Seeing the sites

There are over a billion websites currently, though most people access just 97 separate domains a week.
Naturally we can go online and find out what the least popular websites are. Or the worst (which doesn't only mean bad design).

Most Popular Websites

1. Google
2. YouTube
3. Facebook
4. Baidu
5. Wikipedia
6. Yahoo!
7. Google India
8. Reddit
9. Tencent QQ
10. Taobao

Hey ho heydays

Have newspapers suffered a downturn in circulation? Yomiuri Shimbun, a Japanese paper, has a circulation of 9,690,000. If that's a downturn in technology central then it's still an impressive enough figure to keep the presses rolling - or whatever they do these days.

The Da Vinci Code, it pains me to say, is now the largest selling book even though seasoned readers will know the sources for this grand conspiracy.

As we've mentioned in a previous post, AARP The Magazine and AARP Bulletin each have circulations of over 22 million.

BBC World Service has 188 million weekly listeners and is broadcast in 32 languages.

If you're wondering what the recent spate of interest in the anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales was all about, the biggest event on television since the moon landing was her funeral, watched by two billion people worldwide.

Jaws was the box office champion until the Star Wars franchise and, while Avatar now rules the cinema records, Jaws remains the most watched movie on television.
105.9 million viewers tuned in for the final episode of M.A.S.H. 

Theatre has natural constraints for single attendance and concerts have to move outdoors to meet a certain capacity.
There have been more than twelve thousand performances of Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera

I finally see what the purpose of a cover/tribute act playing the circuit with Tubular Bells. I know it was a huge hit when it was released but Jean-Michel Jarre holds multiple records for concert attendance: a million in La Concorde, Paris in 1979, 1.2 million in 1995, 1.3 million at Rendezvous Houston Festival in 1986, 2.5 million for Paris La Défense: A City in Concert in 1990 and a world beating 3.5 million people went to see Oxygen in Moscow in 1997. This figure is shared by Sir Rod Stewart for his 3.5 million audience at the Copacabana in 1994. 

Guns'N'Roses and U2 have the current highest grossing tours. The Beatles still manage to sell more vinyl than anyone else. Only 'new' names like Justin Bieber disturb the image further piled on by Metallica and Depeche Mode of music being dominated by old farts or legends, depending on your outlook or which station you listen to.

Old's cool

Ignoring the paradox of the post title to look at it's function here: merely a trawl through the non-Internet and unApp world of longer works. I didn't want an app title if it wasn't an apt title and books are simply too long to reasonably compare. The point of the long form entertainments may not be less ease of access but they possess it as a feature. The preparation for a night to the theatre to view a play include buying the ticket, hiring a babysitter, paying for parking or the tram to get there. The investment in time to read a book, unless it is didactic or repetitive in tone, is considerably greater than accessing the same information from the World Wide Web, in the app or out.

This is why we could look at a consumer comparison of a novel on an eReader such as Kindle with a hard cover or paperback but a summary - one hopes - can't replace the work itself so that leaves all those critic and fan sites serving a secondary purpose.
Short stories will continue to be written and read and there will always be those who want more information on growing plums, unclogging a sink or selling tighty whities than is covered in the app. Or, perhaps of hapless apps, if they plan on growing a variety of stone fruit, remove matter from any region that requires the passage of water or are in the "ningerie" industry.
Choose your own example.
Just as the reference work goes into more depth - not inevitably but let's stick with the platonic ideal - the web page can be more up to the minute. Then it depends on the format you choose, along with the amount of information vs currency of information you want.

In my sphere of poetry, the poem can be disseminated in any number of ways: from live on stage, on the printed page, online. or broadcast in numerous visual and audio formats. We are really spoiled for choice. 

There is always a live audience for those talks and speeches, the spoken word performance, the comedy act; even knowing full well there's live streaming of those on stage. This isn't that startling as radio plays and TV game shows before them did both simultaneously. They were more controlled but was this a good thing or a bad thing?

App end

With something as functional as an app - and presumably you mainly download those you are going to use - it behooves us to compare their, uh, application with that of all our hard copy antecedents.
As a form of communication how does it compare to a letter or postcard, a telephone call or moving into more recent times, e-mail (hyphen optional)?

In terms of providing updates on current events and trends, how much has it replaced newspapers and magazines? We can move onto news broadcasts on radio and television; their current affairs offshoots.

Are you really better off in the app? If I have sites bookmarked in my browser I don't usually have trouble getting back in. I've also noticed that my Facebook functionality is different in the app than on my browser on the tablet.

And how does it compare to the Usenet groups the newsgroups the IRC message boards and old school forums

App lies

Aren't the apps in the last post pointing to sites that have the information? You can also download social media in the app; your social networking or microblogging platform of choice appearing on your phone screen.

Blogs have started including icons for access through apps. You can probably manage social cataloguing through an app. If we knew what it was, we'd evoke social evolutionary computation.

We might even ask 'what only comes in apps?'

Apps o' loot

It is not our way to merely list the lists of apps available, besides, with the scare over corrupt files and Google pulling a whole lot of apps (applications) from its site, we need our own examples.

So, we can (sort of) find apps for growing apricots, for building a hearth or for selling frocks. If we're just interested in nihilist culture, that too can be accessed through an app.

Apps propose

https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/store/apps/windows?icid=TopNavSoftwareWindowsApps

https://www.apple.com/au/ios/app-store/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/apps

http://www.samsung.com/au/apps/mobile/

https://www.dreamgrow.com/top-15-most-popular-social-networking-sites/