September 6th, 2010

Guaranteed Payola-Free0
JR posted in Web news on July 5th, 2006

Rafe Needleman of CNet wrote about PayPerPost, which allows bloggers to be paid for posting about particular products, events or services.  He feels that this will taint the trustworthiness of blog postings with undisclosed commercials disguised as independent reviews.

While certainly a risk, I don’t think that this is much of an issue.  Most bloggers are already hypersensitive about their reputation and readily disclose when they have received any freeby in relation to a particular posting.  In the Attention economy, reputation is a paramount concern.

All the same, a later post by Rafe pointed to some nice logos by Tim King for explicitly stating that one’s site is “payola free”.  I’m not certain if I’m concerned enough to add those to my site at this time, nor am I certain if the term “payola” is sufficiently universally understandable to be meaningful to an Internet audience.  Further, as Rafe points out, there isn’t yet a good way of enforcing the claim of being payola free.

We’ll see if this takes off.

Microsoft and the iPod killer0
JR posted in Devices on July 6th, 2006

Many sites are now discussing a Microsoft developed and marketed portable music player that is intended to compete with the Apple iPod.  Most of the discussion appears to have been sparked by an article by the Bloomberg news service.

The best and most insightful article I’ve found is from the often irreverant The Register out of the UK.  They correctly point out that after years of Microsoft feeding their hardware partners with successive versions of Windows Media players, that none have succeeded in making any significant inroads in the iPod market.  Indeed, over the last year, Apple’s market share actually increased.

More interesting is the point they make that instead of an iPod competitor, Microsoft may be preparing a handheld game machine to exploit their growing success with the X-Box.  They feel it would be trivial to include multimedia playback on such a device as a throwaway add-on.

A nice idea, but it fails to recognize that Sony as tried exactly that same formula with their PlayStation Portable device.  While a modest success as a game system (and falling far short of Nintendo’s DS), its multimedia capabilities have been considerably less well received.  The UMD disk format, promoted with much fanfare and commercial investment has utterly tanked with retailers virtually throwing away the poor selling disks.  My neighborhood retailers have just removed the last of these.

The Register article also points out that anything new that Microsoft might include in a multimedia-only device could easily be replicated by Apple to defend the brand.

Spyware: The Scourage0
JR posted in Privacy, Web news on July 7th, 2006

BusinessWeek has and excellent cover story on spyware illustrated by one of its chief creators, Direct Revenue (deliberately unlinked).

I don’t think that there are words strong enough to adequately describe how hated these parasitic programs and the people who make and distribute them have become.  The article starts off with the casual notation that the company received e-mail that included the word “die” 103 times, in a single month.  Other less savory terms are nearly as common.

The company is presently under investigation by the New York Attorney General, but claims it cleaned up its behavior several months ago.  From what the article claims, however, it may merely be a pause in the ongoing difficulty with this type of software.

Why we blog0
JR posted in Writing, Web news on July 19th, 2006

CNet is showing a summary version of a Reuters article about a report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.  The subject is blogging and why we do it.

Not surprisingly, given the personal nature of blogs, the report found that 77% of bloggers post to express themselves creatively, not to get noticed or paid.  The primary subject (37%) was the blogger’s own life and experiences, followed distantly by politics and government (at 11%) with other topics at lower percentages.

In the ongoing debate about the popularity of blogs, the report found that 39% of US Web users read blogs on a regular basis.  This is much different from another recent report from Gartner which found much lower popularity.

To go with my personal take on things, I fall in that lesser group of people that blog to get noticed.  While I am not too concerned about my readership at the moment, I’ll admit that I have enough ego to want to be seen.  Ideally, my awesome insights into Internet and tech news should become a regular stop for people’s RSS readers.

Net Neutrality insight0
JR posted in Web news on July 24th, 2006

CNet had published an excellent defense of Net Neutrality by Caroline Frefrickson of the ACLU.  She is responding to Congressman Dick Armey’s contention that secure private property rights and consumer choice would preserve free speech on the Internet.

She makes the important point that Net Neutrality isn’t something new, but rather was US policy until 2005 when the FCC and Supreme Court effectively abolished that policy.  With that ruling the phone companies (with the quiet consent of the cable companies) began to talk about their desire to prioritize delivery of content to their customers.

To date, the US has maintained a remarkably hands-off approach to the Internet and it has worked well.  In the late 90’s, a similar proposal was made that there should be a regulation to ensure that ISPs didn’t interfere with the delivery of Internet content.  That regulation was rejected because there were dozens of ISPs in a given city all competing fiercely to provide unfettered access to the Internet.  If a particular ISP did not provide such access, it was easy to select another.

Times have changed in the broadband era.  What has come to be in most US communities is at best a two-headed monopoly with little ability for competition to move in.  Cable Intenet access can’t easily be replicated without the prohibitively expensive duplicate wiring to a community’s homes and the additional burden of applying to each community for a franchise to do that wiring.  The phone company’s broadband solution, DSL, was exempted from the requirements to give competitors access to their central offices which they were required to allow for competitive local exchange carriers.

Now both cable and the phone companies are beginning to look at their customers as a product to market to other large companies.  If Amazon wants to reach to our customers, Amazon should have to pay the ISP directly for that privilege.

Caroline Fredrickson correctly points out the incorrectness of this argument and the danger it represents.

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