Category Archives: Technology

The clickthrough’s tyrannical efficiency

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Terrific post on Nicholas Carr’s Blog about what the Net is doing to newspapers. Sample:

Traditional newspapers sold bundles of content. Subscribers paid to get the bundle, and advertisers paid to have their ads in the bundle, where those readers would see them. In effect, investigative and other hard journalism was subsidized by the softer stuff – but you couldn’t really see the subsidization, so in a way it didn’t really exist. And, besides, the hard stuff contributed to the value of the overall bundle.

That whole model has been slowly unraveling for some time, but the web tears it into tiny little pieces. Literally. The web unbundles the bundle – each story becomes a separate entity that lives or dies, economically, on its own. It’s naked in the marketplace, its commercial existence meticulously measured, click by click. Advertisers, for their part, pay not to be seen by a big group of readers, but to have their ads clicked on by individual readers. They’ll go where the clickthroughs are. Clickthroughs themselves are priced individually, depending on the content they’re associated with. As for readers, they’re not exactly trained or motivated to pay to read anything online. The economic incentives created by the web model are very different from those of the old print model – and it’s economic incentives that ultimately determine business decisions.

Google buys Writely

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I’ve been using Writely for a while as an online word-processor that enables one to create documents on which colleagues can also work. Now comes the news that Google has acquired the four-person start-up that created the application. It’s just another step in the progress towards public realisation that the network, not the platform, is the computer. Or, as one of my colleagues puts it, “the PC is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet!”

More: Some useful comments on Good Morning, Silicon Valley.

The very first Web browser

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Screenshot of Tim Berners-Lee’s Next workstation screen from, I would guess, early 1990.

Update: Hmmm… James Cridland did some digging and came up with a directory listing which assigns the date 7 June 1994 to the image. This doesn’t necessarily date the screenshot, though. But if it does, then the image certainly isn’t “the very first Web browser”, as the headline on this post suggested, because Mosaic was released by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina in the spring of 1993 and there were certainly browsers running on Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT workstation in CERN way before that.

In any event, the first browser was a text-browser like Lynx rather than a graphics-based one like that shown in the screenshot.

Posted in Web

Ofcom’s ‘media literacy’ audit

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Ofcom (the omnipotent UK communications regulator) has conducted a study of what it calls ‘media literacy’ (defined as “the ability to access, understand and create communications in a variety of contexts”) in the UK. Summary of findings is here. Full report here. Highlights:

  • Age is a significant indicator of the extent and types of media literacy, with mobile phones a pervasive media technology for the 16-24 age group. Those aged 65 and over have significantly lower levels of media literacy than other age-groups.
  • Media platforms are seen mainly in ‘traditional’ terms; there are few signs yet of a widespread recognition of their wider digital functions.
  • Knowledge of industry funding and regulation across platforms varies. A significant majority of respondents (over 75%) know how the television industry is funded and that it is regulated. Over half of UK adults know how radio is funded and that it is regulated. Two in five internet users know how search engine websites are funded, although this drops to one quarter of UK adults as a whole.
  • Levels of concern about content vary across platforms, with little concern over mobile phone content. Most people are not yet aware of content controls on mobiles. A sizeable minority of internet users are not confident about blocking viruses or email scams.
  • Many people, especially the elderly, say they prefer to learn media skills from family and friends, or by themselves rather than in formal groups.
  • The highest area of interest for many people is in learning how to use the internet. One third of people say they are interested in learning more about digital platforms and services.

    • Original garbage

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    Nice piece in the Wall Street Journal by Lee Gomes.

    There is a new and insidious threat to the World Wide Web: a slowly rising tide of “original content” on Internet sites that is at best worthless, and at worst possibly even dangerously inaccurate.

    I should know; I’ve been writing some of the stuff myself.

    Understanding what’s happening requires a lesson in modern Web economics. If there is a topic in the news, people will be searching on it. If you can get those searchers to land on a seemingly authoritative page you’ve set up, you can make money from their arrival. Via ads, for instance.

    It’s a wicked world out there. Sigh.

    The Crackberry saga

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    This morning’s Observer column…

    The Blackberry saga has turned out to be a high-tech rehash of Bleak House’s Jarndyce v Jarndyce. And, as in the Dickens novel, nobody comes out of this looking good. RIM was foolish to have ignored NTP’s claims early on, when it could have settled for a modest amount. But it didn’t, and its product took off and suddenly made it a valuable target, which in turn stiffened the resolve of NTP’s lawyers to stick with the case.

    The story also highlights the absurdity of the legal chains that now entangle the technology industry. After all, NTP makes nothing, delivers no service, makes no contribution to society other than by paying its taxes. RIM has created a service that apparently offers fantastic benefits to consumers – and may enhance governments’ ability to communicate in crisis situations. Yet it’s RIM which may go under. It’s daft. But that’s intellectual property for you…

    Quirky note: Just noticed (Sunday, 10:06 UK time) that the column is top of Google News coverage of the saga. As far as I know, that’s a first for me.

    A billion legal downloads!

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    Yes, siree! The Apple iTunes store has sold its billionth song.

    The billionth song, ”Speed of Sound,” was purchased as part of Coldplay’s “X&Y” album by Alex Ostrovsky from West Bloomfield, Michigan. As the grand prize winner, he will receive a 20-inch iMac, 10 fifth generation iPods, and a $10,000 Music Card good for any item on the iTunes Music Store. In addition, to commemorate this milestone, Apple will establish a scholarship to the world-renowned Juilliard School in his name.

    I wish some corporate psychiatrist from Harvard Business School would write a comprehensive explanation of why the music industry didn’t see the opportunity.

    Wi-Fibre

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    From Technology Review…

    Atop each of the Trump towers in New York City, there’s a new type of wireless transmitter and receiver that can send and receive data at rates of more than one gigabit per second — fast enough to stream 90 minutes of video from one tower to the next, more than one mile apart, in less than six seconds. By comparison, the same video sent over a DSL or cable Internet connection would take almost an hour to download.

    This system is dubbed “WiFiber” by its creator, GigaBeam, a Virginia-based telecommunications startup. Although the technology is wireless, the company’s approach — high-speed data transferring across a point-to-point network — is more of an alternative to fiber optics, than to Wi-Fi or Wi-Max, says John Krzywicki, the company’s vice president of marketing. And it’s best suited for highly specific data delivery situations.

    This kind of point-to-point wireless technology could be used in situations where digging fiber-optic trenches would disrupt an environment, their cost be prohibitive, or the installation process take too long, as in extending communications networks in cities, on battlefields, or after a disaster.

    Don’t you just love the way a battlefield application is sneaked in?

    Tor

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    Interesting application of net technology — Tor.

    Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet.

    It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.

    Individuals use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and their family members, or to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, or the like when these are blocked by their local Internet providers. Tor’s hidden services let users publish web sites and other services without needing to reveal the location of the site. Individuals also use Tor for socially sensitive communication: chat rooms and web forums for rape and abuse survivors, or people with illnesses.