I few weeks ago I finally got an iPad. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find out how much it has changed my reading habits. Every night I spend at least an hour reading online news. The app Flipboard curates articles from about 50 different sources and puts them all in the same easy to read format. It’s great for the convenience factors, but also because I’ll put off trying to read anything on a computer screen because the iPad is so much easier on my eyes.
Flipboard also combines with another app called Instapaper. While I’m using Flipboard to browse through news I can tag anything more substantial (10 page NY Times features for instance) as “read later.” Once I do this, these articles are all pulled into the Instapaper app and available on demand at any time (even when I don’t have an internet connection). It works the same way with my iPhone. When I am looking through Twitter I can tag anything as “read later” which is especially convenient when you consider no one wants to read a five page article on their phone.
All of this “saving for later” adds up in a few different ways. First, I find myself reading more five to ten page articles than more substantial books. Increasingly before I go to bed I’ll pick a few significant articles to dive into instead of reading another chapter out of one of the books on my nightstand. Second, I find that if anything is going to take longer than five minutes to read, I’ll immediately save it for later. The unintended consequences is that even if something is really timely (such as all the Bin Laden information), it will be a few days until I really delve into it. I’m not sure if either of these are necessarily bad things, in the end I’m reading more regularly and that makes me happy.
Why doesn’t this exist? (if it does, why don’t I know about it)
The only time I every use Facebook is on my phone. I wasn’t selective enough with accepting friend requests at first and now my feed is filled with people I only vaguely care about. The people I want to know about don’t even really use it at all, further aggravating the problem.
The only functionality I use on the iPhone is the messaging. It is almost like I have e-mail, texts and facebook. Three different ways to send messages for three different (but sometimes overlapping) audiences. Everything else in the Facebook app is worthless to me and on top of that the alerts for when I have new messages are never timely.
What I need and want is an app that just handles fb messages, is that too much to ask?
When most people think about Aol, slow dial-up internet is the only thing that comes to mind. Most people are actually shocked to hear that the company still exists. After undoing the debacle that was the Time Warner – Aol merger most people thought they just faded into irrelevance and disappeared.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize a company with an obsolete technology as its core business isn’t going to continue to grow forever. Even when dial-up subscribers were its bread and butter, Aol created original content. They were a walled garden years before Facebook. You could either use an ISP that gave you access to the internet, or use AOL and get the internet PLUS original Aol content! I guess this approach made sense at the time. They added value for the customer through original content, which was useful because in the early days of search engines it wasn’t always easy to find information out there on the web.
Fast forward a decade later and they are now a content company that just happens to have a base of a few million dial-up subscribers. I don’t remember their original content being that great to begin with, but obviously no one asked me. In a key distinction from the content farms that clog up search results with keyword laden, but poor quality content, Aol is going to hire an unpaid army of bloggers. Hoping to hire nearly 8,000 bloggers in just eight days, AOL will have an army of free labor to produce content around the clock. This is of course, after they unceremoniously fired most of their paid ones.
Aol is also bolstering its media empire with high profile acquisitions. Back in February, they paid $315 million for the Huffington Post. This is only the most recent in a series of acquisitions where Aol has spent billions. In fact, in the very first acquisition ever made, they acquired an ISP that eventually turned into dial-up era Aol.
Originally I thought Aol was just struggling to stay relevant and spending boatloads of cash to do so. It turns out they have been doing it all along. Throughout its history, the company has been constantly spending tons of cash to stay on top and it seems to be working. My guess would be that these guys aren’t going away any time soon.
Maybe the title of the post is a bit of an overstatement. It is actually very cool and rewarding to see that someone over at The Economist is thinking about the same questions as I was almost three years ago.
Essentially my hypothesis was that increased access to information would make a country more free than those with less access to information. (Disregard the obvious question about which way this relationship goes. Are countries more free because they have access to information or do they have more access to information because they are more free?) My original thinking was related to the internet, but it quickly became clear that I needed to expand that idea into communication in general. There just wasn’t enough solid data available to only focus on the internet. This was three years ago and the best data I could find at the time was another few years old. In the past five years alone, the number of internet users has doubled.
A very simplistic version of what eventually happened was that I took a combination of the percentage of the population of a country with access different types of communication (phones, radios, internet, etc.) and compared that to the Freedom House Index score of the country (a measure of how free a country is). I did this for about 180 countries. In the end there was only a slight correlation and I couldn’t event start to claim there was causation. I can still remember sitting in my professor’s office telling him I think I needed to start over. His advice was great. He essentially told me that it was beyond the scope of this project to actually come up with some big revelation and find out that two things were definitively connected. The point of the project in my case was to go through the process of doing research and learn how it worked. It would have been nice if at that time Freedom House was compiling internet freedom scores like they are today. That would have saved me some serious time and headaches.
In the end, it is really interesting to see how in my case the lack of available data ended up shifting my thesis topic away from the original question. In that vein, it was incredibly satisfying to come across this article in The Economist. With people asking if social media played a role in some of the Arab revolutions, it makes sense that serious thought is going into the question. I’d like to believe that unfettered access to information is making people more free, don’t you?
The image in question is below, here is the original article.
After ten weeks in hiatus, I’ve returned to the blog. I’m making a renewed commitment to try to write something substantial on a fairly regular basis. For the random unrelated posts which consist of 90% videos with very little explanation, I’ve started a Tumblr.
The plan is to post on Tumblr 10-12 times a week and not have much of a filter. If I run across something half-way humorous or interesting it will get posted without exception. Occasionally I’ll remind all my Twitter followers that I share all this great stuff and post links there. I probably won’t ever post links to those things here. That way I can satisfy that inner urge to compulsively share everything with everyone around me.
If you’ve found this post that means that you are probably going back through old posts. Keep in mind there is about a ten weeks gap between when this was posted and the next oldest post. For a little more of an explanation, see what I wrote here.
For some of the highlights, check out these past posts:
Strange to think that six years ago today this web site launched. Less surprising, six year old kids don’t have plain birthday cakes. Or at least they don’t put pictures of plain birthday cakes on the internet.
Six years ago in my dorm room I registered the domain “kylelibra.com.” I had to send some company in Utah a check because I didn’t have a credit card at the time. Six years later it is still here, or still sitting in the same data center out in Utah. I’ve haven’t given this space much attention over the past few months (years?). I’ve let traffic decline to next to nothing. There hasn’t really been a focus since I graduated from college. Some changes are definitely needed. Over the next few weeks I’ll be making some major ones, stay tuned.
Really cool music done by dueling cellist (is that the word?). The video does have a strange subplot that starts around 2:30, not sure what is going on with that. Must be a European thing.
Jerry hatches a plot to take over the world with his side kick George. But in the end, Jerry wants to take all the spoils for himself while leaving George out to dry.
