Well, after another brief shpurt of blogging, I’ve decided to kind of suspend things on DJI in more or less permanent hiatus. The reason? Not that I don’t have anything in particular to say (which I do, at times), so expect the odd post in an irregular fashion.
No, the reason behind things is that I made a decision about a month ago, after looking at a picture of myself in the mirror, that, to be blunt, looked very different than the person I was 10 years ago.
Residency and medical training takes a toll, and having just completed a whole whack of it, I really have no excuse but to start living the advice I sometimes tell my patients.
Long story short: between parenting, work, and trying to deliberately live a healthier life – exercising, sleeping, and eating with intention and purpose– I find there’s not much else I have time for.
I guess there are probably a lot of reasons to whip myself back into a healthier version of myself, but like other people who have accomplished this, it doesn’t matter what the reason is as long as you do it.
I may return to blogging regularly at some point, but its hard to say when that will be. Thanks to everyone who have stuck around for 3 years, I’ll be sure to keep in touch.
Tony.
Time will tell if it was Bing’s inherent abilities or Microsoft’s deep-pockets spending that caused the initial bump of 8% in unique users after the first month — but its clear what is suffering from a lack of Buzz … Wolfram Alpha.
About two months after its initial launch, there’s been thundering silence from the blogosphere / socialstream on WolframAlpha’s computational awesomeness. And now, even with some buzzworthy stuff, it seems like its wholly underwhelming [not being a stats nut, I will take WebWare's take on VORPs for example].
While WolframAlpha was never meant to in any way replace Google, its got to be a little disappointing to see a 50% drop off in traffic and an almost complete drop off in buzz.
With its growing community, some pretty fantastic stuff with its development in frameworks, astronomy, and other eggheadedness awesomeness, I’m not sure if the problem is a piece of software which is inherently lackluster — Cuil, I’m looking at you.
Maybe buzz isn’t important. Maybe traffic isn’t important. But, I suspect that for WolframAlpha’s investors, and as a means to ultimately monetize things, both metrics probably *are*important to some degree.
Here’s hoping that the WolframAlpha team continues to improve its marketing outreach. Its not that Google needs more competitors, because WolframAlpha really isn’t about Google — its about developing a unique piece of computational answer-ware which deserves to live and thrive in its own right.
In advance of the inevitable blogging orgy around Microsoft’s Office 10, only a couple of questions I’d like answered:
Will Office 10 work “better” in Internet Explorer, and will it require Silverlight to work? It would be fascinating (and stupid) if Microsoft made that the case, but I suppose, perhaps, that its no different than Google OS working “better” in Chrome (although Google’s current applications do not use a web application framework like Silverlight).
The other silly one is that so far all signs point to it being “free” for web-versions of Office 10 — does that mean it’s Free, ONLY if you’ve a paid version of Office 10? Because the last time I saw a paid version of Office is probably the last time I saw a paid version of Photoshop.
(Work and student-bought copies being the natural exception to the rule).
Nice pick up from the USA Today on privacy concerns regarding Google’s upcoming Google OS. In particular
Privacy advocates want more transparency from Google about how it plans to monetize the vast amounts of behavioral data it collects. Google could charge a pretty penny for this intelligence, which could help advertisers better target their pitches, says Court.
“Even though the company espouses that it doesn’t do evil, the potential for a lot of evil exists,” says Court. “It may start with simple ads you get based on whether you like soccer or baseball, but the evolution of being spied on, not only through your searches, but on all the files you create, that’s pretty frightening.”
At times like this, I like to remind myself that as tin-foil-y as privacy advocates sound (at times), Google has been known to add cookies that last 30 years long, was almost strong-armed by the government in handing over a ton of privacy related information, or how the Google van has been known to take photos of people without their specific consent. Yep … sometimes, I’d like to refer to Danny Sullivan’s seminal article which is only two years old, but details a great many “tipping points” towards malevolence since 2001.
