5 posts tagged “web 2.0”
"There are things in life other than money: hunger, poverty, misery." -- BB Gabor
At this time of year many people's thoughts turn to doing good for others.
John Breen, a Bloomington, Indiana, computer programmer recently turned his thoughts to the issue of global hunger and came up with a novel idea: A vocabulary game on the Web called FreeRice that uses advertising to pay for rice to be distributed in impoverished areas by the.United Nations World Food Program. (The UN program works with organizations in over 75 countries and when possible buys food locally to support local economies.)
Every correct answer you make at the site generates 10 grains of free rice in the form of advertising dollars paid by the site's sponsors. Ten grains a question may not sound like much, but consider what advertisers pay for clicks, and then consider the effect if millions of people play the game
Quesions have been raised--as they always should be--about who gets what money and where the donations actually go. According to FreeRice, simply by playing the vocabulary game, rice (in the form of money from advertisers) is donated for every correct answer. And the site's operators claim they make no money from the Web site. However, some sceptical folks in the philantrophy business have wondered about who gets the ad revenue when a visitor clicks directly on an advertisement in FreeRice: Does the site's creator receive the money or does it too go toward combating world hunger?
Whatever the answer, trying to do good is its own reward, not to mention the fact that you might actually improve your vocabulary.
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For those who wonder what all the fuss about so-called net neutrality is about, witness what Comcast has done to subscribers of its "Internet" service.
Essentially, Comcast is secretly blocking certain Internet requests and Internet traffic in the same manner that hackers hijack computer systems with false messages. Comcast does not inform customers that it is blocking Internet traffic; indeed, it intentionally hides its hacking activity from users.
Comcast's behavior raises several issues: Is the company guilty of deceptive advertising by claiming it offers high-speed Internet access when in fact it only offers access to some parts of the Internet? Can it now be sued by users--including the possibility of a class action suit--for such practices? Is it trying to censor Internet traffic in the same way that government officials in China and Burma censor Internet access? Will the company begin censoring sites that differ from its corporate political views? (In fact, several analysts point out that there appears to be no specific law to prevent Comcast from blocking or hiding, say, republican or democratic sites from its customers.)
Now that Comcast has been caught deceiving its customers and ducking questions about its behavior--questions that were raised as long ago as last August--it may represent a turning point in the battle over net neutrality. Until now, companies such as Verizon and AT&T claimed that there was no reason to enact laws protecting Internet access as it exists because no one was blocking access to customers or planning to do so.
But now the telecom oligopoly has in fact started to hijack the Internet, which may finally spur people and the politicians that represent them into action.
For more on net neutrality, see: Verizon and AT&T: Web 2.0 Killers
For more on Comcast's actions, see: Comcast Blocks Some Internet Traffic
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Net neutrality has yet to pierce the public consciousness (Jon Stewart notwithstanding), but that moment may soon be upon us.
The phrase "net neutrality" refers to the current state of the Web wherein every site has parity on the Internet. Anyone can start a Web site (say, Joe's Guide to Sesquipedalianistic People) and be assured that you and I can connect to it as easily as we connect to, say, The New York Times online. It is the way the Internet was designed, and it is what makes it a unique communications tool and an increasingly essential part of the global business and information infrastructure.
Now, several companies want to hijack the Web, change its structure, and use it to wring money out of every single site on the World Wide Web. The proposal is to strike down net neutrality so that companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest could make it easier to access some web sites and more difficult to access others. So, in the future if you wanted people to be able to download video clips from your site, for example, you'd have to pay additional fees to one of the companies that own the phyisical telecommunications lines, otherwise those companies would make it extremely difficult for people to access your Web site.
The result: Good-bye comparison shopping online, good-bye entrepreneurs and innovation, good-bye voice over IP digital phone services like Skype, good-bye videos online, good-bye every Web 2.0 idea you've every heard of. The only sites that would survive would be the likes of Amazon and Google, which presumably could afford to pay the telecos for priority access. Oh, and you can kiss the idea of online advertising good-bye as well, since the only way to get sufficient traffic to support an ad-based model would be to give the telecos a cut. However, the margins for most sites are too small to make that feasible.
Currently, there is no explicit legislation to prevent telecos from charging every Web site additional fees for access. Hence, the so-called net neutrality movement, which wants legislators to enact laws to prevent the telecos from fragmenting the Web and stifling innovation, restricting access to information, etc. (Incidentally, there is already technology out there to prioritize informational traffic on the Net--IPv6--but that is designed to address other Internet issues, such as how to accommodate, say, streaming video and the explosion of IP numbers.)
What's remarkable about the net neutrality issue is that some organizations, ignorant about how the Internet is structured, have come out against net neutrality. The latest to voice such a position is the technologically handicapped U.S. Department of Justice. On September 6, it filed a so-called ex parte paper with the FCC commenting on net neutrality. Essentially, that paper argued against preserving net neutrality for two reasons: 1) net neutrality laws would stifle innovation, and 2) allowing companies to create a multi-tiered service has worked in other businesses, like the U.S. Postal Service.
As to the first point, it is patently false. Net neutrality is the existing state of affairs and there's been plenty of innovation (no matter how much fun I poke at trendy marketing terms like Web 2.0). Maybe no one at the DOJ has used the Internet yet.
On the second point, it a false analogy. Aside from the questionable tactic of citing the U.S. Postal Service--which is barely hanging on by its fingernails and has failed to innovate since the days of the pony express--the Internet is really more analogous to the phone system. So following the DOJ's logic, eliminating net neutrality would be like allowing phone companies to not only charge for basic service, but also charge each and every one of us an extra fee to actually guarantee that our phones would ring every time someone called (rather than just ringing, well, some times).
So why should you care about net neutrality? Because if net neutrality were to end any business that uses the Web would be adversely affected and every person who uses the Web even just for e-mail could see the utility of the Internet severely curtailed.
To learn more about the issue, how it could affect you, and what you can do about it, I suggest visiting Save the Internet. See also, "Fighting for Higher Phone Bills."
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As a pre-Internet technology critic/writer/reporter, I should be crowing about the pending demise of Time Inc.'s Business 2.0 magazine.
To start with, it was constructed out of smoke and mirror shades. There's no such thing as Business 2.0--just as Web 2.0 is an utter fiction. People have been writing blogs since the dawn of the World Wide Web (and etching graffiti into walls since the Summarians roamed the earth), we just didn't call them blogs (we called them Web pages, electronic diaries, hobby sites,...you get the idea). And when Netscape was introduced the whole idea was to serve up things like word processing (hello Google Docs) and services online. The only problem: We were living in a dial-up world. But I digress...
Business 2.0 was a fiction predicated on the idea that there were plenty of advertising dollars left on the table by the likes of Fast Company magazine and original tech magazines like PC Magazine. That's what the term "Busines 2.0" really referred to: the publisher's business 2.0 plan, not yours. All one had to do was be cozier with the Silicon valley kids, and you'd be in like Jobs. Furthermore, technology companies had been thriving for decades before eCompany, er, Business 2.0 came along. And nothing had really changed (it was all still built on the information superhighway that Al built and on the integrated circuit). Nothing new--except for the hype, stock options, and flim-flam burnrate mountebanks.
And now, the mask is off, the advertisers have fled, and the macrobiotic, thin woman with a carbon footprint smaller than your pinkie is about to sing for Business 2.0.
But I'm not gloating, unlike some competitors (like Forbes). No, I'm not gloating. Why not? Because the soon-to-be-announced demise of Business 2.0 indicates that businesses are buying another fiction espoused by the likes of Google and accepted without question by, well, Forbes, and others. Call it another form of TP. Better yet, call it Advertising 2.0, the new, new fiction. Behold! A shimmering online world filled with better advertising, a form of communication exceeding any heretofore conceived of by human minds. (Until, of course, the privacy folks come in and spoil the party.)
And so, today, we scramble to worship the new online advertising God, burn our books, toss our magazines, and surf instead of read, skim instead of think, click instead of critique.
Me? I'm going to plunk myself down on the couch and watch TV.
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The Internet is supposed to make your life easier to manage, right? Okay, so they didn't plan on the deluge of spam or the hours frittered away at work reading Web sites like this one. But there are some Web-based ideas that could legitimately save you time and trouble. One example: Whitefence.
I spoke with the company's CEO, Eric Danziger, recently to discuss what his company's site offers. The essential idea is that when people move, they end up wasting a lot of time arranging for phone service, getting cable or satellite TV service, calling to get the power turned on, etc. As if packing up all those boxes wasn't work enough. So Whitefence created a one-stop site where people who are in the midst of a move can compare different services, say competing phone packages, and then just make the arrangements all through Whitefence. No waiting on hold for hours or calling multiple utilities. Just do it all through Whitefence and wait for confirmation e-mails to arrive later.
According to Danziger, Whitefence has about 1 million customers a year and covers all 50 states. However, there are some holes in that coverage, such as New York City (where everything is anything but transparent) and outlying rural areas where there aren't that many competing utilities. Nevertheless, Danziger hopes to eliminate those gaps soon and foresees adding new services. Why not compare and arrange for a new mortgage, for example, or change your car insurance through Whitefence?
Ah, if only all of life could be taken care of with just a few mouse clicks...
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