Tag Archives: Internet

Internet litter. Blech, just blech.

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I spend a few minutes every day looking for interesting golf-related articles to share via my golf association’s Facebook and Twitter feeds.

And wow. There is so much garbage out there. More than ever.

So thanks a lot, all you “get rich on the Internet” types who think you can throw up a website, regurgitate colorless, uninteresting, overly-generalized, zero-value articles and then “monetize” them via Google ads.

Because guess what. I’m sure it works to a point. I’m sure your artful use of keywords will pull in a bit of search engine traffic. I’m sure there are a handful of people who will click on your Twitter links — at least until they learn how little value your links deliver.

But if you think this can pass for a genuine, productive business model, you’re kidding yourself. Nobody is going to stick around long enough to click on your ads if your articles are junk. They’re going to do what I do: read about 5 or 6 words, then go straight to the little x in the left hand corner of the page and go bye-bye.

And while we’re at it, I unfollow Tweeps when the links they serve up keep falling into the garbage category.

Think I’m the only one who wises up after a bit?

Wired’s take on YouTube

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Article is by Bob Garfield. This gets one piece of it:

It’s said that if you put a million monkeys at a million typewriters, eventually you will get the works of William Shakespeare. When you put together a million humans, a million camcorders, and a million computers, what you get is YouTube.

The subhead gets another:

TV advertising is broken, putting $67 billion up for grabs. Which explains why google spent a billion and change on an online video startup.

Uh huh.

Also worth the click is the glimpse into the post Google-acquisition ride of Chad Hurley, one of the site’s founders. There’s something so kinda sweet & touching about these overnight Internet zillionnaire stories, isn’t there? Another coupla dorm room geeks all grown up and rich. *sniff*

It’s the mindset that dooms them

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Blogs that cover the cultural and economic effects of the Internet on newspaper publishing are all linking a couple of articles in The Economist about the latter’s dire straits:

For most newspaper companies in the developed world, 2005 was miserable. They still earn almost all of their profits from print, which is in decline. As people look to the internet for news and young people turn away from papers, paid-for circulations are falling year after year. Papers are also losing their share of advertising spending. Classified advertising is quickly moving online. Jim Chisholm, of iMedia, a joint-venture consultancy with IFRA, a newspaper trade association, predicts that a quarter of print classified ads will be lost to digital media in the next ten years. Overall, says iMedia, newspapers claimed 36% of total global advertising in 1995 and 30% in 2005. It reckons they will lose another five percentage points by 2015.

So what are newspapers to do?

Gal Beckerman, at CJR Daily, ends a summary of the piece with this little zinger:

If the only way to make newspapers profitable is to turn “fine journalism” into junk, than maybe we should start thinking about whether or not news is too precious a commodity to be subjected to the same economic rules by which one sells widgets or hamburgers.

That would be “free market” rules, right? Bring on state-subsidized newspapers!

Meanwhile Jeff Jarvis excerpts from this companion piece in a post titled “Who Saved the Treees?” — and notes that it ends hopefully. This is about change, after all. And change is only a threat if you aren’t willing to change with it.

I was thinking last night about how Google has made a fortune organizing content for people without regard to its quality while newspapers husband their content jealously — in essence, they place a higher value on the content than on peoples’ access to it. “This is so good, you have to pay to see it.” “If you want to read this, you have to register and maintain an account with us.”

It’s a completely different mindset. No wonder the newspaper industry is in flames.

Just try to stop it

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Three weeks ago, when the story first broke that Google would be cooperating with the Chinese government to help it censor searches, Mr. Snitch predicted that this, too, would pass:

Not that some serious stuff isn’t missing from China’s Google. Tibet can’t be Googled anywhere in the country. But this is the Internet, where things change fast. Whatever Google can’t offer the world’s largest nation is going to be seen as an opportunity for some stealthy ‘net entrepreneur out there.

Has his finger on the pulse, does Mr. Snitch. This Monday’s Wall Street Journal featured a front page article (subscription required) on the growing number of workarounds that are enabling Chinese citizens to access forbidden content, courtesy of a new class of netizen, the Hacktivist:

Bennett Haselton, a security consultant and former Microsoft programmer, has developed a system called the Circumventor. It connects volunteers around the world with Web users in China and the Middle East so they can use their hosts’ personal computers to read forbidden sites.

Susan Stevens, a Las Vegas graphic designer, belongs to an “adopt a blog” program. She has adopted a Chinese blogger by using her own server in the U.S. to broadcast his very personal musings on religion to the world. She has never left the U.S., but “this is where technology excels,” she says. “We don’t have to have anything in common. We barely have to speak the same language.”

In Boston, computer scientist Roger Dingledine tends to Tor, a modified version of a U.S. Naval Research Laboratory project, which disguises the identities of Chinese Web surfers by sending messages through several layers of hosts to obscure their path. In addition to the Department of Defense, Mr. Dingledine had also received funding from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that supports free speech online.

The article says that the promising of these may be Freegate, a software program that connects computers inside China to servers in the U.S.

As the product of ethnically Chinese programmers, [Freegate] uses the language and fits the culture. It is a simple and small program, whose file size of just 137 kilobytes helps make it easy to store in an email program and pass along on a portable memory drive.

The software’s creator, Bill Xia, estimates that about 100,000 people a day use Freegate or one of the other censorship workarounds he helped develop.

I like that, a lot :-)