iBrain

Is it possible to fill our body's hard-drive space (brains) with too much information? An episode of Married...with Children touched on this concept. Sort of:

Bud Bundy: You have to understand, Kelly's brain can hold anything. But there are some things you have to know. One: that it's totally empty.
Al: Woudn't you know it.
Bud Bundy: And two: that you can't just shove information into her head. You have to be careful. Feed her information slowly, bit by bit, drop by drop, until she's full.
Al: Full?
Bud Bundy: Oh, yeah. Kelly's brain can actually get full with information. And then you got to be really careful. Because each new thought after that will totally replace an old one. That's why Kelly forgot to wear a blouse on the day she went to take her drivers ed exam.

However, according to Paul Reber, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, we don't have to worry too much about our brains reaching capacity storage levels for quite some time:

For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.

The Secret to Blog Success?

So, what's the secret to having a successful (read: heaps of people reading it) blog?

Well-written? Engaging? Quirky? What exactly lures a devout and populous readership?

According to the British Psychological Society's "Quantity Not Quality Key to Online Popularity", it could simply be the sheer volume of posts:

Susan Jamison-Powell from Sheffield Hallam University presents the findings of a study of the activity of 75 participants in an online social community, and their popularity. The participants were recruited to a new community within popular social blogging site Livejournal.com, on which people post entries about their daily lives which are shared on the pages of others within their communities.

The researchers looked at a number of factors including: the number of blog posts each participant had made, the total word count of their blog posts, the tone of their posts - whether they contained negative or positive words - and the number of friends they had. Each member of the online community was asked to rate their impressions of each other member on a scale of one to five (one being very unattractive and five very attractive) after one week.

They discovered that the popularity of participants could be accounted for by their activity within the community, but not by the tone of their posts. "The more words a person had contributed, the more attractive they were rated by the other members of their community. The strongest factor was found to be the total number of words they had contributed over the week," said Susan Jamison-Powell. 

Her claims haven't gone without criticism, however. Take Chris' "New Study Suggest Blog Post Quantity Trumps Quality for Online Popularity", for instance. His post even earned a response from Susan Jamison-Powell, herself.

Nonetheless, if her study is on the mark, then it could certainly affect the way blogs and probably other media, are written in the future. I think we online folk respond to quantity because of the nature of online media, itself. Websites aren't generally great works of literature we treasure in our hearts, and re-read time and time again. We're largely invested in immediacy. Being up-to-date. And there's heaps of competition. A recent estimate claims there's as many as 70 million blogs out there.

Also, sheer quantity affords more of a hit-and-miss approach to quality. It's very much a production line process. Mass producing for the masses. As long as the overall product serves the "customer" decently enough, a few "flaws" here (read: writing quality) and there won't matter so much. In fact, the very art of spewing forth as much content as you can, would (ideally) improve your overall writing ability. Why else do writers advise hopefuls to "Write! Write! Write!"

Keep digging away at that hill, and you'll find gold eventually.

Ghost Writers in the Sky

For those not-in-the-know, a ghost writer is "a professional writer who is paid to write books, articles, stories, reports, or other texts that are officially credited to another person."

Sometimes, ghost writers even write for the dead. Ever wonder why V. C. Andrews is still publishing books, even though she died in 1986? Yep, ghost writers.

Even celebrity tweets aren't safe from this chicanery. I mean, shit. They can't even come up with 140 characters on their own? Sheesh.

Anyway, for more insight into this field, read Brett and Kate McKay's interview with ghost writer, Dean Zatkowsky. Hell of an eye-opener.

Narcissistic Octopus

Looks like Internet Disease has spread from humans to the animal kingdom, at least going by this article from Stuff.co.nz:

Putting his camera up close to get some footage as the octopus clung to a rock behind a clump of kelp, it suddenly thrust out a tentacle, grasping the camera.

"Out of nowhere it just completely shot straight for me," he said.

In an initial panic, Mr Huang said he "freaked out" for a bit to free his arm before realising the octopus only clung to the camera.

Eventually managing to free its shiny new $700 toy, the octopus swam off with Mr Huang giving chase, while the camera, being used for the first time, continued to record.

And yes, the footage is out there. But when American biologist, PZ Meyers, tried to embed it in a blog post, he stumbled onto the naughty cephalopod's hidden agenda: "That's when I realized the octopus's real intent: he wanted to make videos that were shareable and publicly accessible."

What Is Big Bird?

Ever wondered just what kind of bird Big Bird, of Sesame Street fame, happens to be?

Unfortunately, the answer's not so clear-cut:

It is believed that Big Bird is probably a giant canary. However, in an episode of Sesame Street Big Bird was asked if he was related to the cassowary, he replied, "I'm more of a condor." On a 1976 episode of Hollywood Squares, he said he was a lark. In the film, Don't Eat the Pictures, Osiris calls Big Bird an ibis.

Peekin' at Pedon

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