. A good movie title should be like a good haircut – at first eye catching and attractive, suitable for the person or film it adorns, yet it should be natural enough that after a while you stop thinking about it and it just becomes part of the whole – not something you’re still noticing two hours later, wondering ‘who the hell thought that was a good idea?’

That’s it for now. Turn your computer off and go for a walk.