Here’s the start of the wikipedia entry for Moore’s Law:

Moore’s law describes an important trend in the history of computer hardware: that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years.^[1] The observation was first made by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper.^[2][3][4] The trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop for another decade at least and perhaps much longer.^[5]

Here’s the diagram that tends to go alongside such text, also from Wikipedia:

The trouble with all this is that normal people are not necessarily used to log scales, nor to statements about exponential growth in the capacity for placing inexpensive transistors in an integrated circuit. Which means that people’s eyes glaze over when I start talking to them about Moore’s Law. [Well actually most people make sure their eyes glaze over as soon as I start talking, regardless of subject, but that’s another matter.]

Where was I? Oh yes. Moore and his Law. I find this a simpler way of explaining it:

The chart above tracks the price per gigabyte storage in an iPod, and how that has varied over the years and generations. I’ve been using it for a while, and now it’s getting a little dated. Haven’t seen a more recent version, I sourced the chart from a James Stoup article in AppleMatters a few years ago.

If anyone has a more recent iPod/iPhone version i’d love to see it. Comments? Views? Have you found better ways of explaining Moore’s Law to my grandmother?

I cannot be in Washington DC on the 23rd of this month. And as a result, I’m already looking forward to a webcast of something that’s happening at the Library of Congress that day.

Yes, this is an unashamed advertisement. For someone I don’t know, have never met, and in whose business I have no stake. But I have enjoyed the things he has been doing with his class, particularly the things he has done with YouTube and Twitter.

Dr Michael Wesch, yes he of The Machine is Us/ing Us and A Vision of Students Today, will be speaking on the Anthropology of YouTube. I quote from the Library of Congress news release:

More video material has been uploaded to YouTube in the past six months than has ever been aired on all major networks combined, according to cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch. About 88 percent is new and original content, most of which has been created by people formerly known as “the audience.”

Wesch will discuss the three-year-old video-sharing Web site in a lecture titled “The Anthropology of YouTube” at 4 p.m. on Monday, June 23, in the Montpelier Room on the sixth floor of the Library of Congress’ James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C.

Wesch and his classes have been doing some very interesting things with YouTube and with Twitter. (See for example his post on teaching with Twitter a few months ago.). Actually there are many people doing very interesting things with twitter, what makes Wesch and his classes different is that they capture and articulate what they do very well. And then they share their articulation.

I’m fascinated by the behaviour of digital natives; I try and understand them every chance I get, usually by watching my children; I feel I now know a little about how the dinosaurs must have felt when they foresaw their own deaths.

If any of you do get to see him speak, let me know if you plan to tweet it.

Incidentally, I’m also looking forward to seeing/hearing the Douglas Rushkoff lecture on Open Source Reality scheduled for the end of the month.

I’m delighted to hear that the BT Web21C SDK team has just won the eWEEK Excellence Award for Application Development, seeing off competition from Salesforce amongst others. Open multisided platforms are the way, and it’s great to see colleagues being honoured. Well done to the team. Full story here.

Disclaimer: I work for BT. And this is not an advertisement. Just a personal vote of thanks to the team.

So you’re finding someone’s changed his tweet frequency, he’s tweeting too often for your liking? Maybe he’s got on his high horse about something and he can’t let go. And you just wish you could tune him out for a brief period?

Help is at hand. Look at this:

TwitterSnooze. Personalised short-term filtering out of someone. Now all I need is the same thing for a something and not a someone. When I can choose to tune out tweets about a particular subject or topic or entity, for a short while. [Yes it can be tag-driven if required].

I don’t tend to do quotes du jour, but this time I had to make an exception, taken from this post.

Jeff Atwood:

A blog without comments is like Amazon without user reviews

In fact, the entire paragraph is worth highlighting:

A blog without comments is like Amazon without user reviews. Is it really even worth using at that point? The products themselves are commodities; I could buy them anywhere. Having dozens of highly relevant, informed user reviews means I’ll almost always buy stuff from Amazon given the chance. It’s a huge competitive advantage.

I could not agree more. So here’s my twopenn’orth:

Social objects are designed to commoditise over time. And as they commoditise, what makes them valuable is the tags, the reviews and the ratings around them. And in turn that makes the community around them valuable, the people who do the tagging, the reviewing and the rating.

So next time you get asked what the value of a community is, think about the role of the community in enhancing the value of objects that would otherwise be undifferentiated and valueless.