http://zeronomy.com exploring the evolutionary economy of ideas, time and money Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:15:40 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en By the team at XA.net's count, from Facebook's own figures, about 495,362,600 users. Still a lot, perhaps the other 4.6mm or so are from other countries than the 186 listed, or people who live on the moon or whatever. Here's the data in an excel sheet, along with country populations ... http://zeronomy.com/facebook/facebook-almost-to-500-million-users I just received a letter from a Financial Advisor at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management (part of Bank of America Corporation). In it, it says that "Mortgage rates are at some of their lowest historic levels" and that "For over 25 years, we have been offering innovate refinancing solutions and one ... http://zeronomy.com/finance/merrill-lynch-bofa-mortgages-nothing-has-changed As I was listening to a member of Congress saying something on the radio this morning, it occurred to me that the more online sources (wikileaks.com for example) or news stories, or previous statements in newspapers aggregated by online services, or twitter postings or for some people, foursquare.com checkins... The ... http://zeronomy.com/thinking/lying-liars-and-luck Looks like comScore is getting some unwanted attention yet again about once of its aliases, voiceFive, under which it installs software to track user behavior online. I believe it is lame that they do this under several different names and attempt to hide the identity of the company gathering the ... http://zeronomy.com/privacy/comscore-in-the-news-again-about-spyware I'm sure Kaiser Permanente, Ford and Oral-B will be very happy to see their ads showing up all next to each other, having a great time there not only together but also at the very bottom of the page on 50 Cent's website, Thisis50.com. Now of course it's probably not a ... http://zeronomy.com/advertising/50-cent-on-the-dollar And their CPM number seems very high. See release here. Based on my estimates, I'd guess they came in about 50% on the impressions numbers and about doubled the CPM. But then what do I know? :-) My guess is around 24.1 billion impressions a day whereas theirs comes in around 12.2 ... http://zeronomy.com/advertising/comscore-impressions-numbers-seem-low It seems that Hilary Clinton needs to update her profile on LinkedIn - it still says she is "Candidate for President" and Senator from New York. http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=15890911 By the way, looks like Hilary (or her people) signed (her) up a good deal later than Barack Obama, whose ID number is lower: http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=11932467 Unsurprisingly, his ... http://zeronomy.com/networking/hilary-clinton-for-president I was standing in line recently at the off-airport car park. We had just gotten off the shuttle, for which a few of us had had to wait an extra bit for because the previous one was full. I had noticed a man who had arrived after me and wanted ... http://zeronomy.com/random-events/someone-has-to-be-the-meanie I couldn't print out my Southwest boarding pass because the page hadn't finished loading. Turns out it was trying to get images that were taking forever to load: http://i.xx.openx.com/250f8716d94d8b28c4cab4ff37b2c3a4.gif Looks like Southwest is using OpenX for hosting "ads" on its boarding page site. Just seems like a silly idea. http://zeronomy.com/internet/southwest-using-openx-to-serve-ads-on-boarding-pass-screen Mozilla has a lot of interesting information and statistics about installed plug-ins, and one of my personal favorites to examine is AdBlock Plus by Wladimir Palant. Here is the stats page for it. Looking at a chart over the last 12 months, the number of active installs is fairly stable ... http://zeronomy.com/advertising/adblocking-behavior-is-relatively-stable-geeky