Can you weigh information? Can you weigh the Internet?

Information has energy. Information has weight. Physical weight and not authority – although it can have that too. I don’t know about you, but the thought of information as energy is mind-blowing. And it gets better. A professor at Stanford figured out the weight of the Internet and it weighs as much as a large strawberry. Less than the weight of a human brain.Watch this video to learn more. Wow is all I gotta say!

The Weight of the Internet

Netflix Debacle

I would be remiss for not nodding to the current state of universal anxiety rippling through the cyberworld. It is pinging with anger, frustration, and complaints: why would you do this to us, Reed Hastings?

If you managed to miss this one, Reed Hastings, Co-Founder and CEO of Netflix, sent out a mass email blast followed by a blog posting on the changes to Netflix. Namely, streaming and DVDs are now separate entities with separate fees. The new pricing was announced about a month ago, basically doubling the monthly fee for almost all (hating absolutes) Netflix users. Smacks of monopolistic behavior in economically pressed times. And yet the price is still cheaper than a family of 3 going to the movies once a month. It is cheaper than one person, for that matter.

What will all of this mean? Innovation. Others will need to fill this void that Netflix is opening.

Amazon is considered one hopeful, but not by this blogger. I don’t want to pay per movie we stream. With a child that watches the same film over-and-over-and-over again, sometimes within the same day. Yikes! I don’t want to see that bill. Besides, I have other issues with Amazon. For another day. Some lament the ouster of Blockbuster by Netflix. Again, not this blogger. I will not forget how they used to censor materials. So who will it be? I certainly hope it isn’t Apple – more monopoly and censorship issues involved with that happy-shiny-people-entity. Blah! Who knows, maybe it will be Netflix, themselves, as they realize the outrage is far greater than they imagined. The noise in the cloud is deafening. They must hear.

My greatest hope is that more material will become available through streaming. Will classics migrate into the world of packets? I hope so. We cannot let the Marx Bros., Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Tracey and Hepburn, The Thin Man, and the list continues, fade into oblivion with the movement away from DVDs to streaming. I fear that old will be forgotten for the newest movies, that old-must-be-bad mentality.

Ultimately, this odd news pushed through email and blogs signals a new direction for all. Streaming is the future. Reed Hastings is correct. However, is Netflix really at a point to split the company? And how will this move affect our pocket books and our filmic history?

Today we say good-bye

Two days ago, Michael S. Hart passed away. He is the creative genius that invented eBooks and Project Guttenberg. Back in 1971 Hart created the first eBook and was so inspired, he kept going. He had a vision that literature would be freely and widely available to all. Like the Guttenberg Bible, Hart changed our lives. People are reading everywhere from their iPads, Nooks, and Kindles, from their iPods and smart phones. We can travel with more books than we’ll ever read on that vacation, all contained within some little electronic device.  We tuck our literature into our pockets, sneaking reads like the maids in the 18th century who carried little 16mos in their aprons. Learn more about Hart and his world view. You will think about things differently.

“Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world.  Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves.  All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.” G.B. Shaw, and one of Hart’s favorite quotations.