Gongol.com Archives: January 2010
Brian Gongol


January 10, 2010

Computers and the Internet Facebook's founder signs the death warrant for his own creation
Mark Zuckerberg tells a live audience that he thinks privacy is no longer a social norm. This confounding level of stupidity can be shut down with a single, five-second thought experiment: Do people still place curtains, blinds, and shades on their windows? Of course they do. To assume otherwise is ignorant. Privacy still matters, and it always will, albeit to different degrees. But telling the world that you don't believe in privacy anymore, as Zuckerberg has done, only guarantees that in the long term, you'll never retain the trust of the customers you hope will keep coming back. As a result of this and other blunders, Facebook will not be the dominant social-networking website in 2015, guaranteed.

Broadcasting China's national broadcaster arrives in Houston
China Radio International now airs 24 hours a day in the Houston area on a Galveston radio station. Few Americans know much about international broadcasting and how influential it is around the world -- the BBC is the only service that gets much, if any, attention at all. But the fact that CRI is now being rebroadcast in the United States -- in Honolulu as well as Houston -- should be a wake-up call. America's own international broadcasting service has been badly neglected, and it's time to reverse course.

Aviation News How nice it would be if airline boarding passes weren't ugly
But, as it turns out, a lot of practical restrictions keep those passes from being pleasant to behold. Alas.

Business and Finance The EconDirectory gets a citation in the Eastern Economic Journal
The EconDirectory is a project of this site, in which hundreds of business- and economics-related websites are ranked by their traffic statistics

Science and Technology It may be cold outside, but forced-air central heating has only been around since 1935
Prior to that Depression-era invention, you just had to hope that radiant effects would work. Scary thought.

Broadcasting Notes from the "Brian Gongol Show" on WHO Radio - January 10, 2010

@briangongolbot on Twitter