acrylic on canvas, polaroid, scanner, GNU image manipulation program
August 2017
zucker-eyeballs valuation
Those hoping that Facebook might actually die have assumed it would happen because "the kids" moved to another platform, as happened with MySpace. Ten years later, here we all are...
Financial pundit Mark St. Cyr thinks it might happen for a different reason -- advertiser disillusionment. He compares turn-of-the-millennium AOL with present-day Zuckerland and sees many similarities on the ad-oversell front.
Facebook is, for all intents and purposes, an advertising tool for advertisers only. It derives nearly all its revenue from advertisers. i.e., If there’s no advertisers buying on Facebook – there’s no Facebook. Regardless of how many free “users” sign up.
Pretty simple construct, but imperative to truly contemplate because it’s not that FB provides anything that people truly need. It’s just an outlet connecting eyeballs. And it is those “eyeballs” which are the product. And as soon as advertisers begin regarding 2 Billion eyeballs as being not worth more than two-red-cents, because nobody is buying? That’s when $Billion dollar valuations begin to plummet.
"Plummet" is a word that looks nice in proximity to "Facebook." Hey, we can dream, can't we?
the CEO's window
An office in the Wall Street area -- an e-marketing startup that launched last year -- has its personnel on display to pedestrians, goldfish-bowl-fashion.
Behind one window you see staffers sitting at long tables, working at their PCs. Another window shows us the CFO and/or CTO, working two to an office.
And finally, the CEO's room, where he can be seen pacing around, talking on his cell, or seated, staring at a computer screen with feverish concentration.
On his window ledge, slightly recessed below street level, he has arranged his public-facing decor: a guitar with an American flag facade, and stacks of books, with Risk to Succeed and Think & Grow Rich topmost on the stacks.
This is not invented -- this is an actual photo of a real place.
[edits after posting]
internet meta-scholarship: "Karadar.it"
Wikipedia's entry on French composer Hector Berlioz contains a footnote (note 16) to support the statement that Berlioz's parents "disapproved" of his abandonment of medical studies in favor of music.
The footnote link takes the reader to a Wayback Machine-archived page on Berlioz from Karadar.it, a quasi-encyclopedic entry with no sources given.
What is Karadar.it? A website formerly run by the Karadar Bertoldi Ensemble, a piano and violin duo based in Italy. A bio of the violinist, Sibylle Karadar, appears on another site.
At least one critic satirically complained that Karadar.it was scraping content on classical music from all over the web and passing it off as original. See Brief Outline of How to Steal, by Karadar
Karadar.it eventually migrated content to Karadar.com. Karadar.it is now a parked domain with a fake blog in Italian; Karadar.com is a portal page for people interested in auto accessories ("car radar" -- get it?).
