Web, Blogging and Computers – Page 8

Web 2.0 Is A Lie!

It is over. The emperor has no clothes. Time to get out your old Web 1.0 t-sirts and accept the bitter truth:

Web 2.0, a catchphrase for the latest generation of Web sites where users contribute their own text, pictures and video content, is far less participatory than commonly assumed, a study showed Tuesday. A tiny 0.16 per cent of visits to Google’s top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch, according to a study of online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with Web audience measurement firm Hitwise. Similarly, only two-tenths of one per cent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo Inc., are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found. The vast majority of visitors are the Internet equivalent of the television generation’s couch potatoes — voyeurs who like to watch rather than create, Tancer’s statistics show.

Oh. My. God.

You know, this really surprises me be cause, you know, everybody at work blogs, right? Non-stop. And nobody looks at me like I have three heads when I say the word “blog” any more. And I am making thousands a month from my Google ads. That is the beauty of the new e-conomy. It’s like earning piles of cash for doing next to nothing…or is it the other way around.

[Ed.: I should have dubbed this “Wake Up To Web-ality Week” but who knew this would be the week the wheels started to fall off. Secret – I use bank tellers.]

Ahoy! Pirate Radio Ahead!

US based web radio is about to get a massive hit and it will be interesting to watch how it plays out:

The new fees, which will apply until 2010, will charge a flat fee per-song, per-user in addition to a $500 fee for every channel owned by a station. Fees will increase every year until 2010. Radio stations with multiple channels, such as NPR, would be charged thousands of dollars, which they claim will cripple them. Previously, stations paid an annual fee plus 12% of their profits. The fees will start on 15 May 2007 and will be collected retrospectively for 2006. Webcasters will be allowed to calculate retrospective payments by averaging listening hours.

My first reaction is to call NCPR and make sure I pay my fair share. That one station is the main source of music in my life now. I rarely by CDs anymore as I have about 400 plus 150 lps and cassettes and 45s and I pretty much never get around to using them as much as I might – though I have to admit the vinyl did spin last Friday night. [Ed.: T-Rex was right – we were born to boogie.] But what of the amateur hobbyists like Darcey’s Friday Night Blues and Beer or Steven’s Acts of Volition Radio? Sure these are both Canadian but how and when will a fee like this apply? How can I pay it when it does arise.

Don’t get me wrong. I think there should be a fee. Sadly, there were plans to have nice and useful hidden fees attached to purchases of media of one sort or another but the hyper-libertarians and whacko self-proclaimed “user rights” advocates got to that idea and gave it the boot – my nickles! my dimes!!! they shouted so that a direct fee structure will be imposed granting people the right to be coat tail on both the artists and the medium that provide the access to the good stuff. So now we are stuck with the wrong end of the pipe holding the bag and a reasonable likelihood that the access to intelligently selected music on the web will dry up.

How should we pay the piper anyway?

Getting Rid Of The Internet

What! Is there some kind of weird thing happening here? Just one year ago – one thin year – I asked the question whether we should turn off the internet […well, not “we” as in this bunch around here but the “we” that we are all part of, a small bit of which “we” has actually the power to turn off the Internet…] and now they […by which I mean people with more power than “we”…] are thinking about shuttin ‘er all down.

Will there be room made for me and my dopey blogs? Why would there be? Western world creates a miracle of a communications system and it – aside for the fact that it is structured like something out of a terrorist’s dream – it is filled with the empty babble of dingbats like me, people selling old paper cups on eBay and the hacking and spamming and fisking and all the other vacuous dingbattery that goes on around the world. Why would anyone in charge actually make room for that…for me…for we?

What will it look like when the Internet goes off-line? Wanna bet when it’s going to happen? How would we report the winner?

April Showers Bring Friday Bullet-pointy Chatt-a-ramas

This week. This was a short week. Short weeks are good in that Friday comes faster but it also has the air of less than a full week off as much as less than a full week of work. But was another week in your life. And it has passed.

Later Update: man’s only trump card soon to be lost thanks to science.
Lunchtime Update: NYCO knows where the bees are.
Update: please consider and vote for the best of beer poetry. The prize is a weekend of free beer so make your decisions carefully.
Speaking of passing, this was the week that Kurt Vonnegut died. I first read his books when one should – in my late teens. In my mind, I vaguely lump him with the also late Peter Sellers but he is almost the opposite. Sellers was a big jerk personally and only celebrated the absurdities of life as an angst-ridden professional. Vonnegut advocated contentment, humour and compassion for this life in all he did, even as he suffered from personal depression.
One of my constant bloggy reads throughout the years has been Ian at xtcian.com and he is celebrating his fifth bloggiversary today with a retrospective. I’ve followed him through his medicated post-9/11 volunteering singlehood to his medicated becoming a husband through his medicated struggles as a movie maker through his medicated struggles as a TV writer through now his days as Daddy. Because he comes to the game as a good writer he is, in my opinion, the best personal blogger on the net. And I say that even though his regular updates with pictures of his kids are the second nicest photos of family – after mine…which, of course, I never post because I have a clue about data mining and biometrics.
I have been trying to think of analogies in Canadian culture on the Don Imus now-firing. I think that it is a good thing that this pervasive voice was fired for saying such a foul thing – and saying it in such an offhand…even, dare I say, entitled manner – that was focused on a specific and small group of young people who achieved only excellence. The closest I can think of as an equivalent would be Don Cherry calling our national women’s hockey team Pepsis and sluts. But he never would. He may be a dope but he is not cruel. I think that is the thing and maybe it is the thing that broke the back of the shock-jock’s status even with all his good work for charity.
The Tiger points us to the photo of the week. I miss Jean like I miss Ed Broadbent.
The BBC is running an interesting series examining anti-Americanism. Being at a peak of pro-Americanism in my personal life these days (what with baseball being my main sport of obsession now, what with my upstate day-tripping, what with listening largely to NCPR and WFAN for my radio diet, what with my exploration of BBQ and what with the dreary nature of Canadian politics compared to the gold mine that is local New York state politics) I find anti-Americanism beyond my understanding. I am fortunate in what I am able to do and have a more than a couple of projects on the go that get me involved in cross-border discussions. But was not always the case – I suppose, like me, many more Canadians can say that compared to say in the 80’s. Is this, too, due to free trade?

What a load of bullets. Usually I struggle with these but those whipped right out. Now for coffee to be followed by spelling mistake correction.

Camera Bombs

This story reminded me of an idea I had years ago:

Google is using its popular online mapping service to call attention to atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan. In a project with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, inaugurated Tuesday, the Internet search company has updated its Google Earth service with high resolution satellite images of the region to document destroyed villages, displaced people and refugee camps.

My idea? After Rwanda and the Bosnian war and news of slaughter and the concentration camps, I wondered why it was that there were no camera bombs out of which hundreds of little C-U-See-Me style cameras on parachutes are deployed over sites of atrocities broadcasting direct to satellites, landing unseen or picked up by those on the ground to record what was happening to them. The lack of video for CNN to show over and over has been as much the difference between the war on terror and larger human rights disasters like Darfur.

Web 2.0 For Suckers

This is hilarious…in that tiny sort of hilarity that really does not affect anything that you really need, care about or have thought much about before this point:

The row blew up after MySpace asked her to remove a link that let visitors buy songs from a competing service, pointing out that “we retain the right to block or remove content that violates our terms of use, including unauthorized commercial transactions”. The unauthorized commercial transaction here was that Ms Tequila’s profile included a widget – a small piece of code – that took visitors to the Hooka music service instead of the MySpace-approved Snocap.

The web shall set you free, if you pay the proper fee.

Help! I Hear A Guru Thinking About How To Earn More Money!!!

Yawn. Never heard of Kathy Sierra. Never heard of Tim O’Reilly. I have never even heard of the “blogger Ms Sierra described as ‘far more prominent than me’.” Time to remember no one really cares or should really care about blogs – for good reason. But pump up the non-issue and – WHAMMO! – conference fees go crazy.

Remember: you are hearing is from a prominent blogger. Send $29.95 for further details and my plan for the future.

Group Project: What Were We Like And What Are We Like Now?

…and what are we becoming? I know I go on but this new report on the state of privacy and surveillance technologies in the UK reminded me of this one about blogging, especially this passage:

…before the telegraph, for example, almost all ordinary people read entire newspapers and were generally very up to date on all issues of the day. It was not uncommon for politicians and other famous people of the day to come to town and speak literally for hours on end about complex issues facing people. Ordinary townspeople would know exactly what was being discussed and were not spoken down to or had the subject matter dumbed down for them. Postman relates one typical example where Lincoln was speaking somewhere for something like six hours, excused everyone to go home and eat supper, and then resumed speaking again an hour later. Then the telegraph made the spread of information much, much quicker. But because of all the dots and dashes, information became sound bites overnight. As a result, people’s tolerance for lengthier, meatier writing began to wane. And newspapers at the time who began getting their news from far away over the telegraph began writing shorter and shorter stories.

It’s the general proposition that I think interests me – as usual – how we as humans go about largely unaware of these sorts of quick shifts and are not very good at assessing whether they are good or bad, whether we are smarter or dumber because of them, freer or less free. The promise and the payout. We no longer think about things that were quite common ideas quite recently, like the information divide – which I think I think is as much due to the general ease of internet access as much as the awareness that most internet use is idle and recreational. No one considers access to a phone as a measure of full functional participation now either.

So, without getting into the goodness or the badness, how far could people go in immersing themselves into the unimportant and the abandonment of individual privacy while still being functional in a democracy? Are they even related? Do I need a coffee?

Doug Mientkiewicz On My TV

Come over to the dark side, Doug. Resistance is futile.

I watched the Yankees-Twins pre-season game last night care of the glory that is cable TV. If the Web 2.0 had a quarter of the success of cable TV, it might amount to something one day. Like that miracle of the 1990’s, pervasive email, the miracle of the 1980s, pervasive cable TV, has changed our lives so fundamentally we do not even notice it anymore.

Last night, the miracle transported me to a small baseball field in Florida to watch the Yankee hopefuls beat up on the hopefuls for the Twins. One of the former who used to be one of the later stood out – Doug Mientkiewicz. He stood out not only for his horrible grapefruit league batting average of well under 0.100 but his incredible catching at first, stretching out with last second splits to grab the ball a tenth of a second earlier than if he let it come to the glove.

I don’t know if that is enough to earn him a spot, though, given his batting. But one thing about pre-season baseball, compared to say NHL hockey, is there is a lot more potential for fluidity at the far end of the bench and with the farm team system more opportunity for parking people for specific purposes later in the season so we will likely see him play.

The NTY has a good story on Mientkiewicz (Ment-KAY-vich to you non-Slavophones) in this morning’s edition.

Chatteriffic Bullet-a-rama For A Friday

A fabulous day is here. The Friday that begins the great final melt, the weekend the rains come. Soon we will be smelling things, things that have been out there under the snow and ice for months. Soon car windows will be down, we will notice sounds from a distance as we sit in our houses, dogs a few streets over will interrupt our thoughts, the neighbours fights will introduce new words to the kids. Tra-la!

Update: Did you know that Kingston has the lowest unemployment between Halifax and Winnipeg? 5.0% percent.
Update: I had never heard the phrase “pimp my Zamboni” until I heard this story.
I am a broken record, I know, but sometimes you still here the music between the skips and so it is with great pleasure that I give you the greatest conversation of the week making fun of Web 2.0. An argument between people who want pornier porn and those who can advocate this with a straight face – “beware the coming misappropriation of the phrase ‘social software’.” Fabulous in its meaninglessness.
Indeed – what has Ghana done anyway?

Here is new information I did not know before. With all the talk of hands off our resources, the right way is the only way, and Alberta is taking the lead…now they are begging to not have their special case Federal tax break taken away:

Alberta Finance Minister Lyle Oberg warned Thursday against any move by Ottawa to scrap a special tax break for the oil sands, saying it would be the final punch in a triple whammy blow to the energy sector. The Harper government, which needs Opposition party support to pass its March 19 budget, is reviewing an NDP call to scrap what’s called the accelerated capital cost allowance program for oil sands…tax expert Jack Mintz of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management estimates that oil sands projects would pay $165-million more in federal and provincial corporate income tax a year if the income tax rules applied to them were the same as conventional oil and gas investments. But, he adds, if oil sands investments were treated the same as Alberta’s non-energy projects, the additional tax would be $440-million a year.

Maybe we can have these bonuses put on the table when we have to deal with the insufferable self-promoters of the West that lies between BC and Sask next time. Nice to have been pulling their weight so they can tell us how self-sufficient they are.
Speaking of meaninglessness, apparently Red Sox veteran pitcher Curt Schilling is blogging.
A couple of travelers sent me nine photos of their trip to Belgium. I like their travel planning.

That is it for now. Maybe more later. I have some planting to plan and I have start working on my spring festival outfit. And thinking about who to invite to the cheese roll.