DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Jonathan Miller, head of the Time Warner’s Internet division, was at Web 2.0 last week. I was not paying close attention because I was busy surfing the web (a little conference humor there).

I heard him and John Battelle, the conference host, discuss a number. I missed whatever it was the number meant.

“25 million?” said Battelle.

Miller motioned “up” with his hand.

“50 million?”

Miller motioned “up” again.

And so on. Battelle stopped guessing around 100 million. Miller shook his head and said “660 million.” And all the while I was thinking, what the hell are they talking about? My notes actually read: “aol - 660 million what??”

I had a sense of what the number might be, what it could only be. It couldn’t be anything good or the number wouldn’t have been a surprise — AOL would have published it long before.

My suspicion turned out to be correct, as unbelievable as it was. 660 million is the number of AOL CDs the company produced.

The good news is that AOL doesn’t make these CDs any more. I thought Miller stated that they’d stopped sending CDs, but readers immediately reported having received them within the past week. So, I’m not sure whether AOL is still sending them or not.

A stack of 21 bare CDs weigh 335 grams and stands 3cm tall. So, 660 million bare CDs would weigh 10,528,571,428.571 grams (or 23,211,526.7 pounds), and stand 94,285,714.286 cm (or 585.86 miles) tall. This doesn’t include the packaging.

I used to see the AOL CD displays at the post office and wonder if anyone ever takes them. Hasn’t everybody already had one at some point? AOL sent me a half-dozen personally, and two more showed up attached to the newspaper. I believe I may have also seen them inside the 4-pack of toilet cleaner at Costco.

I found a study indicating that as of late 2004 there were 185M Internet users in the US. AOL printed 3.5 CDs for each of them.