19 April 2009

State of the Web, April-09

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It is somewhat regrettable to see our focus shifting from the important to trivial much more than it is meant to be. I admit important is not as nice or entertaining as trivia and it is understandable for all of us to cheer up a little bit, but the balance is off, way off.



Let us take the case of Mayu Yamamoto, a Japanese researcher who developed a way to extract a vanilla fragrance and flavor from cow dung. In a world-first recycling project, a one-hour heating and pressuring process allows cow feces to produce vanillin that could be used in products such as shampoo and aromatic candles at half the cost of making vanillin out of vanilla beans. Linked Google search showed 6710 results at the time of writing this post. Jokes like "bringing a new meaning to flavored milk" aside, it really was an important research.

Compare it to Ashton Kutchner's victory over CNN on Twitter; for a search string like kutchner twitter cnn, you end up with 1,170,000 results, almost 175 fold. I can not say surprising but I am disappointed. I did not expect less results for Ashton's story but I hoped Yamamoto would be cited more than this.

I have proudly tipped the balance to Yamamoto's favor by one result.


5 comments:

  1. thanks dude the information proved me good . i today thought to write comments as i use to read your blog and the information on your blog is fabulous i will give 5/5 the first blog i have seen with quickest updates and articles the log of Archiver is a very good blog . i Would like if others would come front who leave in the dark light as they just come read and go but as i am reading this blog it help very much and i encourage it . i would like if others will come forward and appreciate the author for this and all other good posts

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  2. I was just posting about this at another blog... it seems that some thing this Twitter achivement is big news and ground breaking... but I keep saying that it is small news and unimportant. The only thing that keeps people interested is the involvement of celebs... maybe one day our country and our people will look at things that are important...

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  3. I am not saying important things are overlooked, only the ratio is abnormal and resources are wasted.

    Any event where celebrities are involved naturally makes the news. However, the twitter case is surreal. People who are following Kutchner are already part of the news, they know what is going on. There is no reason to disproportionately report it back to them.

    This is an interesting side effect of Internet the big media still fail to understand.

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  4. Okay, let's face it, the trivial wouldn't be such a hit if people ignored it. Mayu Yamamoto's invention is important. However, (speaking only about Americans) it would seem that most Americans don't care about that. We want the trivial. We crave the trivial. The dumbing down of America is so strong that non-trivial news has a hard time competing. Look at any major news source and study what they call “news.” If it doesn't sell, it's not what they want. You'll get important news, but you'll certainly get the trivial in every case. We get what we pay attention to.

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  5. I like trivia just like everybody else, I'm O.K. with that. But I know for certain that I would like to be informed about latest developments in science, technology or medicine. Maybe that's why I hardly watch TV any more. It is at least possible to customize your news feed in Internet, which is a big plus in my humble opinion.

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