Profile: Sam Edwards

Personal background
I'm in my mid-twenties and never held down a job long-term. Bleh. Anyway, since I'm hopeless at hunting down employers, I do stuff in my spare time that could be considered work. I'm weird like that.

My latest new funk is this site network concept I have. See, everywhere I go on the internet it's pop-up ads, pop-up ads, banner ads. It's gross. Just goes to show, what starts out with the most innocent of intentions, winds up being an unindexable mass of more information than you can shake a stick at. It's useful, but only if you know how to dig stuff up.


With Omniloth Network I have a really simple objective. Generate hits without deceiving people. Give them a chance to just look around and see what's out there, without being drowned in pop-pop-pop-pop-pop windows.

And it's not doing bad. Obviously, it's small scale. I estimate that maybe 20% of the people who look at one part of the site will be interested enough to explore the rest of it. When you're only talking about an average of 150 page impressions a day, it's not much. But it's a start. Some day people may actually just say, 'Oh, you can probably find that on Omniloth.Net' or I can dream about it anyway.

The main thing with this is, the site has to be of a reasonable quality. If people can't use your site, if they can't figure out what on earth you had in mind when you threw up the pages, what was the point? It's all very well having a whole top page peppered with destinations, but if they aren't kept looking up to snuff, people will visit less often. Or they'll visit a better site. Such is the cut-throat nature of website development ;)
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I read in New Scientist that the chances for life developing elsewhere are looking up. It's closer than one in three than one in a million per Earth-like planet, they say.

And there's a big sky full of planets. Inevitably you're going to see it on the news, that contact has been made, we're not along in the universe, etc etc.

Trouble is, pretty much all we can do is yodel across the blackness. Sending people to meet and greet our neighbours is not going to happen in my lifetime. And that's what you have to do, eventually. What's the point in ringing up your buddies a hundred light years away if you can't go over and see them once in a while?

I have no idea how it'll be done, but if we're anything it's inventive. SETI@Home is a brilliant example of that.
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