mediajunk

I'm posting this entry from the lobby of a hotel in Milan, where I got five hours of access for €5.95.

That's not bad in comparison with charges in Ireland, where wi-fi prices fall under the same "rip-off" heading as so many other consumer goods and services at the moment.

In San Francisco, wireless access will soon be provided free. The San Fran mayor has declared that wi-fi internet access is a "right".

That's probably an overstatement, but let's hope that other cities follow San Fran's lead and that, in the relatively near future, free wireless internet access will be the norm in major urban centres.

Since I no longer get time to update this website as often as I used to with observations about how the web is changing, let me give you an overview of some of the high-level patterns I've noticed so far this year:

1. More and more sites are moving to a "third generation" design -- that is, designing around CSS rather than tables; designing with user behaviour in mind, rather than simply imitating print marketing materials.

2. Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are less likely to contain "spam" results than this time last year (even though there's probably a lot more SE Spam on the web than there used to be).

3. Most big sites seem to use a Content Management System (CMS)

4. Many more people are paying for Google Adwords (and the cost of Adwords is going up accordingly).

5. As web users are becoming more savvy, community sites (forums) are benefitting in particular. Users understand their conventions, and know how to use them effectively. Even small, geographically close-knit communities are using online bulletin boards as their communication tool of choice.

6. In general, sites are becoming more usable.

7. Certain websites have made an impression on me this year, particularly:

tripadvisor.com (seems to have hit a critical mass that has allowed it to take off, and now is the first place I check when looking for a hotel)

maps.google.com (not that I ever use this, but it was the first time I experienced what's being called "ajax" technology)

rentacorder.com (and other international outsourcing sites like it)

8. eCommerce is making a big comeback ... and it's probably going to get bigger.

9. More and more of the sites that are showing up highly in organic search results have clearly been optimised (i.e. they are there by design, not luck).

10. The malware plague is spreading fast, is becoming much more covert, and is more calculated in its aims.

I am a late convert (considering my interest in all things Internet) to wireless access. But now that I've started, I am sure that, as with the web itself, I will wonder how I ever coped without wireless access.

I believe that wireless access has just reached a tipping point in Ireland, particularly in Dublin, with enough hotspots to make it feasible. I'm currently in the Little Chef cafe in Swords, which isn't officially a hotspot incidentally, but is in the same building as the Travelodge, which in turn receives a wireless service from Bitbuzz. The access fee is a little expensive, incidentally, so I don't think Bitbuzz will complain that I am receiving next door's signal, as they are still getting my money.

The download speed -- despite the signal being weak from my slight geographical distance from the hotspot -- is still fast enough to work with. And while my own laptop doesn't have internet access, I bought a USB wireless LAN converter, which is a magic-marker sized gadget that plugs into the USB spot in my machine, a little like a memory stick, thus making it wireless-enabled.

So, no more internet cafe for me!

I've been attending Internet World 2005 in London. It's much more of a trade fair than a networking event (to my disappointment, to be honest). However, a handful of the seminars were quite interesting.

I was most intrigued by a talk by Mike Taylor (CEO of Sirius) on open source software, entitled "Are proprietary software vendors facing an Ice Age?" The idea is that, with the commoditisation of both hardware and software, businesses in the IT industry must focus on services -- e.g. implementation, support, etc. This, says Mike, is the future, and represents a fundamental shift in the IT business model.

On reflection, I realised that my own company has indeed been moving in this direction. We configure, install and integrate open source Content Management Systems and Databases, for example. We charge clients for integration and training, but not (obviously) for licence fees.

Another interesting seminar was a panel discussion on the growing problem of malware. I had no idea how big this problem already was, yet this is only the tip of the iceberg, the experts all agreed. While viruses of old were created mainly by teenage geeks for kicks, today's malware -- trojans, keyloggers and the like -- are designed by the criminal world, who use social engineering techniques (and hire teenage geeks to create the programmes) for purposes of making money unethically or illicitly (or both).

Watch these spaces!

A California-based man is suing eBay for allegedly using "shill" bidding against him to force up the price of the item he was buying and (by proxy) to increase its fees.

According to The Register:

Glenn Block claims his bid for a Xerox Copy Cartridge was increased from $111 to $112.5 despite the absence of any real competing bid. In another auction Block claims eBay's intervention raised his bid from $75 to $75.55.

Although the sums involved are only small, multiplied by eBay's huge customer base they could add up to millions of dollars.

Since trust is so important in the business model of the online auction giant, the negative publicity attached to the lawsuit will be most unwelcome. In its defence, eBay claims that the plaintiff "completely misunderstands the functionality of the eBay bidding system".

This is most likely the case. Those who misunderstood Google's technology, for example, have in the past failed in their attempts to sue for breach of copyright, besmirching their good names, etc.

I remember reading an article back in 99 with the headline "How the Web Shrinks as it Grows". The basic idea was that despite more and more pages getting added to the internet, regular users are visiting fewer sites.

At the time I thought this was due to the high quality of those few sites, with good brands and updated content, etc. But now I think the search engines have a lot to do with it.

Despite there being eight billion plus pages on the web, I sometimes feel that I am watching a cheap cartoon, where the background (the same sites) get repeated again and again. I know there is much more information out there, so why do I keep finding myself on sites and thinking "oh, this one again"?

Take weblogs as one example. There must be over a million of them but I seem to end up on the same handful of blogs all the time.

This may reflect my search habits, or my preference for sites of a certain style and quality, but I think the nature of how search engines reward -- via their infamous algorithms -- is at least partly to blame.

Maybe Google should offer a "randomise the results" button to replace the entirely useless "I'm feeling lucky" button?

Or Maybe Google's regular results should be made more like its News results, where results are clumped into stories, and users can choose from different sources of the same story or piece of information? (This would admittedly be tricky, as not all types of information are as interchangeable as newspaper stories are, but may work with some imaginative thinking.)

Just my €0.02 for today...