by Gigi L. Johnson | Jan 31, 2009 | Innovation Shifts
This could happen to me — I can see this now. I make a typo in a database and accidentally write “/” — and suddenly everything goes wrong on my website.
But I’m not Google. They did this around 6:30 am PST today and typed “/” in a database that identifies malware. And around the world, every search for about an hour on Google identified everything as malware, since every address has a / in it.
Twitter buzzed, but wasn’t too helpful. Lots of things were hypothesized. TechCrunch beat all the press to the table out of their Belgian office. Their posts were helpful, not as much from their stories, but from their comments from the whole world pinging in as to the fact that this was happening around the world.
Users were confused in all timezones. Was this my computer? Should I reboot? Should I complain to my ISP?
Google finally ‘fessed up and said no, it wasn’t stopbadware.org’s database. That site was crunched as many users went there for information, so was of no help. No, someone at Google put a “/” in their database. Their quality control folks were able to identify this and fix it in about an hour total. Blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-your-computer-on.html.
An hour? In Google Internet time, that’s a big outage for a small glitch.
I had another temporal Google glitch last week. The dates in my Google News search on the left hand side were from the 1800’s — really. When I clicked them, it brought up newspaper articles culled from archives and digitized from the 1800’s. After a few searches, that feature went away. (It was cool, and I’m not sure of why this accident drifted in.)
Glad to hear that Google wasn’t hacked. Disturbed at the ripples. Amused at the temporal impact.
by Gigi L. Johnson | Jan 26, 2009 | Innovation Shifts
This Comedy Central piece from Jan. 21, 2009, with Stephen Colbert daring us to NOT mash up his audio book and video of his two-week earlier interview with Lawrence Lessig nearly made me cry from laughing.
Then my co-worker, looking over my shoulder, said, “I’m confused. Is he for remixing rights or against them?”
Or is it for or against free marketing in this free market? Where else will this amazing video go?
Great beats and visuals. I was going to say “dude,” but that’s too old fashioned. I am just not as Down as Rap Master Colbert.
P.S. And http://community.colbertnation.com/ has a place for everyone to NOT upload their remixes and you can see all the remixes that everyone has NOT uploaded. 🙂
by Gigi L. Johnson | Jan 23, 2009 | Innovation Shifts
I put together this montage of views of CES, with lots of messaging about Eco-this and Eco-that, as well as small or thin TVs or laptops everywhere.
Enjoy!
CES 2009 – Consumer Electronics Show
by Gigi L. Johnson | Jan 7, 2009 | Innovation Shifts
One of my friends posted on LinkedIn an excellent “Bargain Hunting for Books” story from the New York Times late last month. If you have the market now to buy used books for $.01 or $.25, does that shift tremendous flow from the new book market? Now, my children have no patience to even wait until a book comes out in paperback, but for the rest of us who have longer lifespans to look back on, have we now unleashed our own libraries’ economic value just as we have unleashed the CD collections and hard drives of people all over the digital music world, just with shipping for $3.99?
Another related item is my current life hanging out in dusty stacks of the libraries. The Los Angeles Public Library, in its struggles to keep its shelves full without spending a lot more money, has cut its borrowing time to two weeks. So I’ve been going onto Amazon’s used books to now look at a buy or borrow strategy for books I’ve been wanting to use on my research on connected education. I love WebCat.org, which can tell me which of many libraries a book appears at, then lets me click right there to see if it is available to check out. The amazingly liquid market for used books reflects well the lack of availability in libraries. A friend hinted, and I don’t have the data to support this story, that libraries are having challenges with “rarer” (fewer hanging around Amazon’s used book market) books being “lifted” from library shelves and appearing on the second hand book market as some folks’ personal revenue. Any facts behind this? I wouldn’t be surprised in that over at UCLA’s stacks, many, many books on the more expensive list that I’m looking for are “missing” and haven’t been replaced by the university. In fact, of 20 education books I was looking for, nearly half had disappeared — the expensive half. Hmmm.
All this while I’m working on a textbook proposal. Reminds me of banking — I was told when I got in during 1988 that I’d missed the “good times.”
by Gigi L. Johnson | Jul 19, 2008 | Tech+Change
And in my last post, I forgot the now ubiquitous YouTube channel, not mentioned in any of the other material. http://www.youtube.com/doctorhorrible, with 1,586 subscribers and 10,887 channel views. So with the volume that supposedly had been hitting their own site, this is a surprisingly low number.
4th largest subscribers to a channel on YouTube this month, but way behind #1 with 29,149 called The Mean Kitty.
But this is where the fun responses are. I do love that sidekick piece!
And more about Dr. Steel. And the soup thickens — if you go to http://www.toysoldiersunite.com/index.php?pid=missions&mid=34, you can find marketing missions from the Dr. Steel folks on how to place comments into these various viral marketing elements of Dr. Horrible. An interesting marketing play perhaps? Will this get weirder going into ComicCon?