Web wasteland
The internet is a big old place with many a nook and cranny - but lots of sites go unused.
As we know here at Weird Science Towers, it can be difficult to get people's attention amid the electronic din.
Net security company Zscaler's State of the Web report revealed something I'd always suspected. Much of the internet is a wasteland barely visited, if at all.
Zscaler analyzed several million websites over three months to create a 'heat map' of active and inactive sites.
The map showed clusters of active sites but a big sea of nothingness - huge swathes of the net that goes untouched.
But maybe just as disconcerting is the domination of the likes of Liveperson, Google, Doubleclick (the web advertising distribution network), Yahoo and Facebook.
The web is no longer a diverse community, but is increasingly becoming concentrated on just a few players.
And that can't be good for anyone.
Weird Science Factoid: The USA purchased Alaska from Russia for two cents an acre. Didn't Canada bid?
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
