To answer that question, I decided to plot the numbers on a logarithmic scale:

Using a logarithmic scale, it is easy to see the rate of growth.  As you can see, up until 1997 there was a very substantial growth.  In 1996, for example, the Internet grew by 900%.  Between 1998 and 2001 growth slowed so that it only (on average) doubled in each of those years.  Since then, we’ve established a slower, yet still substantial rate of doubling only every two or three years.

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This may seem alarming to many. Why wouldn’t people want a faster connection to the Internet? I think cost is the biggest factor. I keep seeing TV commercials for dial-up accounts for under $10 per month. A broadband connection, on the other hand, would cost at least two or three times that amount. Why should people pay perhaps another $150 per year just to download their email and favorite recipes a few seconds faster?

Interestingly, about 3% of the visitors to this website access it through a dial-up modem.

Another interesting stat, for an e-commerce site that I run, dial-up visitors generate the highest per visit value. Dial-up visitors are more likely to make a larger purchase than broadband visitors.

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Yahoo’s ability to withstand a Microsoft bid was based in Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s claims that Yahoo has more potential and is worth more than Microsoft was willing to pay for it. Yang wanted Microsoft to pay $37 per share, and Microsoft only offered $33 per share. Now today, analysts are saying that if Yang is on a limited time line to get the trading price of Yahoo stock above $33 to prove he was right about not selling out to Microsoft.

I believe that Microsoft ownership of Yahoo would be very bad for the Internet. While Microsoft has currently withdrawn its bid, there is always the possibility that Microsoft will, in the future, attempt again to buy Yahoo. High stock prices are the biggest deterrent from future buyout attempts.

I want to do what I can to allow Yahoo stock prices to increase. I figure that I can do this by giving Yahoo as much legitimate business that I reasonably can. The easiest way to start is by switching the default search engine in my web browser to point to Yahoo. Perhaps I’ll find additional ways to give Yahoo more of my business. This is my small role in keeping Yahoo away from Microsoft.

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As a developer, I currently trust the openness of Yahoo! developer APIs, but I would have serious concerns if I could depend on a Microsoft Yahoo for continued support of these APIs.

Some reports say that the Microsoft bid is simply to buy Yahoo!’s user-base. I refuse to be bought like that, and will remove myself from the user-base when it comes time.

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• http://hardh.at
• http://enscri.be
• http://xenopho.be
• http://jacobbrunson.us.com

I think the .at domains are going for about $50, while the .be domains are just $18. If you want a .us.com domain (not like anyone is going to remember it) you can dish $150 out to Network Solutions.

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By blocking YouTube, BYU is prohibiting students from accessing great video content. For example, recently The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the sponsoring organization for BYU, has published public affairs videos on YouTube that show Church Leader Elder Ballard explaining church beliefs. Students trying to access this content from BYU campus Internet are blocked from the site.

Other educational materials are also on YouTube. Recently, UC Berkeley started posting full lecture videos online. So far, they’ve posted over 300 hours of video taped lectures online for free access to the public. These lectures could help BYU students supplement their own studies, except that BYU blocks the UC Berkeley’s YouTube site.

BYU’s efforts to block video content come in addition to Google’s own safe-search program anyway, which limits access to inappropriate “adult” material. Why does BYU feel they need to be extra restrictive about YouTube? When does blocking bad content at the consequence of blocking good content go too far?

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When I first started this blog, I really wasn’t sure about what I was doing. I still don’t. But as traffic to this website is anywhere from 200% to 400% of what it was a year ago, I’ve found that I need to keep many of my posts more professional because they increasingly represent who I am. Consider this excerpt from one of my very first posts:

Roommates are interesting. I’m not sure how much I trust them yet, which is kind of unusual, because I would like to think of myself as a trusting person. Yet there is something that just doesn’t feel right about one of them, and I just can’t quite ignore that feeling.

I don’t think I can really write such things anymore. I can’t talk trash any more. So along with my other efforts to diversify my blogs by audience, I’ve decided to create a new secret blog somewhere out there on that massively large world wide web, where I can post just about anything I want.

I know some of you will want to try and find my blog. Go ahead, it might be entertaining for you, but more likely it will just waste your time. But to give you a fighting chance, let me tell you about some of the details about the site that really aren’t going to help you find it at all:

• Between pink, blue, and green colors, I chose a theme with lime green and black and white and gray colors.
• I’m using Wordpress software to run the site
• I did not register a domain name for the site (at least not yet). I instead elected to use a subdomain name provided free from an independent web service provider.
• The software runs on the same server that runs most of my other blogs
• I have Google Ads on the site, and I actually hope that I might make money off of people clicking them. Of course, this means that I need people to come to the site, so I’ve made efforts to have the site fully indexed in Google and other blogging search engines.
• I’ve already made three posts to the secret blog in its first day.
• I intend to use code names for myself and in reference to other people

Well, that should be enough hits. If anyone other than Iacov finds it, I will be very impressed. My goal with secrecy is that I want many random Internetizens to find it randomly, but have no one I know actually ever come across it.

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I think websites sometimes neglect out dial-up friends for at least these two reasons:

1. Those in the web design industry are very likely to be accessing the Internet over broadband connections. Because the creators and authors of Internet websites have such a fast connection to the Internet, they tend to forget how slow downloads take for dial-up users. The content and websites they create are then larger and take longer for dial-up users to download.
2. An increasing number of trend-setting websites sell products, and their customers who can afford their products are the same people who are more likely to afford broadband Internet connections. In free-market enterprise, consumer-producer communication happens monetarily. Thus, those who can afford high-speed Internet also have a louder market voice to commercial Internet content providers.

Only conscious efforts on the part of web designers to keep sites slim and fast will keep the web accessible for everyone.

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Don’t search for porn, and don’t expect to find any around here. I looked up some information about the person who performed that search, and I will publish it here to show that the Internet is not anonymous.

On July 6, at 19:09:41 MST, a user from IP address 206.192.18.14 arrived at my website while “trying to find a porn movie.” This user was using the computer host18-14.ecpi.edu at ECPI College Of Technology. This user was using Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows XP.

For the record, the user accessed my January 2006 blog archive which contained a post where I questioned the dependency of Google’s business on porn.

I suspect that by publishing this post, I’ll see an increase of people coming to this site looking for inappropriate material. If you are one of these people, you won’t find any inappropriate material here. I encourage you to stop searching for porn. If you can’t stop, you may be addicted and I exhort you to seek professional help.

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The bill uses broad language to define a social networking site as one that: “allows users to create web pages or profiles that provide information about themselves and are available to other users; and offers a mechanism for communication with other users, such as a forum, chat room, email, or instant messenger.”

This language is so broad, that many websites would fit into their definition, possibly even this blog. Blogger, slashdot, even Gmail might all be banned under this description.

What this bill does is effectively limit minor’s abilities to speak freely on the Internet.

While I’m against predators from using the Internet to find minors, I don’t think banning minors from using certain Internet technologies is the right way to solve the problem. The bill encroaches on parental responsibilities to encourage their teens to be safe online.

Sure it may be unsafe to post personal information online, just as it may be unsafe to cross the street–you may be hit by a car! Does that mean we need a law that bans minors from crossing the street?

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