This article talks about how a phrase can so quickly become a dominant thing on the Internet.

Perhaps the true story here is how definitive Google has become as the de facto search engine. The vaguely unnerving thing is that the very meaning of a word seems to have been "hijacked."

In many ways this could be considered a good thing - people are talking about this, and Google picked up on it in a timely fashion.

Interesting.

This article about the Drudge Report is a very fascinating look at the economics of the post-dot-com Internet.

Another, similar site is the Ain't It Cool News website. It's probably got one of the most horrifyingly bad web designs on the Internet today, and yet it continues to grow in influence.

Both sites feature daily updates and a certain cult-of-personality to drive consistent traffic. They also both feature extremely lean operations - they don't need to worry about lots of overhead, nor, frankly, does anyone seem to care.

Similarly, Slashdot is another example of a website that features very little yet drives amazing traffic. There's a bit less of a cult of personality, but what Slashdot does offer is a constant stream of pointers to interesting sites. The actual content which is run is pretty minimal, but effective (an occasional email interview, usually).

The other model is the electronic email newsletter, such as the weekly TidBITS, with over six hundred back issues. Each issue features a few articles, but is always timely and useful. Interestingly, it's eschewed the use of even basic HTML formatting, sticking with the plain text view that has served in the past.

It begs the question, of course, of what the most influential sources are for any given industry or market segment. Any community of a large enough size could, in theory, support a SlashDot or a Drudge... and if the only source is a larger corporate content source, there may be an opportunity there for a more nimble individual to establish a name.

If I'm reading this article right, Sun's new efforts into providing web services include a model whereby you can define web services using RMI. This is interesting, as it allows for a single service to be provided both as a Java-only RMI interface and a web service with the same code base.

Several years ago, when SOAP was just appearing on the field, I remember theorizing that Microsoft was going to offer an alternative simultaneous data path whereby any service exposed via SOAP using a Microsoft server would also automatically support a high-speed binary version.

It's amusing when these things start to show up in the oddest places.