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“Eyeballs-on-site” yielding to “eyeballs-on-content”

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When the web was new, the goal was to get as many “eyeballs” as possible looking at your site content—to aggregate readership with your site being the aggregation point. This pretty much followed the old rules of advertising and promotion—you needed people to see your advertising in order to succeed financially[1. Oh, wait, what do I mean “old rules” here? It’s still true, and that’s why the rest of this article is germane.]. The phrases “visit us often” or “bookmark this site” or “come back frequently” were the conventional wisdom, and web surfers used bookmarks  to remember what sites they wanted to go back to and read later. But they mostly never did except for the big news or entertainment portals.

RSS feeds and news readers began to change that. (Thanks Dave[2. Dave Winer].) I use NetNewsWire’s standalone software on my Mac, and online services like Google Reader let you integrate feeds into your iGoogle home page. You can also sync your Google Reader settings across multiple programs and devices. But in the last couple of months, the scene is greatly changing is subtle ways I think people haven’t spotted yet… [Read more…]

Pad Computing in Sci-Fi and in Real Life

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The iPad immediately led me to think about how tablet computing is portrayed in science fiction. TV and movies  – because that’s the only place you actually saw little beasties like these 10 or 20 years ago.[1] Today they’re (literally today) all around the world.[2]

In Sci-Fi Channel’s series Caprica, portable computing has become “foldable” and takes the form of sheets of “paper” on which characters, symbols and other stuff light up so you can read them. The paper is touch-sensitive and you can move the characters around as well as tap them (read “keyboard”). [Read more…]

Other issues related to balkanization of the Internet

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I wrote yesterday about the potential for the Internet to become fragmented and subdivided so that it would be many separate internets rather than a vehicle for open international communication. Traditionally this kind of subdivision is called balkanization, though I called it cantonization because of the current example of the great Chinese firewall [China’s Golden Shield]. What you see as the Internet when you log on in many countries around the world is only a portion of what you’ll see from other locations. There are some other important issues related to this fragmentation of the net. [Read more…]

Google Chinese-language search, Hong Kong, and Internet Cantonization

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So the “solution” to providing uncensored Chinese-language search, at least right now (beginning 22 March, 2010), is to have Chinese citizens use google.com.hk (hk==Hong Kong) rather than mainland-based google.cn. I guess it’s a breakthrough idea to do this, since under Hong Kong law, the uncensored search is legal, but of course the arguments going on these days about restrictive access to the Internet have to do with nations trying to restrict the access of their citizens based on physical location. And the location of a server is important because the local authorities can come in and physically shut you down.

But the great firewall is already blocking Google.com.hk content, as would be expected. [Read more…]

The Future of Publishing – by DK

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Here’s a novel way of looking at how we (maybe) fit into the future of publishing—Dorling Kindersley Books did a video about The Future of Publishing, initially for internal consumption, but later on they released it on YouTube. As Cory Doctorow said when blogging it in BoingBoing.net[1] “Watch it at least halfway through…” and you’ll see a change in  attitude. [Read more…]