rambling blog entry

Just an assorted mish-mash of things that have caught my eye lately.

Interesting article in The Times yesterday about Generation Zero, young people who are trying to reduce down their physical possessions to the bare minimum.

A few thoughts arising,

this makes most sense if you do not own a house, once you own a house you rapidly start to accumulate vast volumes of stuff. I think a lot of this stuff really belongs to the house, rather than to you as an individual.

this makes more sense now that you can live a lot of your life online, you don't need to keep letters when you have emails, you don't have to keep physical photos when they are on your hard drive, ...

this makes more sense if you have gone digital with your media, so a downloaded album does not count as a possession it is just more bits on your hard drive.

just because you do not have a lot of physical possesions does not mean that you are living some ascetic life. You could be living in Starbucks, downloading material from iTunes in bulk, running an expensive mobile phone and subscribing to any number of online cloud services.

It does all rather paint a picture of someone with a laptop in one hand, an iPhone in the other, living in rented accomodation ready to move on at the drop of a hat but more at home in the online world.

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Interesting article the other day about Google doing a survey that reckoned that the online economy was now seven percent (I've not checked, this could be rubbish) of the total economy. Not sure that this is entirely credible, I suspect that it must include some mobile phone stuff etc that you would not really think of as internet, and that not much of the big money is actually being earned by UK companies, but interesting nonetheless. All part of the gradual process of people stopping seeing physical shopping as a passtime and using online for more and more of their shopping.

At the moment my online shopping is getting a bit annoying, a few orders still not arrived after over a week. Maybe the internet commerce is reaching another of those step change moments where capacity needs to ratchet up by a significant amount in order to meet demand.

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In terms of growing my investments I think I need to work to orders of magnitude, so that once I have reached one milestone in terms of orders of magnitude the next target is to aim for the next order of magnitude, even it it is something that is going to take years. Once you have got to 100, getting to 200 is less of a challenge. Probably something that might apply to growing a business too, otherwise you make the mistake of just thinking in terms of too many little baby steps, rather than really growing the business.

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My Amazon reviewer ranking has now leapt to 5997, though rising through the ranks is increasingly more mysterious, a few additional reviews make no difference to the rankings, and then suddenly I have rising a big chunk up the ratings.

Normally I think that there is no point to hundreds of reviews of the same product, but I actually found myself browsing through the reviews for the iPod Classic, and I was appreciative of the large number of reviews just to guage how much of a problem hard drive reliability actually was. Obviously for a book or a film, there remains little point to hundreds of reviews.

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Blogs are getting a bit tired, but I am not sure what there is to replace them, just where is the cutting edge at these days?