Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

Externalities: Data Centres

Paul posts some interesting (verifiable?) stats on data centre environmental impact. Arstechnica has a longer post.

See related posts on externalities.

Update - probably worth cross referencing this with this recent Larry Page interview.

The FreeForAll

I'm holding back on writing about Chris Anderson's article in Wired magazine about his new book (Free) until, well, I've read it end to end. However, I did watch this video pitch that is up on the wired site and it just confuses me.

If you've been following my comments regarding the concepts in this book, you will know that I'm all hung up on externalities. Chris starts of by talking about Lewis Strauss and his prediction that electricity would become free due to the use of nuclear power plants. Chris then observes that this didn't happen, but imagine what the impact would have been - we would have lots of good things going on. Okay - fine. He then states that three other technologies that touch our world as much as electricity are becoming "too cheap to metre" (quoting Strauss' on electricity): bandwidth, storage and processing.

So - Chris - these computers and networks that don't run on electricity - where can I find them? In my world, these things that are free require something which, as you rightly point out, is not free.

Here's the video.