nonsmokingarea.com

very cool: 5.000 VR-panorama-shots in more than 40 cities: 360cities.net …

(via Google Blogoscoped)

here’s a little challenge for my fellow readers who are registered at Last.fm…

• log in to your (free) account.
• pull out your stop-watch.
• check how long it takes you to find the right link for upgrading to a premium account (2.50 EUR/month).
• please don’t use STRG-F, that’s unfair and probably not the way intended by the user-interface designer.

one has to wonder if Last.fm really wants users to pay for premium services… anyway, after 4 years of free-surfing & several minutes of search, I’m now a paying customer of Last.fm…rock on!

one of my current reads is The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr (whose blog roughtype is a recommended read - and the place where I sponged off a advance reading-copy - thanks!). the book is all about utility-computing, drawing parallels between the surge of the electric grid in the early 1900’s and the rise of cloud-computing we are seeing today (or since the early days of the WWW, if you want).

I’m mentioning this, as of today, Amazon’s Web Services (AWS - E3 Storage, EC2 cloud-computing, and the transaction service whose name I forget all the time) has seen it’s first major outage (1-2 hours according to Sitening). sure, this happens all the time. I can’t think of many (any?) web-services which don’t have at least 1 outage a year (even Gmail breaks from time to time). but if clouds like AWS go down, it affects hundreds or thousands of sites at once. bad experience, if all your major services break down alltogether ;)… on the other hand, the numbers still speak for AWS: 1-2 hours downtime in 2 years (S3 was launched in 2006, I believe) is not too bad - a degree of availability most companies couldn’t provide themselves in a profitable way.

Update: Nick Carr has got a post about the outage already, as do lots of others (check Techmeme).