Why Google is Really Investing in Solar

During the past week or so I've heard a lot about Google's plan to reduce the cost of solar power. Surface journalism has called this a benevolent act that will lower our electricity bills and other reporters have said that this is a strategic way to earn positive PR points. I give both opinions credit, but it seems strange that no one has even mentioned how important this is to Google's business.

Is this so apparent to everyone that it isn't worth mentioning, or have we overlooked the important part? As it stands, Google spends more than $2 million dollars per month on electricity. Of course they want to research lower cost energy consumption. It'll only help business.

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Music Recommendation: Sin Fang Bous - Indie rock that will swing you through the day with quick beats and pleasant cherades

Murdoch Changing Another Media Model?

According to The Guardian and Mashable, Murdoch plans to start charging for online news and he expects to make a profit. If he does, of course all media will follow like they did when he created his first profit horse business model and transformed the nature of news into entertainment.

I wonder what Murdoch is really thinking? Perhaps he figures that traffic volume isn't that important? So many people interact with News Corp owned media that if it reduces by ten, twenty, even fifty percentage points then who cares? 50% of Facebook readers is still 15 million people.

Meanwhile, Digg seems to be embedding semi-incognito advertisements in content. People can still vote ads up or down meaning bad ads will get buried quickly, but is this the future or a blur between product and content that crosses the line?

I'm going to read Chris Anderson's Free by the end of the week and I should have more ideas on the future of media, but for now I thought I'd share Murdoch's intentions and Digg's plan so we could see what comes of it together.

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Stephen Shiffman and the Land Of No will release their album in ten days. It will be well worth a listen.

Triumph For Pack Rats

I'm a pack rat, and not just the kind spouses complain about when it comes time to clean the garage. I'm the pick-up-everything-in-sight-because-one-day-this-moment-and-object-could-define-my-life sort of pack rat. In other words, my compulsion for keeping is really. really. bad.

Then I discovered the hard drive. I picked up fewer rocks and started collecting music and then words and pictures. I still pick up especially beautiful rocks here and there and often find myself slipping objects in my pocket so that I can hold a moment forever, but the tendencies that probably would have buried me in objects has shifted toward the computable intangibles.

When I started getting tangled up in the web I transfered my pack rat tendency toward the world of links. I tried to collect them in browser favorites but of course most are lost. Many of the sites would be changed or expired by now even if I had all those links, but the ones that are left would serve as a sort of continuous time capsule diary for what I found relevant and profound at the time. I would love to look back on the sites I adored back when the internet chugged along dial up telephone lines at 56k, but alas, all that is gone.

I'm going to sound like a blatant product promotion here, but the moment I found Read It Later I knew that I'd found another brilliant tool to cure my satiated bookmarks bar and the sorrow of losing old Favorites. I no longer needed to send myself links of articles I didn't have time to read at the specific moment when I found them and I knew that I'd never have to write a URL on the back of my hand again. Instead I use Read It Later, a site that stores every article I haven't had time to read and archives the ones I've checked off.

Convenient, of course. But that time capsule of a diary I wrote about a second ago. I can finally make it. And someday when I'm navigating the web on whatever is going to come a couple generations after Google Wave (a tool that's supposed to change our way of using the internet) I'll look back and laugh.

"You were concerned about DDoS attacks on Twitter and figuring out why the biggest growth demographic for tweets was not teenagers, but adults," I'll say. "Because really, the important thing all along were the rocks that made the ground you're standing on."

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Miike Snow's music will capture you faster than you could read any description I could give. Check the trio out here.

Miike Snow - "Animal"