DB's post riffing a bit on the Large Hadron Collider spurred some random thoughts on my part.

The earth is still here today, but despite premature media fearmongering, it's because the collider hasn't started colliding things yet - they only sent the particles in one direction. So things are OK - for now. That lets everyone get up to speed on the science, which is good.

I'm not surprised by the play that the LHC Rap has received on YouTube, and one of the key investigators at LHC is former rocker Brian Cox. It used to be that rockers wanted to destroy their hotel rooms, but now they're aiming higher. And while I'm at the random connections, how many ex-rocker physicists named Brian do we need?

After the East Bay Earthquake last week - the biggest earthquake in the East Bay all week - I checked Twitter to see how many status updates would follow and, sure enough, there they were.

But what's going to happen after the LHC really does start colliding things? In the spirit of the site to check to see if Abe Vigoda is still alive, there is one that now checks on the status of planet earth. Though that seems a little old school - we've been checking on Abe since Web 1.0 days.

However, checking status may not be feasible if everyone is gone, so the day before the collisions start, I think I'll load up Leon's Gratis Status facebook app with half "the earth is gone", and half "the earth has survived", and roll the dice. If nobody is left to observe, maybe they'll both come true!

Next up: what is the sound of two hadrons colliding?

Brijit is a web site that offers 100-word-or-less summaries of long form content (from over 100 sources). It combines editorial expertise with user-contributed content, sharing, ratings and feeds, and ultimately points you to the original source for a full read. For the serendipity-minded it's a great source of info, and paradoxically can save you and cost you a lot of time! It's advertising-supported, and well worth a look.

There - I summarized Brijit in less than 100 words, so I'm off to a good start. Thanks to Gary Peare.

If you need a little break from all the web 2.0 enthusiasm, kick back and enjoy the Richter Scales' rework of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire".

Thanks to Frederic Jean.

No, it’s not a new version of Star Trek, it’s really an article in the Wall Street Journal (fee required, but not for long!). I’ve been saying lately that in 20 years, we will not have a President of the United States because of the incriminating photos that were on MySpace and Facebook. Well, here’s some interesting support for this hypothesis:

WSJ: Are millennial M.B.A.s also proving demanding for career-service offices and corporate recruiters?

More and more it seems making silly claims about one thing or another being dead or gone and then leaving it at that has become the common practice. There were three separate occurrences that made me cringe...

1 - I was reading the comments on a posting at engadget about parallel processing and one commenter said, "why would u need a personnel computer 100 faster than the fastest one out now". He was immediately thrashed and comparisons of 20 year old computers which are 10,000 times slower than today's palm pilots were used to show the poster's ignorance.

2 - I checked my feeds and saw a great post from Anil Batra discussing how it's in fashion to say things are dead in blogs and he referenced the posting from Nick Sharp at WebTrends who wrote about Web Analytics being dead. Anil went on to rightly say that web analytics is maturing and growing into a more well defined piece of the overall analytics toolbox, a much better and more accurate way of stating the obvious as opposed to Nick's shlocky salesspeak about how WebTrends is the first company to notice this and they're creating a new thing for people to buy to take advantage of it. Rubbish!

3 - One of our search specialists returned from the PPC Summit in NY last week and spoke about one of the presenters; he basically said that Web 2.0 was dead, or bullshit... As soon as I heard this I thought of a humerous parody about Microsoft's new Surface product, which is a top rated video on YouTube as well as already showing up 7th on natural search results when you google "Microsoft Surface", and it's only been posted for a week. As a "search guru" , marketing strategy expert or whatever his title is, you would expect him to be a bit more forward thinking since one of the core tennet's of web 2.0(UGC - User Generated Content) directly affects the field he's supposed to be an expert in. Web 2.0 involves users doing things on there own, immersive content and many other things, most of which are indexed and grow on the rankings based on people's opinions, which directly affects paid search, web analytics, banner advertising, negative keyword campaigns and everything else. Read Josh Ross's blog for an interesting perspective on Web 2.0.

These three examples are deeply intertwined, if we had stopped developing computer processors or hard discs because all of our current needs were being met then we would never have evolved into the internet overloaded society we have now...which happens to be a processing speed and disc space Goliath. And had the internet never evolved, we wouldn't have the newest iterations of usage and content sharing to measure and try to understand. The fact that these things continue to mutate and grow is main point, processor speed will never go out of style, growing and adapting the ways we measure online activity will never cease to change, because the way people use the internet and it's future incarnations will never cease to change.

The short version is that sticking your head in the sand can calling something dead, doesn't make it so...