It was an email containing “amazing” Internet facts.  I’ve received at least one of these types of emails every week for the past five or so years.  By now I would hope that I could just press delete and get back to my really important something I was doing.  But nope, no could do.  I just HAD to read it.  Here are a few of the statistics cited:

2009 Internet Facts

• 90 trillion: number of emails sent on the Internet
• 81%: percentage of emails sent that were spam
• 234 million: websites on the Internet as of December 2009
• 1.72 billion: Internet users worldwide
• 126 million: blogs on the Internet

(Source: Pingdom)

C’mon, is this stuff really TRUE?  Who actually counted all of those emails?  And what were they doing in my email account anyway?   I know for a fact that the spam percentage is way off.  At least 98.3% of the emails I receive are spam.  Add in the ones that remind me it’s time to re-order something I bought online last year and that number shoots up to 99.2%.

Do we really need this information?   Frankly, it doesn’t matter to me that there are 125,999,999 other blogs out there; the most important one to me is mine!

On the other hand, if you’re looking for information on the Internet for a school or work project, a blog article, or personal use, knowing that your information sources are accurate and credible is important.

With this in mind, and having completely lost touch with the important thing I was working on earlier, I scampered off to the Internet to do some investigating about Internet statistics to see how credible these stats are.

One of the stats Pingdom used was from The World Bank.  It turns out that The World Bank compiles data that it calls World Development Indicators (WDI), in conjunction with 30 other partner organizations.  If you click on this link, http://datafinder.worldbank.org/indicators, you’ll come to a page of its different data sets.   Here’s what you get:

There are several hundred indicators of data from around the world on many different topics.  Regarding the Internet, for example, in 2007, according to the WDI, 73.6% of people in the United States were Internet users compared with 21.3% worldwide. That is credible, accurate, and perhaps useful information for someone conducting research on Internet use worldwide.

In case that doesn’t excite you, you can go back to the indicators page and look at some other interesting data sets about the world, like Births Attended by Skilled Health Staff, Mobile Phone Subscriptions, Measles Immunizations, or CO2 Emissions.

There’s a lot to be said for understanding how to effectively evaluate information on the Internet.  Thus, I may not have time to sift through all 126 million blogs, but I’m sure there are some I could and should be following (once I evaluate the quality of their site information, of course).

As always, thanks for reading!

I’ve dubbed this increasingly common experience “What Was I Doing?” syndrome, or “WWID?” for short.  You may recognize this as a takeoff of the What Would Jesus Do? acronym.  This seemed fitting to me because, frankly, I doubt even Jesus would have known how to deal with all the information cast upon people today.

I’ve considered creating wrist bands fashioned after the “Live Strong” yellow bands or the “WWJD” ones.  I think it would work better, though, to create a string to tie around one’s finger, like people did long ago.

But only one string?  If you’re like me, you’d probably need six or seven strings. Of course, then we’d have to remember what task each of the strings represented, which would just bring us back to where we were to begin with . . .

Well, I’m getting that gnawing feeling again, so I’d better get back to . . . now what was I doing?  Oh, right, I was making WWID? wristbands.

If you read about computers, the internet, or just about anything related to technology, you are bound sooner or later to come across this quote attributed to Bill Gates in 1981.

Did he REALLY say this?  It seems both preposterously shortsighted yet embarrassingly, predictably human at the same time.  It’s possible he said it; even geniuses make mistakes sometimes.

But no. He never said it.

As far back as 1996 he never said it, according to this quote by Gates from Bloomberg Business News: “I’ve said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time.”

Factoid as it is, though, this quote is still being used today.  Well, yesterday at least — it was Tweeted just yesterday:

[PHPtweetLater "640K ought to be enough for anybody." - This is not humorous by itself; but in the context it's a classic by Bill Gates in 1981 1 day ago via API]

So always remember: friend the fact but avoid the ‘toid!

*Factoids: facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotions in the Silent Majority – Norman Mailer, 1973

But now it’s out of the way. Welcome to my first article on my new blog.

Why have I created this blog?  Why does anyone create anything?  Are there some universal reasons?  Perhaps. Let’s test them.

First, some reasons that anyone creates anything, in no meaningful order:

• to get something
• to give something
• to show something
• to prove something

Next, a SIMPLE test.

Why does someone create an ice cream sundae?  To get happy.  To give happiness to someone else.  To show a happy smile upon eating ice cream. To prove that ice cream truly is happiness.

Finally, my reasons for creating this blog.

• To learn (“get”) from the knowledge and perspectives of you, my readers.  Like many of you, I have an inherent and sometimes insatiable curiosity about the world.
• To share (“give”) what I’ve learned with anyone interested in listening.  I’ve spent many years becoming educated. Many people have been willing to share their knowledge with me throughout that process.  It seems wasteful and selfish not to offer that knowledge back to the world.
• To develop (“show”) a professional portfolio of my current writing and thinking.  Those articles I wrote about the women’s volleyball team back in college just aren’t going to cut it anymore . . .
• To prove to myself that I have the self-discipline to sustain a focused writing project over a period of time.  If I can prove this to myself, I’ll seriously consider some other ambitions I have, such as acquiring a doctoral degree and/or pursuing a writing career.

I invite you to subscribe to this blog using the “Subscribe” button to the right.   Thanks for reading and remember: look both ways when crossing the Internet!