As we move more and more into a digital world where we get just about everything we need from the Internet, well entertainment wise at least, we are finding the more traditional outlets for our entertainment needs taking a hit. We have seen it happen with music as digital downloads have surpassed the sale of physical media, like CDs, for the first time ever and we are starting to see it happening in other mediums as well with the increasing sale of e-books as a strong indicator.

One of the buzz words that is making the rounds in this changing landscape is ‘cord cutters’ and it refers to those people who have ditched the standard way of getting their television entertainment courtesy of cable companies, and instead, rely on getting their television show fix via the Web using services like Netflix and Hulu.

This of course has cable companies and television networks more than a little concerned but as much as tech pundits might like to think otherwise, and as Nielsen’s new report show, traditional television isn’t going anywhere. That isn’t to say that ‘cord cutting’ isn’t on the rise, it is, but traditional cable television subscriptions are still the way that 90% of Americans get their TV fix.

One of the interesting interpretation of the numbers from Nielsen is that is would appear that those people who are sticking with cable subscriptions watch more television, at 4 hours and 39 minutes per day, than those who have cut the cord and rely on the Web for their ‘television’ fix; which according to Nielsen is about half the time than traditional TV viewers.

As Frederic Lardinois at Silicon Filter noted on the news this ‘cord cutting’ demographic will likely change as younger viewers grow up.

What will definitely matter in the long run, though, is that younger Americans (12-34) now watch less TV per day than before. Teenagers in 2011 watched nine minutes fewer day than in 2010, for example, and young adults between 18 and 24 watch six fewer minutes per day. The only reason overall TV watching is up, according to the NYTimes’ Brian Stelter, is because those over 65 are watching more TV “than ever before.”

As these younger viewers grow up, traditional TV will likely never quite play the same role for today’s teenagers and young adults as for their parents. Video content, after all, is video content, no matter whether you stream it to a tablet, a Boxee box or your phone. Indeed, watching live TV probably feels rather antiquated to many younger Internet users.

Personally if it wasn’t for my wife telling me that I had better sleep with one eye open if I cut the cord I’d be getting all my entertainment strictly from the web.

Nielsen says cord cutters on the rise but traditional television not going anywhere is a post from: The Inquisitr

Numbers can be a little mind-numbing some times, especially when it comes to anything to do with technology and the Internet. Facebook with its 800 million users, or pretty close to it, Twitter with its 225 million active users and that folks, is just scratching the surface.

So, just how many of us are there on the Internet anyway you ask.

Well according web traffic monitoring company Pingdom there were 2.1 billion active Internet users for the year 2011. This is up from the 360 million that were accounted for at the end of 2000 and it also means that 30 percent of the Earth’s population is active on the web.

Even though  social media is a relatively new phenomena it has some pretty impressive numbers to go along with its youth. According to Pingdo:

• 800+ million – Number of users on Facebook by the end of 2011.
• 200 million – Number of users added to Facebook during 2011.
• 350 million – Number of Facebook users that log in to the service using their mobile phone.
• 225 million – Number of Twitter accounts.
• 100 million – Number of active Twitter users in 2011.
• 18.1 million – People following Lady Gaga. Twitter’s most popular user.
• 250 million – Number of tweets per day (October 2011).
• 1 – #egypt was the number one hashtag on Twitter.
• 8,868 – Number of tweets per second in August for the MTV Video Music Awards.
• $50,000 – The amount raised for charity by the most retweeted tweet of 2011.
• 39 million – The number of Tumblr blogs by the end of 2011.
• 70 million – Total number of WordPress blogs by the end of 2011.
• 1 billion – The number of messages sent with WhatsApp during one day (October 2011).
• 2.6 billion – Worldwide IM accounts.
• 2.4 billion – Social networking accounts worldwide.

Of course you can`t compile any web numbers without looking at the impact that video has had on the Web:

• 1 trillion – The number of video playbacks on YouTube.
• 140 – The number of YouTube video playbacks per person on Earth.
• 48 hours – The amount of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
• 1 – The most viewed video on YouTube during 2011 was Rebecka Black’s “Friday.”
• 82.5% – Percentage of the U.S. Internet audience that viewed video online.
• 76.4% – YouTube’s share of the U.S. video website market (December 2011).
• 4,189,214 –Number of new users on Vimeo.
• 201.4 billion – Number of videos viewed online per month (October 2011).
• 88.3 billion – Videos viewed per month on Google sites, incl. YouTube (October 2011).
  
• 43% – Share of all worldwide video views delivered by Google sites, incl. YouTube.

One has to wonder in light of the incredible growth of mobile what kind of numbers we will see next year.

via Windows Observer

Pingdom reports in to let us know there are 2.1 Billion active Web users worldwide is a post from: The Inquisitr

If you want to start a passionate discussion in tech circles just mention Net Neutrality and FCC in the same sentence. If you want to get a lot of blank stares and shuffling of feet just mention net neutrality at your next PTA meeting or neighborhood corner bar.

There is a lot being made about a recent poll by polling company Rasmussen where they found that one in five Americans want the FCC to regulate the Internet. From Huffington Post to reddit you can see the techies get all their panties in a knot and you have host of podcasts, like Buzz Out Loud, proclaiming that 2011 will be the year that the whole net neutrality issue explodes.

Let’s clear up this first misconception.

It will not explode.

The first reality about this is that it won’t explode because it is not an election year in the US.

The second reality is that it will not explode because; as many people have pointed out, both before and after this latest poll published to get big tech press, the majority of American do not know what the hell net neutrality even means; and a larger percentage of those people couldn’t give a shit about it.

Net neutrality is a nebulous term at the best of times but it becomes even more so when you have companies and governments using the concept as a political football; which is exactly what the companies involved in the business want to happen.

The only thing exploding is the general consumers heads as they here the term being thrown around because for the most part if it doesn’t interfere with their Facebooking or getting email they couldn’t care less.

The next  misconception: it will sort itself out, we don’t need to worry about it.

No, it won’t sort itself out.

At least not in a way that will benefit the consumer in the long run because of the simple reality is that access to the Internet is controlled by corporations.

One doesn’t need a degree in economics or business to know that the prime purpose of any corporation is to make as much money as possible with the least amount of expenditures.

Granted, setting up, maintaining, and improving the infrastructure behind the web that we use every day is expensive; but, the fact is that the businesses involved will do whatever they can to postpone improvements for as long as they can.

In our business world corporate growth often means consolidation and acquisitions. With consolidation we have fewer but larger companies who control bigger segments of a market and can do so with lesser repercussions. Then of course is the mindset, especially amongst providers is that instead of having to pay for content to provide acquire the companies already doing that and control even more of the market.

The corporate world is about control and reducing any competition as much as they can. It is no different when it comes to companies that provide access to the Internet. We are constantly seeing consolidation amongst the access providers; and with the Comcast and NBC deal we are seeing the content provider acquisition part of the equation in all its glory.

There is a growing lack of competition and the end result that the end user will have fewer and fewer options. As this happens we will see the growth of trends of things like caps and traffic management; which are already occurring, increase and having to pay a higher prices for those services.

One last misconception is that this is just all about politics.

The reality here is that this is exactly what the companies what you think. The fact is that this doesn’t, and doesn’t need to have anything to do with the government. There is absolutely no reason for the government to get involved.

Yet we find companies that continue to push the limits of the consumer until the government has no choice but to step in due to the consumer demanding that somebody do something to stop the gouging of their wallets. When this point is reached the companies don’t care if the government gets involved because they will have achieved their goals.

The first goal being that they have reached the top end of the tolerance level of the consumer so even if the government forces them to step back they are already ahead of the game. the second point is that they now have given the consumer a much bigger target for future unrest and anger – the government. Now they will be able to point the finger at what ever government is in power and say – don’t blame us … blame them knowing full well that even as much as the consumer may hate the corporation they hate government worse.

Is net neutrality important?

In my opinion – yes.

Should the government be forced to have to step in?

No they shouldn’t.

Will they be forced to?

Yes.

Will the Web end up benefiting if they do?

No.

2011, Net Neutrality, A Couple of Misconceptions and Realities is a post from: The Inquisitr

As we head into the end of 2010 and the birth of a new year I have been pre-occupied with what is happening to The Web. It is a web that I have been lucky to have been around long enough to see it being given birth to.

From my days running bulletin board services and conversations in echos (FidoNET conversation groups) about some new thing called the Internet through to now, when we can create and share content on a level never imagined, our world has changed.

However it wasn’t the Internet itself that brought about change, it was just the vehicle by which change arrived in an almost minor and innocuous way. The real change began at CERN in the early 1990′s with the efforts of Tim Berners-Lee to figure out some way to update, and easily manage, the CERN telephone book.

Since the early 1980′s Berners-Lee had been playing around with ways to be able to link and share data that was being created daily at CERN. It started first with a small Pascal written program called Enquire that has long since vanished into the great bit-bucket in the sky. Then there was a failed attempted called Tangle that was written during his second stay at CERN.

It wasn’t until his third return and a new-fangled personal computer called the NeXT that all the pieces started coming together. Through it all though was Tim’s burning belief that the World Wide Web, as it was later called, Should be drop dead simple and available to anyone – both as a consumer and creator.

What that first bit of Enquire code led me to was something much larger, a vision encompassing the decentralized, organic growth of ideas, technology and society. The vision I have for the Web is about anything being potentially connected with anything. It is a vision that provides us with new freedom, and allows us to grow faster than we ever could when we were fettered by the hierarchical classification systems into which we bound ourselves. It leaves the entirety of our previous ways of working as just one tool among many. It leaves our previous fears for the future as one set among many. And it brings the workings of society closer to the workings of our minds. – Weaving the Web :: Tim Berners-Lee

For the most part, the early days of the Web were under the radar. FidoNET slowly disappeared and companies like AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve believed they would be duking it out for the king of the hill on this new thing called The Internet. Slowly though, The Web grew, browser download by browser download, ISP server install by server install.

In some ways it seems like one day it wasn’t there and then in the next instant Prodigy and Compuserve were gone, AOL became a shadow of itself, and The Web was everywhere. The early days, while filled with early visionaries of what was possible, were for the most part a grand experiment where money flowed like it had never flowed before.

The silos were down and the portals to immense wealth proved to be just as illusionary as the DotCom Bust smashed through the late 90′s. Out of its ashes though grew a Web that was about the people and a vision for a more equal world. It proved to be as resilient in spirit as the people who now flocked to it in droves. From the brilliant and world changers to the mundane, and yes even the stupid, we all suddenly found ourselves with the tools and platforms to be a part of something bigger.

But something has been happening over the past couple of years that while slow to start has been gaining momentum. It is a momentum that is changing the Web that people like Tim Berners-Lee dreamed of as he worked at his NeXT computer. It is a momentum that ironically grown out of the very tools that gave us all a way to create a world without silos.

It is a Web where entertainment conglomerates dictate to governments around the world how they should deal with issues like copyrights and piracy, even to the point of writing the laws for them to pass. It is a Web where because we are allowed to use software for free we increasingly find the definition of privacy and what is personal information being changed for us.

We have a Web where governments have no compunctions against seizing domains without due process for no other reason than the say-so of some third party. We have a Web where both companies and governments are exerting choke hold control on websites that threaten any kind of status quo.

This is a Web that is seeing the return of silos under the guise of being the new open web but in reality all they are doing is insinuating their information gathering tendrils in such a way that it makes government agencies like the CIA and FBI green with envy. Whether it is the Facebook Web, the Twitter Web or some such other social media whitewash the fact is that we are all being herded back into a silo web.

The days of a free web is slowly disappearing and while in some ways that is a good thing in other ways it portends a web that is increasingly controlled by the very companies providing access and content. While the FCC pretends that it is in the ‘net neutrality’ battle for the ‘common man’ it provides the mechanisms for access providers to create a multi-tiered web that act as roadblocks that will only benefit those providing access.

The Web has changed over the years and while for a short period of time it held out the possibility of great social change that time has come to an end. As we leave 2010 behind us we also leave behind a Web that had risen like a phoenix out of the mess of the 90′s only to see it’s visionary future doused as we head into 2011.

The Web has changed but nothing like it is going to change during the coming year. Unfortunately it won’t be the kind of change that will be remembered with any fondness or kindness by future generations.

I wonder what Tim thinks as he looks on to what is being done to something he was so instrumental in bring to life?

2011: The Year the Web We Know, and Dream Of, Dies is a post from: The Inquisitr

What goes around comes around.

What was once old is new again.

Those are just a couple of old cliches that perfectly describe what is happening in technology these days. For anyone old enough to have been around technology long enough what we are seeing happen today with things like mobile computing, tablets, and Google’s ChromeOS that was shown to the public a couple of days ago the first reaction has to be along the lines of – haven’t we been down this road before?

Sure we have all the really cool graphics, smoking hot hardware, and constantly improving technology like wireless broadband and HTML5; but when you stop and look what we are doing is returning to the past single presentation of information and data that we had with DOS.

You got to admit though, it’s a great, and profitable, con job that is being pulled on us. After all why constantly push Moore’s Law when you can convince people that all they really need is lesser hardware that can only run full screen apps that are a shadow of what is possible.

As for that supposed multitasking that is being touted as innovation on our mobile handsets or tablets anyone who has used DOS in the pass will be the first ones to crack up laughing. After all this type of single full screen multitasking is nothing new it’s just a prettified version of DESQview, or DR_DOS; which later became NovellDOS.

Where we once had keyboard shortcuts to switch between running applications we now have screen taps or in the case of ChromeOS we have tabs to select. The only difference between our past world of DOS and the supposedly new world of apps and web operating systems is we now have pretty graphics and the segmentation of the user.

As much as the hype surrounding things like the iPhone, iPad, ChromeOS, or Android would have us believe that we are entering a new age what we are seeing is neither evolutionary or revolutionary. What we are seeing is an increasing attempt to silo the user into what are essentially the new portals of 2011.

Our digital world in 2011: The New DOS is a post from: The Inquisitr

It seems that just about every day that goes by we hear about some new web startup launching and looking to be the next big thing. Every month there seems to be more tech conferences than you can shake a stick at all for the purpose of showing off these startups, and the ones that are in *cough* stealth *cough* mode.

Given that 99% of these flash in the pan startups are following the free is great business model I have long maintained that their only real business model is to be acquired by one of the big boys, like Google, Microsoft or even in some cases Yahoo.

So it was interesting to read a post today by Jason Roberts who is probably best known for a web clone of PowerPoint where he is quite blunt about his reasoning for starting Preezo – to be acquired by Google.

The previous year Google and Yahoo (with the purchase of Oddpost) had replicated much of Microsoft Outlook’s functionality and responsiveness with their new email services and it seemed pretty obvious to me that the rest of Microsoft Office would be challenged in much the same way. The only uncertainty was how long it would take before that happened. My feeling was that while Google and Yahoo were likely to move fairly quickly I could still get there first and if I did I would be perfectly positioned as an acquisition candidate. While that’s not exactly how things played out, it seemed like a pretty solid bet to me at the time.

As Jason pointed out later in the post Google went shopping somewhere else (buying Zenter) and Preezo has faded away even though it got all kinds of favorable press on launch.

I’m not suggesting that all web startups are just a roundabout way to getting a cool job with one of the big boys, Groupon and Facebook are good examples of the small minority that buck the trend, but in most cases I believe that is the best that they can hope for.

Web startups are nothing but ‘live’ online resumes (and why they don’t always work) is a post from: The Inquisitr

I’m betting that anyone who spends any time on the Web will know about the now famous Old Spice ads t hat went ballistic just a couple of months ago. However it wasn’t the first viral ad campaign that actually took off this year and the good folks at ViralAnNetwork.net have put together a great infographic of the top ten successful viral ads for the year so far.

via ViralBlog

The most viral videos so far this year is a post from: The Inquisitr

It goes without saying that when Apple sets its sights on something there is never any doubt that it will do it right. From their laptops to mobile phones to their operating systems Apple’s iron grip on design and implementation is impeccable and in just about all cases sets new standards the rest of the industry follows in one way or another.

So it was interesting when word came that Apple would be launching its own mobile ad network and all indications that anything coming through that network would have to meet the same standards as all other Apple products. After all the company’s products had always been considered to be flagships of the industry and from what people have said about some of the ads to already appear that adherence to quality can be seen in ads like the one for Nissan.

All this hasn’t been without problems though, which considering Apple’s reputation for micromanaging anything to do with the Apple ecosphere. Case in point is the fuss being raised over a post at the Wall Street Journal claiming that the company’s ad service is off to a bumpy start

Since launching its iAd mobile advertising service on July 1, Apple has been slow to roll it out. Of the 17 launch partners Apple named for iAd, only Unilever PLC and Nissan Co. had iAd campaigns for much of July. Of the remaining 17, Citigroup Inc., Walt DisneyCo. and J.C. Penney Co.—which tied its campaign to the back-to-school-season—have since launched iAd campaigns and other companies are planning iAd efforts.

Part of the reason some marketers are experiencing delays in getting their iAds to market is that Apple has kept tight control on the creative aspects of ad-making, something advertisers aren’t used to, according to several ad executives involved with creating iAds.

As much as people might like to point fingers at Apple for being to controlling and wanting to make sure that any and all ads going through their ad network meet the company’s exceptionally high standards I think the whole discussions points to another failing of online advertising.

Since the beginning of banner advertising on the web when outrageously high prices were paid based on the CPM model the web has been treated as the ad dumpster of the advertising world. Even today banner ads, and even text ads, are for the most part nothing but junk that any newspaper, magazine or television ad exec would throw back in your face if you tried to sell it to them.

For the most part these dregs of advertising budgets end up on sites that really have no say about them showing up. Unless you are a name brand site, or blog, where you can have a say in what ads go on your site you are stuck with the leftovers pumped out by some ad company intern. As Jacqui Cheng pointed out in a post at Ares Technica:

As someone who used to work in the ad agency world, part of the reason the clients are not used to that kind of turnaround is because most agencies prioritize mobile ads so low that they’re willing to give them to an unpaid intern to churn out in two hours. I ran the story by a former colleague who has since moved onto much bigger and better agencies, and he said 8 to 10 weeks for a high quality ad is “a realistic timeline.”

So along comes Apple, with a totally different ethos than all these advertisers are use to, and tells them that there is no way their customers are going to be served up the typical left-over garbage. If advertisers want to play in the Apple playground there are a whole new set of rules.

Of course this is going to rub the advertising execs the wrong way because they aren’t use to being the ones not dictating terms. Obviously this isn’t going to sit well and many are going to chaff at the Apple way of doing things. Where once it was a case of dump and run the advertisers where now actually having to create advertising that both looks incredible and at the same time not piss off the Apple customers.

The one thing that people, especially the advertisers, are forgetting is that regardless of what product Apple brings to market the first iteration of that product is always the hardest and be full of slowdowns. Look to the App Store as a prime example of that because we all remember the many posts about App Store problems when it first launched.

While it still isn’t perfect in some ways it has gotten better over the years. The same thing is going to happen with iADs as Brad McCarty at The Next Web illustrated

As the iAd platform matures, Apple will gain speed in its release of new advertising. Once its up to cruising altitude, the companies who jumped ship early will be fighting for space to get back into Apple’s grasp.

Mark my words on this one: We are going to see an influx and a massive queue for advertisers who want to be involved with iAds

I think as well that we could really see a massive side effect from iADs that will find its way through the Web as a whole. Keep in mind that Apple first and foremost believes in quality and style. We are seeing that in what ads are already showing via their iADs network and it could also very well have a trickle down effect on advertising in general on the web.

As much as we may make fun of, and rail against Apple’s iron fisted way of doing business the net effect on web advertising could be the overall improvement of ad quality right across the web. No longer would quality ads be just the realm of big name sites and blogs but also within the reach of all the sites and blogs that run ads.

Apple could be the best thing to happen to online ads is a post from: The Inquisitr

Anyone who has been around the Web pre-Facebook and Twitter should recognize the stylization of this blinged out Claddagh ring. If not I’ll leave it up to you to do a goatse image search, just make sure you haven’t eaten in the last four hours.

If you insist though you can indeed buy the above thing of beauty.

An Internet meme immortalized in bling is a post from: The Inquisitr

More than once I have said that broadband providers need to stop being content providers and become dumb pipe providers. The moment that you mix the two together you automatically have a conflict of interest where, in the long run, the consumer loses.

The Internet is provider agnostic, as it should be, but when companies like Comcast, TimeWarner, AT&T Uverse, or any of the other big players start having a say over what will go over their pipes and at what speeds the two services are diametrically opposed.

As frustrating to the consumer as this can be there is another answer for broadband service and it is one that is really starting to spread.

The answer: your hometown broadband provider.

While there have been efforts in the past of the creation of local broadband services it has faced incredibly stiff, and well lobbied, opposition from the big incumbents in the business. They have even gone to the courts to try and protect their lock on the broadband landscape. Then if the courts don’t play nice you act like TimeWarner and lobby state legislatures like they did in North Carolina.

Interestingly enough though this time around TimeWarner lost and little ol’ Wilson N.C. can continue building out its own broadband service that is 10 times faster than TimeWarner’s own top tier service of 10Mbps. In a move to add insult onto injury Wilson N.C. basic service of 10Mbps is cheaper than anything TimeWarner offers.

From Craig Settles at GigaOM we hear about the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and their citywide service of 150 Mbps

Chattanooga, Tenn. is rolling out a citywide network that delivers 150 Mbps to customers. Today. Not five or ten years down the road. “Our employees designed the network,” said Lacie Newton, spokesperson for EPB, Chattanooga’s public utility. “Along with contracted employees from private companies they are building and operating the network. No doubt there are others capable of providing advanced communication services. But unless we did it ourselves, we didn’t believe that others would bring these type services to every home and business in our community.”

Then we have Santa Monica, who with no money in the budget but with cannibalized saving from updating old technology, where they upgraded their fiber system, sold local businesses broadband services the big competitors couldn’t (or wouldn’t) match, and are now expanding with the help of a $2.5 million capital fund they built up.

Right now the FCC is is trying to promote its vision of 100Mbps service to  100 million homes by 2020 the problem is that they are trying to do it either by government intervention or by twisting the arm of the broadband incumbents. As we have seen in the past this doesn’t work as companies like Comcast or TimeWarner have no qualms of throwing massive amounts of money at the problem and in most cases come out on top.

Given that there are already a large number of communities that are currently, or in the planning stages of running their own broadband services it would make much better sense for the FCC to throw its weight behind them. After all taking on the big company incumbents who will fight them all the way is not an inexpensive proposition.

More importantly though is the support, both in money and time, that we could give our local providers since it is in both our interests to have access to better service at a reasonable price. So since we aren’t, and will likely never get it from the big boys maybe its time to switch tactics and take the fight to them.

Broadband in America: Is it time to think small? is a post from: The Inquisitr

People complain that advertising is boring and mind-numbingly stupid except every once in a while a real gem comes along that you just can’t help but stop to watch.

This latest Kia commercial that appears to have hit only on the web so far but it’s already starting to get a lot of play – which it deserves to. Set to Black Sheep’s The Choice is Yours you have a world of rappin’ hamsters comparing their ever cool Kia Soul to things like toasters and cardboard boxes.

hat tip to My Modern Metropolis

Hamster Rap – this is just too damn cool [Video] is a post from: The Inquisitr

It’s almost given. Give a human being something new to play with and chances are they will get carried away and pour all their attention into that thing. This is why we have things like sports fans or news junkies. Pick anything and chances are you find one or more people who become totally involved – some even obsessively.

There are some who say that we are becoming to obsessed – even addicted to the Internet. At the same time we have others who believe that it is a good thing that our world is becoming even more interconnected because of the Web.

Talk about two totally differing points of view when it comes to what is very quickly becoming an integral part of our lives and society. On one hand we are being told that we need to become even more connected and then on the other we have those who would have us believe we are too connected – dangerously so .. or as Stowe Boyd called it today The War on Flow.

Retrevo published some interesting statistics from a study on social media use, but unfortunately refer to those who are most connected as being ‘addicted’. [via email]

[....]

So, the presumption is that we shouldn’t do these things, and by doing them we are participating in a pattern of behavior that is immoral, immature, or at best questionable. This is, once again, the War On Flow, where various arbiters of public morality will point their fingers and call us names.

[....]

I am completely opposed to this sanctimonious, pseudo-moralistic mumbo jumbo.

They will consistently devalue the actions that keep us connected — taking the text message, responding to the tweets — and they rate our behavior based on the context we are in when the message is responded to, but not the level of our connection with the person at the other end of the relationship. It’s all form and no substance.

Somehow I’m not at all surprised by this split personality we have when it comes to the Web and Technology.

Which is it – Internet addiction or global connectivity? is a post from: The Inquisitr

One of the biggest things that both the freetard and the Web 2.0 warm and fuzzy crowd have been trying to implant in our heads is that the future of media is online and it will be free. Not free as in beer but rather geotargeted social media data-mined we know what you really want type of advertising.

It’s kinda cute to watch all the hype fly by but really when you stop and give your head a shake – to get rid of the hot air that has built up around you – the reality is far different from the propaganda.

For all the talk about openness and sharing we are slowly finding ourselves being sucked into the same game that has played itself in our real world.

Which considering that this is all happening within a landscape where battles have been fought over everything from operating systems to browsers this spineless walk like a lamb into the wolves dens is both sad and hilarious to see happen.

Facebook has become the defacto center of the social media world with it’s brain sucking games and never ending sucking up of user data. Google still remains the only way to get on the Internet for a large number of people. Newspapers and magazines are planning a return to paywalls while they trace the cross on their Armani covered chests in the desperate hope Apple will save their collective asses.

Television – not long ago thought to be the latest conquest by geotarded web start-ups – is finding that things are better in the warm embrace of their longtime masters the cable companies. After all why anger those already paying billions of dollars per year just because some nubile start-ups is promising untold fortunes.

It is true that the future of media will be on the Web – that is inevitable – but the thought that it will be free and dominated by a new breed of whiz kids flush with money from some web start-up sale to a dinosaur is looking to be more of a fantasy.

Sure it’s a nice fantasy to have but as broadband providers implement caps and more expensive packages, not to mention the wireless carriers rubbing their hands in glee over the rise in smartphones as they charge for both data and voice, even getting to the Web is getting costly. Once there it is all about subscription this and subscription that. It’s about playing games that suck up all your data and market it to advertisers and companies.

We might like to believe the garbage hype about how everything is new on the Web but the fact is for the most part it is just a rehash of the same old stuff we’ve been doing for as long as we can remember only now – in the end – we’ll have less choice.

Our online media world is beginning to look like .. well .. our offline media world is a post from: The Inquisitr

Ad blindness.

It is an affliction that affects anyone who has been on the web for any length of time. In some cases it is bragged about as some kind of honor. In other cases people won’t change browsers until there is some sort of effective ad blocker available for it.

Kevin Kelleher talks about this in his To-Do List for Google post at GigaOM and how at the same time display ad revenues have been dropping in general they have been on the rise on mobile devices. While I agree with Kevin when he says it is about getting online shoppers noticing display ads again I think it is going to be a much bigger up hill climb that he, or others think.

Advertisers

On the side of the advertisers I believe that there is a whole bunch being done wrong. Of those various things the biggest has to be attitude.

It strikes me that advertisers are making a classic error in assuming that everything they have been doing for years in the print and visual mediums can just be copied over to the online world.

It can’t.

The old way was equivalent to putting together a great big heaping plate of spaghetti and then throwing it against the biggest wall you could find. The hope being that one out of every hundred, every thousand, or every ten thousand would stop in utter amazement and say that they just had to have that spaghetti.

This was easy to do when you were dealing with what amounted to captive audiences. That is why advertisers loved television. Sure the print and radio medium were useful but they didn’t produce the same number of captives for the same length of time.

However even the success of that kind of advertising was about to reach its end as things like TiVo and ‘watch-on-demand’ gained steam; but still the numbers were on the side of the advertisers.

Then along comes the Internet. Not the 1.0 version but rather the pain in the ass 2.0 version because all of a sudden demographics got smaller and more niche oriented. Gone were the ten’s of thousands just waiting for the next plate of spaghetti to be thrown. Now advertisers had people talking back or gawd forbid ignoring them totally.

Still, advertisers tried to use their old methods of mass ad bombing across all the top sites. After all that is where all the people were right? It didn’t matter if the ads had nothing to do with why the people were visiting those sites just as long as they were seeing those ads.

Except they weren’t.

Now regardless to what all the freetards might think the Web as we know it, all those free apps that we like to use and all those free games we like to play all cost money. It all costs money somewhere down the road. There is really no such thing as free – everything has an associated prices somewhere along the way and for better or worse those bills, those paychecks, those inflated valuation all get paid through advertising.

Advertisers at some point have to admit in 2010 that everything they have based their eyeball acquisition on doesn’t work the same on the web. They need to realize that people are no longer eyeballs staring at spaghetti on the wall anymore. They need to realize that those eyeballs are all finding places that they want to be and with the turning of the tables the advertisers are going to have to go where those eyeballs are and in such a way that people are treated like people – not a commodity looking to buy spaghetti.

People

If there is one thing that the Web has done for people it is that it has made them feel empowered when it comes to dealing with advertisers. No longer is it a case of suffering through twenty minutes of ads for every hour show we watch. Now it is a case of either blocking them out with a browser add-on or literally becoming blind to them.

We can brag to our friends about how we never see ads as we share the coolest link to some new free service or program or game. We laugh at news companies that talk about having to retreat behind paywalls while we surf through Google News or some other new aggregator of what is hot and interesting.

We feast on the goodness of the Web without having to pay anymore than the cost of access from our broadband providers.

Well just as the advertisers need to change their attitudes and practices on the web so do we. Free is nice but behind that free someone has a family to feed, a company has to earn a profit so they can make more cool stuff. This means some sort of method needs to be found so that those things can be met and we can keep on getting all that cool free stuff.

It means that we as consumers need to understand that this is a two way street as well. We can’t just keep taking and not giving something back in return and in this case the fairest return is to stop blocking those ads and stop being so blind.

It’s a two way street

Advertisers desperately need to rethink their models. They need to realize that niches can be the new marketplace. They need to find their voice instead of throwing spaghetti. They need to be able to listen to our voices – large, medium and small.

On the flip side we need to realize that even something with a free sticker on it has a price somewhere, somehow. We need to stop being so self-righteous about how money is made by those whose sites we visit and read on a daily basis.

Advertisers need to change. We need to change.

One thing that needs to change in 2010 – advertising models is a post from: The Inquisitr

We’ve seen the same thing repeated over an over with the music industry, television industry, news industry, and many more just like them. Crying doom and gloom about how their individual wealth creators are being driven into the ground by the Web. Granted the Web might be changing the playing field in favor of the actual content creator and consumers but it isn’t to blame for these businesses failing.

It is their own myopia and unwillingness to find ways to make their business work in the new media world instead of trying to constantly bend it to meet their current business models.

The latest of these is the book publishing world and people Araud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette Livre. It is his opinion that the monsters out to destroy the book publishing industry are the usual suspects – Google, Amazon, Barnes & Noble along with other e-book retailers.

His point of contention with these evil people is the aggressive pricing of e-books in the case of the major retailers and the availability of out-of-copyright books courtesy of Google.

“On the one hand, you have millions of books for free where there is no longer an author to pay and, on the other hand, there are very recent books, bestsellers at $9.99, which means that all the rest will have to be sold at between zero and $9.99,” Mr Nourry said.

There was a real and “muscular” debate in the US, he added. Retailers were paying publishers more than $9.99 for each e-book, so were selling them at a loss: “That cannot last . . . Amazon is not in the business of losing money. So, one day, they are going to come to the publishers and say: ‘we are cutting the price we pay’. If that happens, after paying the authors, there will be nothing left for the publishers.”

Source: The Globe and Mail – E-books ‘could spell the end for hardbacks’

Once again we see some-one who doesn’t seem to understand how the economics of the web works. The fact is that beyond the book author actually getting what their book is worth based on real sales the cost of delivering those e-books is next to zero. In contrast for book publishers the costs incurred to create all those individual copies of the original are far from zero. Why should retailers, and the author, have to sell a copy of a book that costs nothing to create for the same price as what book publishers deem it to be worth.

As with the business behind the other entertainment industries book publishers are finding that because of the Web the middle man isn’t the profit center that it once was.

Book publishers myopic as they claim e-books will destroy books is a post from: The Inquisitr

Admittedly Internet Explorer is a blight on the Web that many would love nothing better than to see disappear – instantly. It has, and continues to cause nothing but grief for designers and users alike but as much as we might like it to go away it is taking a very long time to die out.

Even Microsoft would like to see it go away but as much as they are trying to get users to upgrade to the new Internet Explorer 8 they also realize that when it comes to the enterprise it is going to be a tough battle. The problem is that IE6 has become entrenched as the business web browser with many of these businesses having custom in-house web apps that might not survive the upgrade in browsers.

As Amy Bazdukas, Microsoft’s general manager for Internet Explorer said in an Computerworld post

But while she agreed that consumers should ditch IE6, and understood the motivation behind the growing chorus of Web sites calling for an end to the browser, Bazdukas said Microsoft couldn’t give the same advice to businesses. "With our business customers, it’s more complex," she argued. "For them, deploying a browser is very like much like deploying an operating system across multiple desktops. So it’s not a surprise that IE6 is still being used."

Not that Microsoft’s entirely happy with that. "IE6 use is higher than we like," Bazdukas admitted. "Most of that is from the business installations, that’s where we see most of the trailing installations of IE6."

She even says in the post that “Friends don’t let friends use IE6”. This is echoed by Ray Valdes, and analyst at Gartner who regularly recommends to clients that they leave IE6 behind but he also states the same problem when it comes to the enterprise

"But the situation is, it’s surprisingly difficult to get enterprises to upgrade. Many companies have old software that depends on IE6, and that software is not upgradable because they have no budget or the developer is not around anymore, or the in-house developer left."

It’s not a matter that Microsoft wants to keep supporting a legacy browser it’s that they don’t have much of a choice given that their bread and butter comes from those businesses that still have IE6 deployed throughout their operations.

Even Microsoft would like IE6 to die but can’t help put a stake in it is a post from: The Inquisitr

Well it looks like Rupert Murdoch didn’t get Chris Anderson’s memo about everything on the Internet being free.

Word is that the News Corp chairman told analysts in a earnings conference call that while the newspaper industry has to change to keep up with the time it doesn’t mean that everything will be free – especially his newspapers.

"The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution," Mr Murdoch said.

"But it has not made content free. Accordingly we intend to charge for all our news websites," he said.

He said News Corp would use the Wall Street Journal‘s online vehicle as a model.

"The extended downturn has only increased the drumbeat for change," he said, arguing that classified advertising for online news would never reach the levels once offered by print.

"Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content, is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting," Mr Murdoch said.

Source: Business Spectator :: News Corp to charge for all news websites

Time to get the comfy chair and popcorn ready because the blogosphere is sure to get going full force pontificating over this news.

All News Corp news sites to start charging is a post from: The Inquisitr

The ubiquitous internet Smiley has been with us for a very long time but its origins are shrouded in mystery even though many have tried to lay claim to their birth or knowing where they first showed up. Now though documents have been discovered that let us in on the little known world of Smiley creation.

hat tip to Dark Roasted Blend

Smileys: The Big Internet Mystery Solved is a post from: The Inquisitr

The common wisdom these days is that the Internet and Web, as well as technology in general, will continue on a forward momentum. It will constantly add to our collective knowledge and increase our achievements as it grows. Things like Moore’s Law and Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerated Return would have us believe that our future of incredible technology is within our grasp. After all there is no indication that it is otherwise.

Or is there?

I like to consider myself a realist when it comes to technology and society. I would like to think that there are incredible things ahead for us as we make discovery after discovery. I also believe, unlike a lot of my equals, that as much good as all this new technology will bring society there are those who will subvert the future to their own advantages. That doesn’t change the fact that I don’t hope for a bright future. In fact I hope to always be proven wrong and that we live to see the benefits of a universally equal society as it is helped by our constantly growing technological knowledge.

What if I am wrong?

We live in a world where the Internet and by extension the Web is an increasingly integral part of our society. We might bicker about things like ubiquitous access for all and worry about things like search monopolies, but we would like to believe that as we move to the future we will overcome those problems. We like to believe in a technologically driven world where things like health and other problems which plague us today will no longer exist. Things like oil and coal shortages would be a thing of the past and we would live without fear of the planet imploding from our mere presence.

What if this isn’t the future we end up with?

While the majority of forward thinkers and technologists might dismiss these question as being not something we need to be asking ourselves there are some whole think otherwise. I ran across the writings of one of these types of persons earlier today via a post on Treehugger. John Michael Greer is the author of the Archdruid Report and two of his most recent posts directly look to these types of questions.

The End of the Information Age

In the first post I read titled The End of the Information Age he suggests that rather than heading into a technological Golden Age we are in fact headed in the opposite direction. Much of his argument in the post is based around the point that our technological world is being powered by an increasingly limited supply of energy.

This kind of logic is common enough these days that it’s probably necessary to point out the flaws in it. Electricity isn’t an energy source; it has to be generated, using some other energy source to do so. The electricity that powers the European and Japanese rail systems is mostly generated by plants that burn coal, with significant help from nuclear reactors and a rather smaller assist from hydroelectric plants. Of these, only the hydroelectric plants are a renewable energy source; the others are poised just as firmly on the downslope of depletion as the diesel oil that runs American locomotives.

His point being that our principal forms of creating long term supplies of energy are in fact finite. I realize that this is the point where a vocal group of environmentally minded people will jump up and start waving the banners of solar, wind and wave generated power. Once more we tread into the realm of possible futures but the reality is more likely that these forms of energy generation are going to have a lot harder time gaining a foothold than they think.

As I pointed out in a previous post here we are only just entering into the fields of generating alternative forms of energy. We are barely getting our toes wet in this new world and already see the flag of NIMBY being waved in the communities that, as much as they need these new forms of energy  they don’t want its transport systems going through their neighborhoods.

Now I talked about this whole thing with a good friend of mine, Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins, via IM and he raised the point that Greer was forgetting things like Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerated Return. It was his point that even now stuff like nano-tech solar technology is only about five years from hitting the market in any great degree. For Mark it is things like this that will allow increasing amounts of solar energy to be generated on a smaller more local scale

Well, take into account urban solar initiatives as well as nano-tech – solar is currently poised for a quantum leap forward.

We’re about five years out from affordable solar accessible to everyone.

Having read Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near I can understand the point that Mark is making. Technology isn’t a linear growth, it is in fact an exponential growth that builds on top of what we already know and have. While I may not be in total agreement with what John Greer is trying to say in this first post I also think that people like Kurzweil, and Mark, forget about a major contributing factor in all human growth.

Human Nature

As much as we might like to believe that all human beings are good and want to do the right things for our world and our society that isn’t the case. We live in a world where money and power are the major driving force. Those in power will always do the bare minimum to keep the maximum number of people happy. Beyond that it is all about garnering as much power and money as possible. Corporations have equal or more power than the governments we elect to [supposedly] govern us.

We have seen time and again throughout our history where any serious change in our society has been brought in only through kicking and screaming. Governments and business do not want to change anything that will affect their long term power and profit margins. At the heart of this is our current situation of an inevitable decline of fossil based source of energy and the constant bickering over moving to more renewable sources of energy. On the smaller scale we have even within our own neighborhoods and communities those that will do whatever they can to stop change because it might affect their short term bottom lines.

The Cost of Our Information Age

When it comes to the bottom line in our technological world we all want as much access with a little interference as possible for a little cost as possible. For many people, myself included, this is a perquisite for any attempt to move ourselves into a true technological future. However all this access costs us a lot of energy. We tend to loose sight of this cost when we look on the small scale of our own personal usage of technology. It is a totally different story when start approaching the bedrock of that technology.

Very few people realize just how extravagant the intake of resources to maintain the information economy actually is. The energy cost to run a home computer is modest enough that it’s easy to forget, for example, that the two big server farms that keep Yahoo’s family of web services online use more electricity between them than all the televisions on Earth put together. Multiply that out by the tens of thousands of server farms that keep today’s online economy going, and the hundreds of other energy-intensive activities that go into the internet, and it may start to become clear how much energy goes into putting these words onto the screen where you’re reading them.

At some point we are going to reach a convergence of the need for more cheap energy and the reality that we’ve been playing NIMBY far too long. There will come a point, if what Mark suggests about things like nano-solar doesn’t happen, that energy cost could become the most crucial deciding factor in who – if anyone other than Government and Business, has access to technology.

The Economics of Decline

We could actually arrive at a point where those things like libraries, newspapers and shopping in our neighborhoods become more economically viable because of an increasing cost of technology due to our delay, or inability, in moving to a more sustainable energy production. John Greer talked about this in his second post I read titled The Economics of Decline

All this is true, but it misses the central issue I’ve tried to raise in the last few posts – the impact of energy and resource scarcity on the relative costs and benefits of different technologies – and it also dismisses the even broader issue of whether such energy-intensive technologies are sustainable at all in the future ahead of us. It’s a dizzying departure from reason to insist that the advantages conferred by the internet mean that the internet must continue to exist. The fact that something is an advantage does not guarantee that it is possible.

Our Internet, and all our other technological toys we wouldn’t want to be without, do in fact eat up huge amounts of energy. Companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft along with a host of other technology companies are spending millions of dollars a year trying to find ways to lower their energy consumption. It is a good effort that has already shown promise but they are fighting against an ever growing tide of new technology coming online everyday.

The Growing Energy Cost of the Infrastructure

For as much as technology like the Internet, computers and other modern toys, may have a direct cost energy wise we have to also take into consideration the energy cost of the infrastructure to maintain and grow our technologies. As Greer puts it in his post

It’s crucial to remember that the entire supply chain that keeps the internet and its potential competitors running has to be factored into these calculations. It’s easy to see the internet as uniquely efficient if all you take into account is the energy going into your home computer, or even if you consider the gigawatts used by server farms. Putting those gigawatts to work, however, requires an electrical grid spanning most of a continent, backed up by the immense inputs of coal and natural gas burnt to put electricity into the wires, and a network of supply chains that stretches from coal mines to power plants to the oil wells that provide diesel fuel for trains and excavation machines; the server farms draw on a vast array of supporting services and manufactures, from the overseas mines that produce rare earths for semiconductor doping through the factories that turn out components to the colleges that turn out trained technicians, and the list goes on.

To try and just center our attention on the direct energy cost of technology is myopic and potentially irresponsible. We need to understand that the energy cost of maintaining the world we know and the one we want is going to be immense. As much as our current online experience might like us to believe that the things we want in life can be had at no or extremely little cost the real world shows us otherwise.

The Cost of Living Off of Abundance

Our society for its entirety has lived much a a parasite on this planet. We have placed ourselves above everything else on the planet to the point that we are sucking it dry of its lifeblood. We have no concern for any consequences until we are backing to the proverbial corner. As Mark pointed out though in IM when we talked about this

throughout history, just at the precipice of collapse, humanity figures out a way to continue the growth curve.

He is right.

We have always seemed to pull our asses out of the fire when any bookie in Vegas would have laughed at the odds. Unlike the past though we are reaching a point where the cost of our greed, ignorance and collective self-importance may have exacted too high of a price. While ordinary people fly their NIMBY flags to make sure their corner of the doesn’t change Corporations do everything in their power to maintain the status quo. They have made an art form out of the practice of Avoidance of Cause and Effect.

I am not saying that everything that Greer puts forward in his writing is something that will come to pass. I do believe though that as long as we keep playing the the game of diminishing energy we are in danger of losing any truly good changes that technology could bring to our society. As much as I might like to believe that Kurzweil’s hypothesis might save our asses I also realize that human nature still has a very large part to play in this and that most definitely gives me pause.

Thoughts anyone?

Are we headed to an Internet Dark Ages? is a post from: The Inquisitr

On one hand this story could be funny and on the other it show just how sophisticated some of the scams on the web can be. After all if you are good enough to trap Sir Tim Berners Lee in a web scam it’s got to be a pretty good one right?

The revelation of his being suckered in came out just before a speech he was going to give this week as Web Science 09 in Athens

"The worst thing that has happened to me was when I tried to buy a Christmas present from a company that looked like a bona fide company on the internet and then actually they were a completely fake company. I think I am yet to get the money back, but it wasn’t a lot," said MIT professor Berners Lee with a helplessness that will strike a chord with the Web’s growing number of less famous victims.

Source: Network World

It might be seen as ironic that such a thing could befall someone as knowledgeable of the web but given that the revelation came about in the same week that the web celebrated its 20th anniversary it is almost like an extra insult to the man.

Father of the web gets conned on the web is a post from: The Inquisitr