Monthly Archive for April, 2010

From Brad Stone, The New York Times

Mark Brooks wants the whole Web to know that he spent $41 on an iPad case at an Apple store, $24 eating at an Applebee’s, and $6,450 at a Florida plastic surgery clinic for nose work.

Too much information, you say? On the Internet, there seems to be no such thing. A wave of Web start-ups aims to help people indulge their urge to divulge — from sites like Blippy, which Mr. Brooks used to broadcast news of what he bought, to Foursquare, a mobile social network that allows people to announce their precise location to the world, to Skimble, an iPhone application that people use to reveal, say, how many push-ups they are doing and how long they spend in yoga class.

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From John W. Mayo, Marius Schwartz, Bruce Owen, Robert Shapiro, Lawrence J. White and Glenn Woroc, The New York Times

Transparency is non-negotiable,” declared Europe’s new commissioner for digital issues, Neelie Kroes, in a speech last week laying out her thoughts on net neutrality. “In a complex system like the Internet, it must be crystal-clear what the practices of operators controlling the network mean for all users.”

Ms. Kroes’s comments reflect the decision made by the European Union in November to avoid any of the more extreme regulations that could stifle the innovation that has been the hallmark of the Internet. Instead, the union chose a more measured approach that emphasizes transparency.

This at odds with the Federal Communications Commission, which is currently considering versions of net neutrality regulation that would severely restrict firms’ business models and pricing flexibility. Before the commission embraces regulation, it should take another look at the European model and focus on a policy built on transparency.

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From Manisha Verma, 3 Quarks Daily

The first Web 2.0 Conference held in San Francisco in October 2004 , shortly after Google’s initial public offering – the biggest IPO of a technology firm since the second dotcom boom, had created a stir. Google’s IPO did not just announce Silicon Valley’s return to Wall Street. It also unveiled a new business model. When Google at last revealed just how much money it was making by placing small, targeted text advertisements next to search results, jaws dropped. Overnight, every entrepreneur had learnt a new one-word pitch to venture capitalists: advertising.

Indeed, Web 2.0 today still seems to have only one business model – advertising, and the Valley needs to admit that only one company (Google) with only one of its products (search advertising) has proved that the model really works. Google’s search dominance made CPC based advertising the de-facto monetization standard on the web. Yahoo and AOL also did their best to grab a piece of the action. In this pursuit of “eyeballs”, a series of new internet stars emerged: MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. Each provided a free service in order to attract a large audience that would then—at some unspecified point in the future—supposedly attract large amounts of advertising revenue. It had worked for Google, after all, and ought to work for the others. But the reality, it turns out, is that the number of companies that can be sustained by revenues from internet advertising is much smaller than many people thought. Not one of them has really become an advertising success in its own right.

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From The Edge

Read any newspaper or magazine and you will notice the many flavors of the one big question that everyone is asking today. Or you can just stay on the page and read recent editions of Edge …

Playwright Richard Foreman asks about the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available”. Is it a new self? Are we becoming Pancake People — spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

Technology analyst Nicholas Carr wrote the most notable of many magazine and newspaper pieces asking “Is Google Making Us Stupid”. Has the use of the Web made it impossible for us to read long pieces of writing?

Social software guru Clay Shirky notes that people are reading more than ever but the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we’d been emptily praising all these years. “What’s so great about War and Peace?, he wonders. Having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. Is the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture now finally becoming clear?

Science historian George Dyson asks “what if the cost of machines that think is people who don’t?” He wonders “will books end up back where they started, locked away in monasteries and read by a select few?”.

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