For the third year in a row, the traffic on the sites that I keep an eye on has tripled year on year. That’s counting both the sites that I very actively promoted around this time last year and those that I just allowed to carry on their merry way. Even when you compare those that I spent a lot on vs those I spent next to nothing on the stats seem to tell the same story.

As an example, I put quite a bit of effort (although not much actual cash) into promoting my main blog yet I find that this one is steets ahead of it with next to no effort expended on promotion. Typically on Reuters this blog gets about 50% more readers than the main one for example.

Then, of course, there’s the google fiasco where they hammered a large number of minor league blogs for carrying sponsored posts yet ignored exactly the same practice for the big league sites who were doing exactly the same thing. As it happens, that passed me by pretty much unscathed aside from one blog written by Wendy who’s less than pleased about that to put it mildly. Still, it has me wondering about all the money I spent to get my sites submitted to various directories. Was it all wasted? To be sure those sites did see a jump in traffic starting shortly after each round of promotion but as we come into 2008 I’m seeing exactly the same jump and this time around I’ve not ran the promotion.

Ironically, one of the sites which I did spend a fair bit to promote and which seems to deserve a better following just didn’t shift at all. A comparable site to it launched in the summer is already streets ahead of it.

I suspect that you need to either spend a little money or put a lot of effort into the initial promotion but, unless you’re in the really big league, I don’t know that it’s worthwhile spending more than, say, $50 now and that only to put a new site on the map.

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Building bridges was a trial and error process until relatively recently. The designs that survived were worked out through eliminating many designs that weren’t up to the job and fell down. This isn’t entirely a recent phenomena either as the bridge at Tacoma illustrates.

Obviously small bridges weren’t really a problem. Throw a log over a river and it’s not going to collapse under you. It’s the larger constructions that are the problem as they involve all kinds of structural stresses that just weren’t well understood until quite recently. Hence, you don’t see anything like the number of Roman bridges as you might expect to see if you thought about it for a while. After all, their roads went pretty much directly from A to B so they would have crossed numerous rivers along the way yet few of those bridges remain.

Ah, but they’d have been worn out and collapsed by now. Yes, some of them would have of course but the Romans built pretty chunky artifacts as those which remain attest to so there should have been a whole lot more of them still around. Obviously, they’d have needed some repairs after 2000 odd years but you still see substantial buildings around for that length of time.

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The reasons for this go way back into the past when there were “national airlines” and bilateral arrangements were negotiated on their behalf by the various governments. For example, at one time you could only fly between America and Britain on British Airways or American Airlines and that remained the case for many years which, of course, led to all of us paying much higher fares than we really needed to.

Within Europe many of these restrictions have been killed off by the European Commission who regard competition as a “good thing” and so it is. The discount airline Ryanair could never have gotten off the ground had the old-time restrictions remained in place. One effect of those restrictions was that, since it’s an Irish airline, it could only have flown between France and Ireland yet in many of the airports that it uses it flies from, say, France to Belgium, Germany, etc.

But what about code-sharing? Well, that exists to get around those old-time restrictions which also ruled out cross-border purchases of airlines. The relatively recent AirFrance/KLM merger could never have happened even 10 years earlier and even now it’s not possible for a foreign airline to buy any American owned airlines (so much for America promoting competition, eh?).

With code-sharing airlines are effectively able to operate as one without requiring to merge as such. Singapore Airlines would probably like to buy Lufthansa for its European routes but can’t do so at the moment so instead there’s code-sharing.

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A programmed learning course was a variant of a correspondence course in that you did it largely by yourself. Where it was different was that you could also do the marking ie no tutor needed to be involved.

Now the big plus point of this was that without the tutor, the courses were much cheaper and could even be sold in bookshops as they simply consisted of a series of workbooks with the answers at the back. How they worked sounds exactly how many DVD based courses work today. You went through a series of questions, then checked the answers; if they were correct, you went on to the next session and if they weren’t the book directed you to a revision of the concepts and went over it again.

Although you can get the descendants of this type of course today, we don’t use the phrase “programmed learning” because it got a very bad press at the time. Most importantly, it was felt that the technique would only work for fairly simple subjects and, to be fair, it does work best when there is a straight yes/no response.

That all changed with the launch of the Open University in the UK which started teaching the worlds first distance learning courses in 1971 after several years of preparations.

Things have obviously changed a lot since then and now similar universities exist in all the major countries of the world and together they teach just about every subject you could imagine. And then some. To be fair, there is tutor feedback in the majority of these courses but at its heart it’s still the programmed learning approach from the 1960s and before but applied to courses at a much higher level.

In fact, so much work goes into perfecting their courses that in many instances it’s actually better to study with them than it is at a conventional university: In 2004 The Sunday Times Universities Guide said “Just four institutions — Cambridge, Loughborough, York and the LSE — have a better teaching record than the OU” which is pretty amazing.

Interestingly, the Open University has been given top ranks in 19 very different subjects: Business and management; chemistry; classics and ancient history; economics; education; general engineering; geography; geology; molecular biosciences; music; organismal biosciences; philosophy; physics and astronomy; politics; psychology; social policy and administration; sociology; subjects allied to medicine; theology and religious studies which, of course, includes some rather heavy-weight topics.

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The panic really started in the mid-1990s as some computer systems needed to refer to dates in the 21st century and people discovered that they couldn’t as the dates were all held with only two digits. The net effect of holding the year as two digits was that, for the most part, the computer treated dates that should have been in the 21st century as though they were instead in the 20th century so 01 was 1901 and not 2001 for instance. Naturally, as 2000 approached more and more computer systems were hit with this problem and, eventually, this reached the attention of “the authorities” who duly hit the panic button.

Interestingly though 2000 is a special year as it is a leap year because it’s divisible by 400. In fact, the first problem with computers hit in 1900 because the guys writing Lotus 123 assumed that 1900 was a leapyear therefore you can have the 29th of February 1900 in Lotus spreadsheets (and indeed many others as for compatibility that mistake needed to be replicated). Since 2000 was a leapyear, things like video recorders were fine with two digit years as were most consumer electronic devices.

However, 2100 will be quite a different matter. On the offchance, that you are still using your somewhat obsolete 20th century video recorder at that point, it’ll let you have a February 29th when it shouldn’t. You might think that 2100 is a very long time from now but actually the first problem crops up in 2038 when Unix has a problem with dates and seeing as Unix is pretty prevalent you can probably look forward to a similar Y2K panic around then.

But why was 2000 something of a non-event? Simple really: thousands of programmers all around the world were working on fixing the problems with all the software in the run-up to it. Things did happen though: if you had your eye on the ATMs you may have noticed that a lot of them were rebooted a few minutes before midnight for example.

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All that changed rapidly of course with the arrival of charter flights and the consequent dramatic drop in the prices for foreign holidays. The first place to really benefit in a big way was, of course, southern Spain which at that time was quite a series of fairly poor agricultural communities; not anymore, of course.

In many ways it didn’t really matter what the place you went to was so long as it was sunny and the majority of the early package holidays simply promoted sun, sand and sea as the attraction. With that, there wasn’t much of a need for guidebooks and indeed it was into the 1980s before the main guidebook series really got into their stride.

Today, of course, just about every location in the world has several guidebooks covering it but even as late as 1978 the range was incredibly limited. At that time by far the best for America was the Lets’ Go series, produced by and aimed at the student market because that was the only group that had the time to go on an extended holiday to America at the time. Even in 1980 a trip to America from Europe was definitely in the category of “once in a lifetime” yet nowadays it’s commonplace.

But surely the Internet is better? Not really. The majority of websites that write about a particular place do it in a very sketchy manner compared to the coverage that you’ll get of the same place in a good guidebook. I was very surprised for instance to find that there was no site with decent coverage of Cordoba when writing the article for that for Whole Earth Guide.

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It isn’t the obvious reason of it being the centre of a major chunk of historic monuments from the Palace des Papes to the Pont d’Avignon. It’s because a photo of the Pont d’Avignon is used in every Australian school as being representative of France.

Sometimes other countries choose artifacts that are not what those from elsewhere would consider as being truly representative of a country.

Of course for us from this side of the world it’s Ayers Rock and the Sydney Opera House that represent Australia. No, it ain’t Uluru for us and I suspect that it never will be for anyone but the aborigines.

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Fair enough you might think. What about when your bank owns the overseas bank? Shouldn’t it be able to do the transfer instantly? It certainly should be able to. After all, it’s not as if it needs to worry about “clearing” the money as their systems can quite clearly talk to one another. Have a Citibank account? No problem in getting statement details in any Citibank branch around the world. Likewise for HSBC. Even the more humble Halifax can manage this.

However, try to do an instant transfer from, say, Halifax UK to Halifax Spain and you can’t. It takes up to 5 days.

Interestingly though, you can do it in one day. If we need to transfer money quickly from the UK to France, all we do is swipe one of our UK bank cards in our credit card machine and it’s in our account in France the next morning. I suspect that it’s in even quicker than that but I’ve not yet bothered to race down to the bank to check the balance when we’ve tried it.

Why the banks only offer their customers the “Pony Express” speed of transfer is anyone’s guess because they already have the technology in place to do it pretty much instantly.

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Things changed dramatically in the 1950s. Cameras became considerably cheaper and the amateur photographer appeared in large numbers for the first time. So, chances are that you’ll have lots of photographs from the 1950s and in increasing numbers through to the 1990s.

From the late 1990s people started to go digital. The first digital cameras were extremely expensive (would you believe £2000 for a 300k pixel camera?) and had poor resolution. If you were in the first wave of the digital revolution, you’ll probably have lots of really low resolution images from then.

By around 2002, the standard was 3mp on compact cameras and the number of photos taken went up dramatically. After all, you could take loads of photos but didn’t have to pay to get them printed out. Roll forward five years and the standard resolution is more like 5mp as people realised that their 3mp images weren’t really good enough to be printed out at a decent size.

But will your grandchildren be able to see those photos? I’d say that the answer for most people is “no”. Does that surprise you? Well, for your grandchildren to be able to see them you’ll need to keep the images for a start and that means that you need to maintain regular backup copies which few people do. Even with the backups, you need to have the images copied onto a backup media that can be read in the future. Nearly everyone uses USB for backup but that’s a technology that’s only been around for about 5 years and probably won’t be around 5 years from now. Copy them to DVD? How reliable is that? Not very reliable at all as a scratch or two and it’s unreadable.

Ironically, I’d say that the photos of me that my great grandchildren are most likely to be able to look at are those which I’ll have put on my websites over the years as they’re archived now and again by the likes of waybackmachine.org.

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Whilst this will work in the normal run of events, the actual amount of cash that the banks hold as a proportion of their total assets is around 3% in the UK according to the Bank of England. Soooo, if more than 3% of the customers decide to lift their cash, they quite quickly find that they can’t.

Unless, of course, there’s a run on the bank in which case the Bank of England will usually (not always!) provide the additional cash required as they’re obviously none too keen on getting a reputation for UK banks of not being able to meet their obligations.

This has been seen in action this week with the Northern Rock. Going by the queues seen every day, that 3% of cash has long since been used up so, in practical terms, they can’t repay any more out of their own reserves and are now existing solely on the good favour of the Bank of England.

The only “banks” where this liquidity ratio doesn’t matter are the central banks who can simply print more cash if need be. Unfortunately, most countries don’t let you have an account directly with the central bank. However, in the UK National Savings are effectively Bank of England accounts in all but name ie 100% security.

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