Category Archives: internet

Adobe Air – offline to online is good

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Adobe is launching an application that will allow people to work offline on forms and other content which will then automatically be posted to websites when they go back online.   This is an excellent “transitional” application because many users still have to “log on” to the internet via slow modems or other cumbersome connections, and this will help them participate more actively in the online ecosystem.

That said, I’m increasingly convinced that the explosion of user content is to some extent…over.   Certainly we’ll continue to see huge volumes of content pour online, but at least in terms of the USA it is fair to say that internet access and publishing are is now so easy and cheap it seems unlikely there are millions waiting in the wings to jump online.    Some studies are suggesting that “most” internet users have little interest in blogging or commenting or participating actively – rather they want to read and socialize but not produce much content.     Another interesting factor is that young women appear to be the top content producers in many social networking environments rather than geeky boys who are more likely to spend online time playing games.   It’s going to be very interesting to watch the new media trends shake out in the coming years.  

WSJ reports

Online Activity Study

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Thanks to Metroknow for this link to a study about online activity including kids.  Symantec, maker of Norton Security, did the study and here are some highlights from the study of kids activity:

  • Making friends. About a third of U.S. online children ages 8-17 have made friends online (35%). When you look at teens, the percentage increases, with 50% of U.S. teens ages 13-17 reporting they have made friends with people online. One in three U.S. children (33%) report that they prefer to spend time with their online friends the same amount or more than their offline friends.
  • Social networking. Seventy-six percent of U.S. teens ages 13-17 years old “constantly,” “frequently” or “sometimes” visit social networking sites. Globally, about half of boys (51%) and girls (48%) visit social networking sites. Like mother, like daughter and like father, like son! That’s right…kids take after their parents when it comes to social networking. Case in point: 47% of U.S. parents “constantly,” “frequently” or “sometimes” use social networks while 46% of U.S. children report the same. When you look at China, the numbers are 78% of adults and 85% of children.
  • Shopping online. About one in three (35%) U.S. children report being “very confident” or “confident” in shopping online. This number shoots to 69% among children in China.
  • Getting requests for personal information. About 4 in 10 U.S. teens (42%) ages 13-17 have received an online request for personal information.
  • Being approached by strangers. U.S. children report that 16% of them have been approached online by a stranger; however, U.S. adults believe that just 6% of children have been approached online by a stranger.

    • Check your hosting plan!

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    Some of us – I’m a good example – can be too stubborn about hassling with technology changes because I know that with technology stuff you always can expect the unexpected.   However sometimes this costs me a lot more than the value of the stress it saves me.

    I’ve had many hosting plans for many sites over the years and it has been nice to see  the costs come way down from the old days.    

    I’m just now switching my Verio shared hosting plan from the $50 monthly to the $13 monthly, and it looks like I’m getting better features at about a quarter of the cost.    Also switching my Godaddy “virtual dedicated” server plan, which I was not all that happy with anyway due to SMTP problems neither they or I could solve.    That plan still allows me to have many domains on the server, but cost is going from about $40 monthly to about $16.   

    About five years ago I think I was paying something like $800 per month for a dedicated plan, and over at US History I think we may still be mistaken to run our own servers with all the associated costs for bandwidth and maintenance, but that system would be hard to untangle right now.

    The morale of this story is simple:    Regardless of the size of the site you run you should review your hosting plan to make sure you are taking advantage of the new very inexpensive options available from most hosts.   Also, I think it’s a mistake to assume that the “elite” hosts are better than the cheap ones.  Virtualization (running one physical server as several virtual servers), IP sharing, and load balancing, and customer service quirks mean that the cheap plans can be *better* than the more expensive ones, even at the *same host*. 

    Verio was very helpful *after* I asked them about options for reducing my costs, though they would have earned much more customer loyalty from me if they’d recommended a switch a few years ago when they changed my server but didn’t let me know I should be switching to the cheap plan.   

    Gutenberg + 550 years = Our ADDd Internet

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    John Naughton, writing in the Guardian, has a nice piece about the reading revolution inspired by Gutenberg and the uncertain future of our online equivalents to the books we have held dear for several centuries. 

    Studies are noting how fleeting our attention has become, especially in our young folks.   In terms of “total enlightenment” I actually favor the quick skim to the in-depth read because I believe retention is better for the short bits of information as well as better for the “key concepts” that you get quickly from surfing on a topic.  

    Thus if I read a carefully crafted work I’ll be moderately informed but then lose most of the information over the years, where if I jump around to 20 sources I’ll be similarly well-informed but will retain it better.

    All that said, I’d agree with internet critics who suggest we may be losing our ability – to the extent it was ever there – to quietly and deeply reflect on topics.    Also I’d agree we don’t know the consequences of this shift, though from the national dialog about politics, religion, and other things I’d say we aren’t really falling back or making much progress.   We are a modestly contemplative primate, and we can’t escape that fate regardless of how we input the information.

    Video Games Rulez!?

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    Video Gaming is a substantial economy.   Last year saw over 18 billion in US gaming sales, about 9 billion each from games and 9 billion from the sale of the consoles – gaming computers like XBox360 and WII.  

    Gaming saw a whopping 28% gain over 2006 which is particularly conspicuous in a year where music sales saw a 10% decline and motion picture revenues were flat at about 9 billion.

    Ars Technica Reports

    Copy, right?

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    I’m writing to so many blogs these days it’s getting hard to keep them all straight.    Here’s my thinking on the Lane Hartwell incident over at the Webguild blog.

    Webguild is the Silicon Valley marketing and internet networking group that meets at Google every month and sponsors a couple of conferences each year.   It’s a volunteer effort but run with exceptional professionalism and innovation by Daya Baran (Webguild President) and Reshma Kumar (Webguild Vice President).    I’m looking forward to the Web 2.0 Conference to be held in January.

    Trickles of web content to become floods, sweeping away the cable industry? Maybe.

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    Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider has a good insight about the threat to cable from online feeds, which are now a trickle but could become a flood.    Blodget notes about the agreement between Yahoo and CNET:

    … cable companies, meanwhile, depend on monopoly access to networks like CNBC and cannot afford to be circumvented by, say, a live CNBC web feed (lest a web trickle become a flood)…

    I think Cable still has a viable future for at least the next 5 years because convergence of media is going to take a lot longer than most think, and if Cable is smart they’ll find ways to be the key broadband conduit into the home as they already are for millions of American homes.    It seems to me that the internet is more threatening to information driven media like newspapers than it is to entertainment driven media.   The is partly just a bandwidth issue – currently it’s not realistic to expect people to buy, configure, and use the fledgling broadband movie services.     How soon will this change?    5+ years in my estimation.   Of course eventually super high bandwidth streaming into most homes will be the likely main paradigm for home entertainment, but this won’t happen for some time.   We are too stubborn to innovate nearly as fast as technology allows.

    Oban Scotch for Christmas

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    I owed a friend a pretty good bottle of Scotch for a favor, and knew he liked Oban Scotch.   Unfortunately I had not checked the local price which is consistently $69.95.   Not bad, but I was shooting for a $50 “thank you” gift.   Enter the internet shopping thingie at Google which offered up Turnpike spirits way out east as having the best price by far on Oban – $42 plus shipping.    Unfortunately the website showed “not available” so I called them and got excellent help.  He had some bottles and I managed to order 4 of them.   With shipping I’m going to be under $50, and have a few more nice gifts to give.   Hey Dad – don’t read this post!

    Shopping for scotch shows that the internet has not stabilized pricing at all – at least for Oban Scotch.   This single product has dozens of different online prices, which is especially interesting given that locally the price seems almost “fixed”.    I’m guessing few people buy liquor online – perhaps it is an impulse or very-close-to-Christmas purchase usually and therefore people go local?  However it would seem this price inefficiency could be monetized somehow by matching  low online pricing to high priced areas.    I’m guessing that our local liquore store paid more for the bottle they are selling at $69.95 than I just paid Turnpike, so somewhere in here there is a business.

    Facebook’s Brandee Barker – the web’s most thankless job?

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    Kara Swisher noted the challenges facing Facebook’s PR head Brandee Barker these days, suggesting she might have one of the most thankless jobs on the web, navigating as she must the frigid and hazardous storm water still swirling in the wake of Facebook’s many recent challenges.

    First, Facebook launched “Beacon”, which they foolishly tauted as some sort of landmark in the history of advertising.   Beacon turned out to be more a nasty stain mark as bloggers roundly criticized the approach, and then the New York Times and major advertisers like Coca Cola basically said they were lied to by Facebook.

    As if that wasn’t enough bad news, Facebook managed to look like the ultimate hypocrite when they sued a news site for posting too much information about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.    This from a site that had just started an ad campaign to capitalize on the profile information Facebookers provide at sign up, information Facebook had promised to respect and protect from prurient commercialization.

    Of course they lost the court case, so now Facebook is maintaining a very high and negative news profile across the board for misleading Facebookers, misleading advertisers, and hypocritically wanting to be treated differently from the way they treat others.

    So, hats off to Brandee Barker, PR director at Facebook.   If you make it through this you deserve every penny of your Facebook options value, which hopefully won’t be the next big scandal.

    Mossberg on Amazon’s Kindle book reader – just fair.

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    Bloggers roundly panned the Kindle a few weeks ago during it’s launch, and then Amazon sold out of them almost immediately.  However many (including me) suspect they just didn’t build that many.   Given the negative initial reactions from so many, and the fact Amazon has very conspicuously failed to mention how many sold, I think the “Kindle sell out” was a marketing ploy rather than a sign of the Kindle’s popularity.    In fact I’d be surprised if they sold more than 50,000 or so – probably far short of the numbers needed to bring the Kindle project close to anything approaching profitability.

    Adding insult to injured initial reputation, Walt Mossberg just wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the Kindle is just an OK device.   He was not too hard on it, but no endorsement either.     In contrast and over at CNET, Josh Taylor is warming up to the Kindle after a few weeks of use.    Of course he was on a beautiful tropical beach reading, so maybe that colored his perception to a Kindley hue ?     All I know is that at $399 + $9.99 per book and a buck per blog I won’t be buying one anytime soon.