The Pheromone Trail
Ants and pheromones are the basis for some work I am doing producing ‘The Pheromone Trail’ a set of short stories for adults in children’s book form.
“As one successful forager lays a pheromone trail, many ants are recruited to that resource. Consequently, pheromone trails result in the mass recruitment of foragers to a resource. Mass recruitment is the recruitment of many individuals to an area where work is required. This leads to rapid exploitation of resources.” Quoted from this page
Its being produced as an explanation of human endeavour and thought patterns that go beyond what we are currently capable of, or to put it simply “human development”. We can look to ants as a way to study ourselves, our own possibilities and structure as a species.
This interests me as it goes some way to explaining the existence of meme’s – not a new phenomenon, but one that has become more and more apparent as the internet shares more and more information about us as a species. We are much more able to see the patterns and ideas that exactly match our own – though often completely unconnected, they can often be shown to be doppelgänger’s of our own thought patterns.
On origin of Extensions
Well there is a lot of fuss about ICANN’s proposal to add unlimited domain extensions. I believe that this will have a two fold effect on current domain values.
- Domain values of recognised extensions (.com, .uk, .de) will increase over the next few years while the companies that are building brands under .news .jobs .ebay etc are busy working their shit out, spending money promoting their new extensions etc….
- There will come a tipping point when over 10% of direct navigation changes from searchterm.com or searchterm.co.uk to search.term (think of ebay.co.uk changing maybe to uk.ebay) . At this point, current domain brands will be big enough to withstand the change in this activity but new, younger brands will not, rendering the undeveloped, parked, low traffic, searchterm.com nearly valueless. Partly because with an increase in real estate, SEO/ppc/offline marketing will become the major factor, which requires investment, which in turn affects purchase price. Panic selling will become the norm as people try to realise the value of their big domain portfolios. Over the long term – It can only negatively effect prestige in the .tld namespace – prestige being a major valuation factor. i.e. It will be more prestigious to own .brand than brand.com.
My advice. Don’t sit on anything, build it or sell it, unless its making good money on type ins.
Documeme
I had an idea in University which sprung from my interest in online communities such as The Well and my love for the documentary media format, using both photography and film.
Here it is explained and summarised:
A meme (pronounced /mi?m/) consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity.
A Documentary is a creative work of non-fiction.
A DocuMeme is an evolving collection of documentary media centered around a meme.
I need to pilot this.
Finally!
I have:
- Known people who have written blogs
- have commented on other peoples blogs
- thought about doing my own blog
I haven’t (to date)
- written my own blog
Here it is…
