mediajunk

Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig has, for several years, condemned the ever-expanding definition of intellectual property in the US. Not only does Lessig condemn those multinationals for their greed in trying to "own" ideas, he argues that the pursuit of IP laws amounts to over-regulation, and could stifle creativity, particularly in the areas of software and the internet. In the February edition of Wired magazine, Thomas Goetz argues that companies and other nations who pay little heed to these "property" laws are already benefiting: "Researchers in Australia and India are sidestepping agriculture patents held by the likes of Monsanto and DuPont to develop competitive technologies and foods (such as a high-protein potato) that are, by design, open and unrestricted. In pharmaceuticals, India is skirting patents to create generic AIDS drugs that are orders of magnitude cheaper than those made by the transnational drug companies ... Media industries, meanwhile, are besieged by millions of MP3 traders and DVD bootleggers in open revolt against copyright protections. ... Last year, China began installing the open source operating system on 500,000 computers, with perhaps 200 million more machines on the way. ... Taken together, these developments demonstrate how an alternative culture is arising in our midst - or rather, outside it. They reflect the gulf between IP owners, with their rigid sense of controls, and those who would seek to use that intellectual property with all the flexibility afforded by technology -- the Internet, in particular. And that's not just a difference of opinion, it's a technological generation gap." Empires are about to crumble, but those who get it will succeed.

Webmasters may have noticed recent fluctuation in their rankings on Google and other search engines that use Google's search technology, such as Yahoo and AOL. The recent changes are being referred to as Update Austin in the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) community. It's a little early to see whether these changes will "stick" or whether Google is just experimenting. In any case, the update isn't as dramatic as its predecessor, Update Florida. One thing is for sure: being an SEO is becoming more difficult by the month. This is good news for those who are committed to professional web marketing. From now on, it will take time, talent and dedication for newcomers to build up skills in search-based marketing -- just as it does in offline marketing.

Picture phones are soooooooooo dated. Haven’t you, like, upgraded to a video phone? Well, maybe not just yet. But mobile phones that can send live video streams, or recorded segments, will be with us in the not-too-distant future. Already, the BBC has been testing just such a phone, says a report today in Cellular News: “Simply using their mobile phones, which are equipped with Philips' multimedia camcorder software, BBC journalists can conveniently and rapidly record video clips, up to 15 minutes in duration, and transmit them instantly to the studio for public television broadcast ... even from difficult or remote locations. Added to this are the considerable savings in equipment and time. The BBC has carried out a number of news broadcasts using video captured and sent with the new mobile technology, including a bulletin from a tugboat maneuvering in harbour.” Meanwhile, the growth of camera phones, and moblogs, continues to accelerate “after a sluggish start,” according to a recent report on (co-incidentally) the BBC news site: “Their popularity has been boosted by more users to send images to and people finding novel uses for them. These include snapping broken plumbing fixtures to send to plumbers and taking pictures of car number plates after hit and run accidents. … Hairdressers have been getting in on the act too by letting customers download shots of possible hairdos to show their friends before going for the chop.” The rapid spread of the phones has given rise to privacy concerns. When posted to moblogs, images become accessible to a worldwide audience within seconds of being taken. “Around the world, gyms, cinemas and offices have banned the use of camera phones after complaints about invasion of privacy.” There you have it: a thoroughly modern excuse to avoid going to the gym!

When advising individuals on how to manage their online identities, I usually start with domain names. (For example, I own several domains related to my name, such as michaelheraghty.com and heraghty.net.) However, if your name is Michael Rowe, this may not be such a good idea -- particularly when there are paranoid, pedantic legal departments of certain multinationals out there.

I mentioned yesterday that not all teenage bloggers are geeks. Well, one of the “surprising” findings of the first world internet report is that the average web user does not conform to the stereotype of being anti-social. Far from it: internet users are perhaps more social than those “addicted” to other media. The internet is a many-to-many communications medium, where popular content emerges from the bottom up, and converstaions are truly weblike. Most other media, in contrast, conform to the one-to-many -- or “broadcast” -- model, whereby viewers are passive consumers of infotainment, typically produced by large corporate organisations. Television was traditionally considered an entirely passive medium until communications theorists argued, in the last couple of decades, that viewers do not simply consume television output -- they engage with it, and interpret stories and messages in their own ways. However, engaging with a television programme is a far cry from interacting with other humans. In this sense, TV still is very much an anti-social activity. Couch potatoes are still the epitome of social passivity. Internet users may be known for their tendency to rant, but a rant posted to a site that allows comments becomes a dialogue. And let's not forget that advertisers find the internet much harder to infiltrate. I take heart, then, in the study’s findings that the internet is shaving at least five hours off television viewing among its frequent users -- who, it turns out, also like to read: “The typical internet user is an avid reader of books and spends more time engaged in social activities than the non-user, it says. And, television viewing is down among some internet users by as much as five hours per week compared with Net abstainers.” (CNN) Of course, too much internet, like too much television, isn’t a good thing. I look forward to the day when the web is decoupled from the current PC and monitor arrangement. Until then, it's neck exercises and eye lubricant for me, groan.

Emily Nussbaum has written a lengthy, insightful article about the phenomenon of teenage blogging -- one of the largest sectors of the blogosphere. I was surprised to learn, among other things, that blogging is not confined to geeks, and that cliquishness exists within the teenage blogging community: "Blogging is a replication of real life: each pool of blogs is its own ecosystem, with only occasional links to other worlds. As I surfed from site to site, it became apparent that as much as journals can break stereotypes, some patterns are crushingly predictable: the cheerleaders post screen grabs of the Fox TV show ''The O.C.''; kids who identify with ''ghetto'' culture use hip-hop slang; the geeks gush over Japanese anime. And while there are exceptions, many journal writers exhibit a surprising lack of curiosity about the journals of true strangers. They're too busy writing posts to browse." If anybody thinks that weblogging is a fad (some people still think the *internet* is a fad!), just wait until this generation of high-school bloggers reaches the workplace. Given the way these kids wholeheartedly embrace the medium, blogging -- and the web -- are sure to grow in new and exciting ways.

Yahoo is toying with an RSS system on its site, which will allow it to display headlines from weblogs and news sites, customisable by the reader. RSS -- which stands for Rich Site Summary -- is a way of using XML to create a summary version of websites. The feature is particularly useful for news sites, weblogs, and other sites that are regularly updated. The site summary usually consists of a headline, author's name and opening sentence -- though individual site owners can decide how they wish to set up their summaries. Summaries can then be exported, or “syndicated”, to other websites as “feeds”. While I provide an RSS version of Mediajunk, I’m not convinced that RSS has many useful applications for the average web user. For example, I couldn’t be bothered going to a site such as bloglines (even though I like the way it displays Mediajunk’s feed) and choosing which site headlines to subscribe to. I’d have to go and read through all the blogs I’m not familiar with first, which sounds like hard work -- for a reward that isn't particularly enticing. For now, I’m happy to check in on blogs I’ve bookmarked from time to time, and to stumble upon others if and when I find them through Google, or they are mentioned in the various blogosphere filters (see bottom of right-side column). In fact, blogosphere filters are the best use of RSS I've yet encountered. If there is to be a new web trend involving RSS, it will probably come from the bottom up. Web trends tend to percolate from humble beginnings; it’s much harder to impose a new behaviour (like signing up to receive blog headlines) from the top town. Which is probably why Yahoo! is being non-committal on the subject…

You never know what the blogosphere's going to throw up. One day it's useful free software. The next it's a photo-diary of two slugs mating.

Wow. (I think.)

The National Information and Library Service (NILS), Australia, have created a wonderful little toolbar that checks various aspects of a web page’s usability and accessibility. The toolbar is small (451kb) and free to download. Note: The accessibility toolbar is primarily intended for web page designers and developers – it may not interest "everyday" web users. Some of the features I like on the toolbar are single-click ways to:

• Resize your browser to each of the standard monitor sizes (600x800, etc.) on a single click.
• View what a web page looks like without CSS.
• View a web page in greyscale (gives some idea of how a colour-blind user might see it)
• Highlight various structural elements (headings, etc.)
• Provide a colour palette of all the html colours used on the page, along with corresponding hexadecimal code -- useful if you want to, uh, “borrow” a colour scheme from someone else’s site ;)
• Validate the HTML in the page in various ways, against a range of standards.
• View the page weight (in kb) and download speed (different speeds listed for different internet connection types).

... and, as they say, much, much more. Of course, you won’t want to use the toolbar during regular surfing -- but you can simply turn it off (in IE, go to view > toolbars). All in all, an impressive, feature-rich toolbar. Well done NILS! ***** Speaking of useful downloads, something else I came across this week was ieSpell, a spell-checker for Internet Explorer. This wee -- but enormously useful -- plugin for IE lets you check the spelling of anything you type into an input box. Like comments, for example ;) If only I’d discovered ieSpell earlier -- I used to type a lot of the entries to this blog directly into Movable Type until, after consistently poor spelling and typos, I took to typing them in MS Word, then cutting and pasting. Now I can go back to direct MT input! It’s the little things that make such a big difference, sigh…

Ever wondered what a weblog would look like if it was freed from its browser & scrolling constraints? No, me neither. But thanks to sippey.com's weblog snapshots, I have nevertheless found out. Looking at these emancipated blogs, it struck me that their shapes resemble ancient papyrus scrolls. Nothing in today's print world is formatted in this way. Blogs, more than any other type of website, have taken advantage of the fact that users don't mind vertical scrolling ... to a point, at least. Finding that point can be tough. I recently reeled in the length of this mediajunk homepage as I felt it was just too damn long. Looking at Sippey's array of weblogs laid flat, I now realise I wasn't the only culprit. I guess that about halfway between the longest and shortest of Sippey's examples is optimal. But that's not a usabilty study; just my guess.

"Yahoo is poised to end its long-time relationship with search-results provider Google," reports Keith Regan in today's E-Commerce Times. "The breakup has been expected for a while, as Google has become more of an all-around threat to Yahoo by offering paid search listings and news and shopping searches." Indeed. While the move will be a financial blow to Google, Yahoo's reputation as a search engine may well deteriorate, as Inktomi's (who will supplant Google as Yahoo's search provider) results are generally considered less accurate/relevant than Google's. It will be interesting to see if a reduction in quality of Yahoo's search results lead to a migration of traffic to Google. In the short term, this is unlikely, as Yahoo's users are probably loyal to its brand. But brand loyalty on the internet tends to be short-lived. Ultimately, ongoing improvement in Inktomi's results will be needed to maintain Yahoo's reputation as a major search engine.

Beth Bartel is Antartica's first (I presume?) blogger. I expect someone will be blogging from Mars before too long...

I’ve added a few more links to my list of celebrity weblogs (bottom of the right-side column) – thanks to Kaye Rulz for bringing them to my attention. My celeb blog list is still shorter than most other similar lists out there. I’m trying to avoid including blogs that are obviously just PR gimmicks, and/or where the celebrity in question does not show any real commitment to blogging, or any understanding of what their fans (or potential fans) like to read. I’m pleased however that the list is showing signs of growth -- even if the trend is taking longer to emerge than I’d predicted. That’s good news for Kaye, as she is in the early stages of a PhD on celebrity weblogs. I’m sure that the subject will be a hot topic by the time she is finishing. Of all the blogs on the list though, I'm most impressed by that of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver (who shot to fame with his "Naked Chef" TV show in the UK). Jamie’s site has a nice balance of photos and text (he provides the latter personally), updated frequently enough and with interesting content, giving the reader/fan a friendly insight into his personal life. And it’s all framed in a cute design. Take note, too, that Jamie’s blog also comes up number one in Google on a search for “Jamie Oliver”. This is what I have been calling internet identity management -- and you don’t need your own television show to use it to your advantage.