Dustin LindenSmith

I actually haven't watched more than a couple minutes of any of Lonelygirl15's videos, but I'm aware of what a sensation she has become on YouTube. What I only learned recently is that her whole story is fictional, that she's played by an actress named Jessica Rose, and that her videos are written, produced, and directed by two guys, one of whose bedroom is used for the shoot.

If you're interested, the Wired.com article where I read about this is here, and Lonelygirl15's page on YouTube is here. These guys have over 60 thousand subscribers, for Pete's sake. And I see from many of the comments on her vlog that people are mainly trying to use her +++ pageviews to promote themselves, too.

Interesting phenom, this.

This recent Alertbox article discusses the growth in the number of websites each year since the Web's founding (considered here to be 1991). Jakob Nielsen (pictured in icon with Hoa Loranger) recalls the year 1994, when the web expanded by 16 thousand percent by increasing its number of websites that year from 700 to 12,000.

When I calculated the percent change between 700 and 12,000, I got 16 hundred percent, not 16 thousand. Did I do that wrong, or did he? Anyone else care to try? aldoushuxley is a bit of a math head. As are vyus, probably blorky, twid, and others.

I've been researching content management platforms for powering ulisten.net, and after selecting the blogging engine WordPress, I discovered that they feature a number of web hosts that are streamlined to deal with their platform and also not very expensive. It also struck me that these hosts are advertising good deliverables for a reasonable price.

Here is the list of WordPress-friendly webhosts, along with the WordPress installation instructions for any web server . My synopsis of the best-looking hosts is below. I ended up choosing AN Hosting out of Chicago, and so far everything has been running smoothly. I'm just about to transfer three other domains to this new host though, so it remains to be seen how smoothly the final move will go.

NOTE: These plans have to be pre-paid for at least 1 year.

AN Hosting (Chicago, IL)
free domain name for life (up to 20 domains can be hosted on each account)
15 GB storage + 250 GB monthly transfer
PHP, Perl and MySQL
unlimited e-mail accounts
$7.95/month

DreamHost (Brea, CA)
free domain name (unlimited domains can be hosted)
20 GB storage + 1 TB monthly transfer
3,000 e-mail accounts
$9.95/month ($7.95 if prepaid for 2 years)

BlueHost (Orem, UT)
free domain name (up to 6 domains and 20 subdomains can be hosted)
15 GB storage / 400 GB monthly transfer
2,500 e-mail accounts (web/pop/imap)
$6.95/month

Ever surf through Archive.org's Way-Back Machine?

Here's their earliest copy of Microsoft's home page from 1996. And here's a description of Microsoft.com's architecture (circa 1996), which says how they have 8.7 GB of software online.

And remember Napster? The original one? Here's Napster's site circa 2000.

I'm having a block about other good sites to check out, though. Anyone else have any good ones to suggest?

http://www.thebeatles.com/

It's actually a pretty good site. Pretty, anyway. And lots of good photos.

I might just not be technically adept enough, but in the past, when I've tried to find the physical location (e.g. city) of a given IP address, I haven't had much luck. Then I heard a term called "reverse DNS lookup" and went on to find the following site, which makes it a piece of cake:

http://www.dnsstuff.com/

Just so you know.