Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Among other properties, MySpace got bought for $580 million, Skype for billions, Upcoming for undisclosed riches, and now AOL is dropping $25 million to buy Weblogs, Inc.. It's fascinating because in each of the cases, the software/media properties are pretty basic, have had only a limited time on the market, and could be replicated [better] for a fraction of the purchase price… it really blows me away that traffic and users, which are what's actually being bought, are worth this much.

The reason it blows me away is that one thing that has been shown on the Internet over and over and over is that online properties are like television shows — they can skyrocket to massive popularity in less than a year, but disappear again in the same time period as another property replaces them… It just seems like a strange decision, making an online investment that's going to take a solid ten years to pay off — unless the big corporate players see the market as cooling off and stabilizing? The problem is that if anything, trends will go the opposite way — media and software development is still well within the hands of the common person, hosting and bandwidth is relatively inexpensive, and advertising networks are open to anyone, making it very difficult to block newcomers.

I know, I know, many of you have been telling me to commercialize more fun projects of mine. Now that I have some help on BME maintenance maybe I'll do that… I could definitely use the millions billions.

Speaking casually of computer stuff, I agree with this article that computers are bad for kids. While I want her to be fluent, I don't want Nefarious to get hooked on computer watching any more than I want her to get hooked on television watching. I'm perfectly happy to see her using computers or producing television, but I think with modern computers being so media and software heavy it's very easy for a kid to become the submissive in the relationship, whereas in my opinion a kid should have a dominant relationship with its toys and environment (ie. growing up should be about learning how to create).

In other news, the Catholic Church has finally admitted that “parts of” the Bible are fictional. Thank you, Satan. I wonder what future the Death of God will herald? I predict amateur teener porn, computer-aided drinking contests, and suspension hook animal mutilation. Luckily I've got no particular problem with anything but the last bit of that trifecta.