mediajunk

Nine and a half years ago, when I launched the online version of The Buzz magazine, a colleague of mine – the only Buzz colleague, in fact, who was interested enough to even *look* at the e-zine – got really excited. Sitting in the third floor office on Castle Street, Sligo, Ireland, he clicked from page to digital page, and made a statement I’ll never forget:

“You know Mikey,” he said, as a cartoon lightbulb hovered over his head, “if this internet thing ever takes off…”

I knew that the internet had already taken off. But even I am surprised at the speed with which this communications medium has made its impact across the world.

In North Carolina this week, two men are before the courts, facing up to twenty years in jail for a crime that the internet has made possible, and one of which every reader of this page, I am sure, has already been a “victim” – spam!

One of the men, Gaven Stubberfield, was described by Virginia Attorney General Jerry W. Kilgore as “number eight on the top 10 worldwide spammer list”.

Cybercrimes are sure to increase in the future, as the internet continues to weave its way rapidly into the global socio-cultural fabric – faster even than television or radio did before it.

Perhaps I will be writing about online identity theft in a decade’s time?

By Michael Heraghty

(I am Michael Heraghty. Honest. Just ask Google.)

The web has given rise to a “renaissance of personal creativity,” claims Steve Bowbrick in today’s Guardian.

“When Tim Berners-Lee invented the web he anticipated that we'd all want to write as well as read. The first web browser could edit web pages as well as display them. Later browsers also allowed ordinary users to do it themselves - until Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, decided that the mass of internet users wouldn't want to do that and stripped the edit function out.
…

Blogging has changed all that, though. The web is now properly "writable" again and people who found their voices in their weblogs are now ready for more.”

I mentioned recently in Mediajunk that fully editable and configurable sites such as Wikis may just be the “more” that blog readers (and users) are looking for.

In the meantime, we’re certainly witnessing the rise of editable web elements – not only weblogs and diaries, but photograph collections, bulletin boards, social-networking sites (such as Ryze.com and Friendster.com), etc.

The editable revolution may not be exclusive a single digital medium. Michael Marriott, writing in the New York Times, suggests that computer games manufactures are considering releasing editable versions of their products.

“For years, players have found ways to hack into the digital DNA, the primary computer code that operates some of their favorite games, and alter its rules.”

These teenage hackers have grown up to be mainstream game developers and “are increasingly willing to give away the very software tools they use to construct the games, including them on the disc with the game itself.”

Both these trends, I believe, reveal an increasing comfort with – and literacy in – computer-mediated communications.

In the future, everyone will be a geek.

I’m starting to believe that wikis are the web’s next big thing.

I first heard the term wiki during the last few weeks, although apparently it’s been around since 1995. Recent articles have cropped up explaining what wikis are and why everyone should have one, including an essay by Nathan Matias on Sitepoint.com, which does a good job of introducing the subject.

A pretty good job, that is, except for the fact that his opening definition of wikis is too vague:

“Different people have different ideas about what a wiki really is, but whatever angle you look at it, a wiki is software that handles complex problems with simple solutions.”

Well, that could describe anything from online banking to flight reservation software -- neither of which are wikis.

The definition by wiki pioneer Ward Cunningham -- "the simplest online database that could possibly work," doesn't explain very much either.

First and foremost, a wiki is a collaborative website. Visitors can, in some cases, edit the pages of the site. Indeed, some wikis let any visitor edit any page – a crazy decision, you might think, but apparently it works.

The idea is that the wiki is maintained by a community of users who, for the most part, want to see its content grow and evolve so as to be useful to all. Sure, there will always be a few vandals who want to change one of the pages. But one of the great features of a wiki is that any visitor can restore the page to one of its earlier states, so the vandal’s efforts can easily and quickly be undone.

Indeed, “wiki” itself is Hawaiin for “quick”. The wiki tool lets users create pages and hyperlink trails quickly, so that the site evolves in real-time with its community.

The reason I linked to Matias’s article was not for his definition, then, but for his nice explanation of how wikis conform much better to the “hypertext” paradigm -- unlike first- and second-generation websites.

Matias rightly quotes Vannevarr Bush, the person who first envisaged the world of interconnected hypertext documents, in his seminal 1945 article, “As We May Think.” He imagined that the Memex (the name he gave to an imaginary construct that today sounds like the internet) would be an extension of our memory, rich with links between different documents.

One of the trends I have noticed in the evolution of the web during the last ten years is that, in the “early” days, web pages were created like print documents – i.e. much of the web was “brochureware”.

In the late 1990s, Big Business, and the IT industry in particular, jumped on board the internet bandwagon. Realising that the web medium had a lot more power than print, self-proclaimed gurus hyped the coming of “online multimedia," “personalization” and “portals.”

None of these concepts really took off – because they all borrow too heavily from traditional (read: old) media, which use the “broadcast” model. With old media, the organisation creating and disseminating the content has ultimate control over its messages. Not so on the web -- at least, not if you want to engage a community.

The internet was, right from the beginning, about creating and empowering communities. That’s what businesses failed to see, and it cost them dearly when the bubble (built on the hype I mentioned above) burst.

As the dust settles, however, we are seeing the true nature of the new medium emerge. Weblogs – where publishing is effortless and visitor comments, trackback links, etc. are part of the weblog experience – are one example of this.

The shape-shifting techniques used by Amazon, Ryze and Sitepoint (to take three from the top of my head), where the way the information on the site is presented to you depends on your own actions and trails through that site, represent a second example.

Wikis are a third, though they have yet to take off in the way that weblogs have. But as users become more web-savvy, wikis will explode in popularity.

The web hasn’t stopped evolving; it’s only getting started. Watch out for wikis!

Christopher Allbritton (former AP reporter and Iraq warblogger) is teaching a class on blogging as part of the Digital Journalism course at New York University.

This is a bonafide third-level class, for which students will receive credits. (For those unfamiliar with the US third-level education system: most US courses are made up of modules, each of which is worth a certain number of credits. Students can mix n' match modules, to some extent. Before being awarded a degree, the student must have gained a certain number of credits.)

Everyone in the class maintains a blog -- including the teacher! In fact, Allbritton's blog is used to co-ordinate the class; it would also serve as a great resource to any budding bloggers (eh, sorry, digital journalists) out there.

We may be approaching a cultural milestone. In the UK, people who have interent access are spending more time online than watching TV, according to a survey reported in Internet Magazine.

"The survey by NOP showed that people with both Internet access and a TV at home spend an average of 3.5 hours a day surfing, but 2.8 hours a day in front of the box.

It also showed that 44 per cent think the Internet is a better source of entertainment and news than television.

The survey is the first to show that the Internet is more popular than TV, in households that have both."

The exact details of this survey are scant. For example: do the 3.5 hours spent surfing include use of the internet at work? (I think it would have been worth distinguishing between business use of the web, and entertainment use.) What group was surveyed? How representative was it? Etc.

I also get twitchy whenever I hear that a survey has been sponsored by a corporation that seems to have a related agenda (in this case, BTOpenworld, which is trying to increase the market for its broadband services in the UK).

While it is perhaps premature to say that web use is now more prevalent than television-watching, I nevertheless think that this survey is, at least, prophetic of what's to come.

The web has acquired a massive worldwide user base in less than a decade -- a much faster take-up rate than radio or television enjoyed.

The web is likely to become a more important medium than television in less than a decade. Indeed, it is likely to change television's function, just as TV changed the function of radio before it.

Meanwhile, we can expect a lot of mixing and matching over the coming years among technologies such as the internet, television, computers, games consoles, videoconferencing, digital sound and image recorders/players and phones.

To add this banner to your site, simply cut and paste the source code.

I was reading a how-to guide on viral marketing and realised that I'd already carried out a successful campaign on the web. I didn't need any e-marketing software products (a.k.a spam generators or 'scumware') -- just the simple banner ad I've pasted here.

I originally created this ad for my Diaryland site. It was designed to run only within the members area -- i.e. the banner was only displayed to a selection of others with accounts on Diaryland, who would see it when logged into their private pages.

Yet from this small group I had a huge response. An average of 5.5% of users who saw the banner clicked on it.

So I created a page here on Mediajunk just for the ad, and gave it the name "insulting advertising". The result? Many webmasters have copied the banner to their sites, and the page now comes up in the top 10 Google results for a search on the word "insulting". Traffic to my Diaryland site increased significantly.

The moral? Viral marketing isn't as hard as you might think.

Update: I have since added viral marketing to the services offered by Mediajunk.

Two years ago, the Irish government was touting Dublin as an e-commerce hub. When the dot-com bubble burst, that aspiration faded.

But the city has more recently gained a new “hub” reputation – in internet search and advertising. These previously overlooked sectors are fusing and reinvigorating the industry. Following a frenzy of acquisitions and mergers in recent months, Dublin has unexpectedly found itself host to most of the remaining players in search-dependent advertising.

The latest internet giant to plum for the capital is eBay, which has just announced the creation of 800 jobs in Blanchardstown, a suburb on the northwest of the city. A pushy IDA initiative to shoo the company to Athlone is reported to have greatly irked, but not deterred, the web’s most profitable company.

It is rumoured that eBay’s decision was influenced by Google’s decision, earlier in the year, to locate its European headquarters in Dublin too.

Originally occupying different niches, the two companies have been competitors since Google launched its “Adwords” campaign last year, attracting retailers away from eBay. The auction site has since announced its own keyword advertising service.

Another specialist in the search/advertising crossover – Overture – also put down roots in Dublin earlier this year, hiring 100 employees. Having recently acquired a raft of smaller search engines, Overture was itself gobbled up in July by another huge internet brand, Yahoo, for US $1.63 billion.

Also last month, Yahoo bought Inktomi, the company that currently powers Microsoft’s search. In a direct riposte, Bill Gates sanctioned the development of a homegrown search engine. A Dublin resident since 1985, Microsoft has already hired leading mathematicians, and filed patent, in its bid for search supremacy.

Such rapid maneuvering and consolidation testifies to the suddenly red-hot status of internet search and advertising. Regardless of who – Google, Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft, or an as-yet unforeseen rival – comes to dominate internet search and advertising, Dublin should benefit from its new hub status. The Irish government is certainly hoping the internet tide will rise again, providing a much-needed lift to other boats.

The Recording Industry Association of America — the lobbying group that represents the world's largest music industry corporations — is suing a twelve-year old girl from New York, because she downloaded some songs from the internet. Without using her credit card, presumably.

The music industry still does not get it. The bad press generated by these bullying tactics will make people more determined, not less, to resist paying for downloaded music.

*****

Here's something to cheer you up (and down) though: the pursuit of happiness has officially been declared futile!

A group of US psychologists suggests (convincingly) that our brains are wired to "miswant" -- that is, to overestimate the effects that imminent decisions will have on our emotional states. A new car won't really make us happy; a break-up won't really be unbearable.

The good news is that things will never turn out as bad as we fear. The bad news is that they will never turn out as good as we hope.

As they said in that movie whose title I can't quite remember: "maybe this is as good as it gets."

I mentioned in my last post that bloggers tend to act as editors/sub-editors for one another. Well Jeff Jarvis says much the same thing in a recent post of his: "The internet doesn't need editors. The internet is the editor." (My italics -- edited in!)

The internet has long been seen as a breeding ground for collaborative tools. While many "community" features have now become common (bulletin boards; comments on blogs; etc.), the list of collaborative tools that have failed is far greater.

The fact that they’ve all disappeared is precisely why I can't think of any right now.

Oh hold on, here's one I remember: “Virtual sticky notes” have been touted many times over the last few years. The idea is that you could leave sticky notes on sites you visit, for other surfers to read.

(Zezame.com is one of the latest companies to offer a toolbar with a sticky-note feature.)

Sounds great, doesn’t it? But here's why I doubt it will succeed:

1. For the tool to have value, it needs a certain critical mass of users. After all, who’s going to install the software and leave a note that no-one else will be able to read?

2. If the tool does manage to traverse this tipping point, sites would soon become clogged up with sticky notes, to the extent that users would rarely bother turning the feature on – catch 22!

Other collaborative tools have likely failed for similar reasons. Successful collaborative phenomena, however, tend to be self-organising (e.g. bulletin board communities that spring up around a hot topic); they grow from the bottom up. The internet may be ripe for collaborative tools, but no-one can impose collaboration.

Did you know that many classic books are available for free on the internet? You can even get them in PDF format, so you can print up the pages as they would look in the "offline" book.

See the set of classics available at PDFworld, for example. They've got titles from Kafka to Dostoevsky.

Instead of buying Joyce's Ulysses and leaving it forever (unread) on the shelf, now you can just bookmark the site and leave it on the, er, virtual shelf!

These books are free because they come from an era when copyright laws did not favour the publisher as much as they do today. Indeed, copyright laws were originally developed to help artists make an income from their ouvres, for a short time, after which the work would lapse into the "public domain".

Modern publishing companies, in various art and entertainment industries, have cynically manipulated these laws over the years so that now they favour the publishing "middlemen", and not the artists.

But the internet is changing all that. :)

One of the (many) advantages of being self-employed is that I no longer have to pretend I'm using the internet for serious research reasons, when I'm actually staring at an image of a man's head buried in a load of nuts that claims to determine the efficiency of my right hemisphere.

I wouldn't begrudge employees a little surfing on company time, as Ann Perry puts it.

It’s human nature to slack off. Our brains need short and regular rest periods in order to perform better -- we can't use the right hemisphere all of the time! (Then again, we should probably take our eyes off the screen while resting our brains.)

Perry actually seems surprised to learn that consuming pornography isn't high on the list of office internet activities. I don't share her surprise. Most people have the sense not to indulge in porn at the office -- just as they have the sense not to have sex in the office (… well, except at Christmas!).

In a remarkable, historic move, the BBC is to make its vast archives available for download on the internet -- for free!

"The service, the BBC Creative Archive, would be free and available to everyone, as long as they were not intending to use the material for commercial purposes," the company's news site says.

At a time when other content creation organisations -- notably the US music industry -- are fretting about how to make users pay for content, the BBC has truly embraced the spirit of the internet.

Sure, the Beeb won't make any money directly from this "intellectual property" -- but it will hugely enhance its brand, making it the number one name associated with digital content, which will give it much power in the future.

All of this content -- from Monty Python sketches to football commentary -- has already been paid for by the British public. Why keep it locked up?

So argues Alan Connor in a debate that is spreading like wildfire across the internet.

Content wants to be free. Kudos to the BBC for recognising this!

What if you could have the entire contents of the web on disk? Well, Alexa (an Amazon company previously known for its site-rating concept) is offering just that ... albeit a gazillion disks.

I like the idea of internet archives. I had a magazine on the web called "The Buzz" back in 1994/95 and would enjoy looking at those pages again. Unfortunately, the best known archive only goes back as far as 1996.

I think I may still have some Buzz files on floppies. If so, I'll post them to my new site soon. Meanwhile, the only references I can find to The Buzz are a couple of dead links, here and here.

Both of them say that "The Buzz is a free magazine based in the northwest of Ireland, written and presented by a team of horrendous layabouts, and aimed at a similar reader group," which would have insulted me, if I hadn't written that line myself ;)

*****

Getting back to Alexa: I wonder if they'll run into any copyright issues, now that they've effectively copied the entire web? Incidentally, the same question was recently asked of Google, which maintains a huge cache, or locally stored set of the internet's pages (CNET magazine).

Is checking your email the first and most repeated task of your day? Do you use internet cafes when on holidays?

Wach out; you could be an email addict. And what would you do if you lost your email for a week?

According to a BBC survey, many people feel that a week without email would be more stressful than moving house or going through a divorce.

Sheesh, those people need to get out more. And the group surveyed was very narrow; I think I'll email the Beeb and complain. Then I'll email the article to all of my friends to see what they think, then email a note to the guy in the cube beside me to see if he's got a red pen that works, then email the...

We tend to think that children have a natural penchant the internet. Kids are comfortable with the web; ten-year olds haven't known a world without the internet, just as the previous generation couldn't imagine a world without television. Even ten-year-olds have their own websites – such as Graham Owen, whose site "is devoted to fire trucks, ambulances and aircraft".

But it is wrong – even unfair – to assume that youngsters are automatically brilliant at using the web. Research conducted at Northumbria University in England has revealed that teenagers regularly experience difficulties when using the internet.

The problem, according to Dr Alison Pickard, a lecturer in research methods at the University, is not that teens lack the computer necessary skills; rather, they lack information literacy skills.

Being able to “search, retrieve and use the information” that’s on the web is quite different from being able to find your way around a keyboard (the latter probably isn’t a problem for phone-texting, game-playing teenagers). Teens get frustrated and blame themselves when they cannot find the information they are looking for.

Northumbria’s four-year study shows that the web isn’t just about technology – it’s about information, and communication. Understanding how to refine a search, and knowing how to separate the chaff from the wheat of results, are skills that come with time and practice. An understanding of multiple subjects and different types of information (e.g. government reports, book reviews, academic study, individual opinion, etc.) is also helpful.

The study can also be interpreted study reiterating a point that usability experts have been claiming ever since businesses first went online – that most websites are too complex. There’s no reason why teenagers shouldn’t find the information they want online, if they are given the correct intstructions and guidance on relevant sites. Unfortunately too many designers are caught up with technology, instead of focusing on the user experience.

Hopefully the situation will have changed by the time today’s teenagers become web designers. They will have a better understanding of the pitfalls that lead to user frustration.

The signs are good: little Graham Owen’s site may be short and sweet, but it is simple to navigate. A point that can't be made about all too many "grown-up" sites.

Microsoft was on the crest of every new wave of the computer industry for a decade, until the internet broke loose in the early 1990s. Microsoft didn't see the internet coming, and so had to play catch-up, getting involved in the legendary "browser war" with Netscape.

More recently, Bill Gates's company missed out on establishing a dominant search engine -- a niche impressively stolen by user-focused Google.

Microsoft has been struggling to get ahead of the internet curve ever since. Despite years of hype about its always-immenent "dot net" project, the company has largely failed to be innovative in the internet space.

The software giant risks falling into the IBM trap: growing too sluggish and arrogant to predict, or even react quickly to, new market trends. It is unsurprising that as the popularity of blogging soared during the last 12 months, Microsoft gave little indication that it has even noticed the phenomenon.

Until now. The company has announced that its flagship web design product, FrontPage, will feature "prebuilt functionality to ease creation of blogs" (exactly what that means remains to be seen) in its next release, expected to ship late this summer.

Microsoft is also planning an internal panel to discuss employee weblogging. So far, the company has no policy on corporate blogging, even though over one hundred of its employees are known to publish personal web logs.

Several of these bloggers are to "testify" at this panel. But what will Microsoft decide? If it bans employee blogging, Microsoft will give the impression that, like the music industry, it is out of touch with social trends.

On the other hand, Microsoft could regain lost credibility by endorsing and encouraging in-house blogging -- and provide new tools and services to the public, to enhance the wider blogosphere.

In short, Microsoft needs to pay attention to emerging companies like Moveable Type. As does everyone else -- including Google.

AOL have begun testing a video component to their instant messaging software. The idea is that users will be able to communicate via bursts of short video messages as well as text.

AOL's move may seem like a big step forward but we've been waiting for desktop videoconferencing ever since the internet came into the public domain, a decade ago. The technologies that were popular back then -- notably CU-SeeMe -- were (and still are) more sophisticated than AOL's current prototype. CU-SeeMe is a videoconferencing application whereby the video stream stays alive for the duration of the call. With AIM's video component, you send video clips as messages; image flow is intermittent, not quite real-time, and user-controlled.

AOL can't transform their IM product into a bona fide videoconferencing one due to US government restrictions, designed to ensure that the company does not gain a monopoly on software products in the huge and still growing IM community.

The restrictions may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Users who send snippets of video rather than a continuous stream are less likely to suffer from the vagaries of bandwidth. And the proposed "press to send" button will give users control over any images they send, a feature with which they may feel more comfortable (no need to worry about who might walk into the room while the cam is on, for example).

As IM's popularity spreads from the US to other parts of the world, and as "always-on" connections become the norm, AIM may yet prove to be the killer app that finally brings videoconferencing to the general public.

I've long believed that the frenzied media baying-for-blood of pedophiles and viewers of child pornography is a witchhunt, arising out of taboos about childhood and adulthood, and our difficulty as a society to deal with an unprecedented torrent in the production, dissemination and consumption of pornography in general -- a phenomenon so wedded to the spread of the internet that web pornography now threatens the print porn industry.

Instead of tackling the meanings and effects of pornography's sudden ubiquity, of our relationship with it (the truth is that we -- men, at least -- enjoy porn), we target the fringes of the phenomenon, directing our venom and vitriol at the "pedophile bastards" who make and use kiddie porn. That way, we draw a line between "us" (normal people) and "them" (insert derogatory expletitive here). We refuse to ask questions such as: why, if child pornography so disgusts us, is "teen" (a deliberate ambiguity, since it refers to an age that spans from 13 to 19) one of the most-used words on "adult" porn sites?

Similar hypocrisies were highlighted here in Ireland recently, when Tim Allen -- husband of celebrity chef, Dorina Allen -- was found guilty of downloading pornographic images of children. Allen was fined and sentenced to 240 hours of community service. As journalist Ronan Mullen pointed out, "the Star [newspaper] carried a front-page headline, You're rich, you're free, but you're still a sick pervert, while on its inside pages it carried ads for sex chat lines."

On the rare occasion that we see the phenomenon of pornography tackled conscientiously in the broadsheet press, the agenda is usually a feminist one, and we are made to feel (wrongly, I believe) that pornography is always demeaning to women, and male consumers are portrayed as addicts. While porn may indeed be addictive (so is sex!), such analysis simply reinforces the notion that pornography is "bad" even though (sssshhh!) it's everywhere. The vicious circle continues; we can't talk about porn, the elephant in the room.

A society can maintain such pretence only for so long, before the cracks begin to show. In Dallas, one big fissure recently opened up when a couple were arrested for creating kiddie porn -- after they left photographs of the mother, Jacqueline Mercado, simulating the act of breastfeeding with her baby son into a one-hour photo lab. The full story appears in the Dallas Observer (from where I got the image, above left, which is presumably a version that's been through a fax machine), and there are a spate of comments on the story from the internet public on Kuro5hin.

In the end, the Mercados had the charges against them dropped. But they still haven't got their kids back from custody...

Kudos to the students who aren't backing down in the face of a lawsuit by the music "majors", whose representative body is sueing the kids to the tune (sorry) of $150,000 US per song.

In the early days of the net, a quote (attributed to John Gilmore) often bandied around was that "the internet sees censorship as damage, and routes around it." I believe that this still holds true. The music industry may try to call the downloading of music "theft", but that's because it's in their interest to do so. Listen to music isn't theft, and prohibiting someone from downloading songs via the web is censorship -- which, for the time being at least, the internet still impressively resists.

The internet's "gold rush" phase may be over, but the web hasn't stopped changing the rules of business growth. The Google paradigm has now replaced the Amazon paradigm as the how-to manual for internet-era success.

Fast Company this week revealed much about Google's ethos by talking to some of the company's lesser-known employees. This follows on the heels of a Wired Magazine article, which posed similarly ethical and directional questions to Google's founders and leaders.

Other Google news from here in Ireland: Google is to set up its European HQ in Dublin, creating 200 jobs.

Clearly no-one told them about the rain.

As with all things internet, blogging culture brings with all sorts of new jargon, designed to befuddle the unitiated and thier parents (especially their parents).

Moblogging, as mentioned a few days ago, is blogging with the use of mobile phones. Thin media is a more interesting term -- that's business-speak for the combined publications of the blogging community (the blogosphere), as in: the advertising industry should pay attention to thin media and blogads. The term klog seems to have been around for a while -- it refers to weblogs that are specifically used for knowledge-sharing or knowledge-management, as best I can tell. Vlogs, meanwhile, are (you guessed it) video logs.

How much of this blogification will stick? Certainly not all of it. Remember, not that long ago, when the e- prefix was being tacked onto words like a cheap party hat? We don't hear so much about e-tailing, e-dating or e-governing now, but 24 months ago, these terms were loaded with shiny get-with-the-program futurism.

The word "blog" is probably here to stay: in June 2002, it was being considered for the new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.