SOPA Day of Protest
Today is a day of protest against two bills currently before congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and it’s slightly less offensive little brother, the Protect IP Act (PIPA). You’ve probably heard about these acts, and you may or may not know why defeating them is so important for the future of the internet. If you’ve heard about this but don’t know the details, today is the day to get up to speed on what’s going on. Get the basic facts about the bills, read about it here in Wikipedia (Even today, when Wikipedia is ‘blacked out’, you can still access this direct link). Read this brilliant analysis of why this bill is so dangerous on mashable.com.
To mark today as a day of protest, and to raise awareness of SOPA and its dangers, some major and many minor websites have taken some major steps. Wikipedia has ‘gone dark’ for 24 hours, replacing the front page of the English version of the website with the following:
Reddit has also gone dark, but only for 12 hours:
Google has placed an ominous black box over there logo, and added this link to a page which advises people on what they can do to help defeat SOPA:
Craigslist added a black SOPA page, also with links to try and get more people involved in the fight against SOPA:
WordPress added a black front page, also with SOPA warnings and links to a call to action:
The award for most amusing, as well as informative SOPA protest has to go to Oatmeal.com. If you haven’t seen it, do it now.
Hopefully this unprecedented action by these major websites will be a wake up call to enough people that we will have reached a tipping point in the battle against SOPA. Even before today’s actions, there are signs that the groundswell of noise from the tech community may have been heard in Washington. Last Saturday, the White House came out publicly against SOPA. A few hours later congress announced that the Bill had been shelved. SOPA is not dead, but perhaps it is mortally wounded.
Read More at:
Mashable.com – Why SOPA is Dangerous
Washington Monthly – Putting SOPA on a Shelf
Wikipedia – SOPA and PIPA- Learn More
ZDNet.Com – Geeks-1, Conress-0: Controversial anti-Piracy Bill ‘shelved’
Do Something to Help:
Google – End Piracy, Not Liberty
Online This Week: Jan. 13, 2012
This is my review of noteworthy things that happened this week involving Online Presence Management, search engine internet marketing, search engine news and website SEO. I’ll also be mixing in some technology business news, tech gadgetry news, and tech-culture news.
Here’s my list for the week of Jan. 9-Jan. 13, 2012:
Google Rolls Out Search Plus Your World
By far the biggest story of the week was Google’s announcement of and subsequent rollout of a new feature that they called ‘Search Plus Your World’. The new feature returns ‘YourWorld’ results with the standard search results. ‘Your World’ results were any relevant information that Google could pull from your Google+ content. If you haven’t heard about it, I wrote a blog post summarizing the story on Wednesday. Twitter spoke out publicly against the change, while Facebooks reaction was a little more backhanded. Since Wednesday the tech/search blogosphere has continued to explode about this story. The headline of this BusinessInsider.com article this morning was ‘Google May Have Made the Worst Mistake in its History This Week’. This article in Gizmodo proclaimed ‘Google just made Bing the Best Search Engine in the World’. Whether this is blogosphere hyperbole or if this will be an actual watershed event in the history of search, only time will tell. You might want to keep your eyes on Google’s market share in the coming months. And speaking of market share…
Bing Passes Yahoo in Market Share of Search
USA Today reported this week that Bing has passed Yahoo in the battle for search market share. Their source for their figures was comscore.com. The current market share as of December 2011 for the big three search engines now stands at:
Google: 65.9%
Bing : 15.1%
Yahoo : 14.9%
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)
This is not a new story, but coverage this week has intensified as we get closer to a vote on this controversial bill. The bill would require internet providers to block access to any foreign IP addresses that host stolen intellectual property(IP). It also puts any site that contains even an accidental link to stolen IP at risk of legal action. This BusinessInsider.com article titled ‘How Congress is Preparing to Destroy the Internet’ explains how some major sites could be in trouble if the bill passes. The list of sites that could be introuble includes Ebay, Amazon, Youtube, Reddit and Flickr. To help in the fight of SOPA, go here.
Consumer Electronics Show
The CES was held this week in Vegas. In the past this show would generate enough high tech buzz to keep people talking for weeks. Most of the stories this year seemed to lament the fact that CES is not what it once was. Another common theme was that if they saw one more tablet or smartphone rollout they would scream. Most agreed that the CES just doesn’t have the excitement it once did. Apple does not attend the event and Steve Ballmer gave the Keynote in what will be Microsoft’s last year as an exhibitor at the show. Even the Adult Video News conference, which has always coincided with the CES, seemed to be distancing themselves from the show, as they moved to a different, more distant venue and scheduled their show to run not concurrently, but with only a weekend overlap. Some have even predicted that the CES may be history by 2015. One story that I did think was pretty cool was a translucent LCD, or smart window. The translucent computers of the future that you’ve seen them using on CSI:Miami might be a step closer to reality. Although it was only a prototype, Samsung plans to go into production soon.
How Google will change Web Marketing in 2012
Brian Whalley of Hubspot wrote an interesting blog post for the Harvard Business Review blog that summarizes changes Google has made in 2011 and extrapolates those into what he foresees as some of the major changes in web marketing for the upcoming year. His main predictions are:
- Search results will include more direct information – Google will expand direct information (such as hours of operations for businesses) that it includes in search results. To take advantage of this change, it will be important for businesses to follow certain formats, to make sure that their website provides Google this information in the format that it expects.
- Google will enter new industries and markets – Google purchased ITA software in 2010 to incorporate more travel data into searches. You can now type “BOS to SFO” into google and it understands those are airport codes and gives you travel related data. He predicts Google moving into more markets like this.
- Data that Google makes available will be reduced – Google now sees its tremendous amount of data as a competitive advantage that it must protect. In 2011 they stopped providing the keyword terms used by searchers if they were logged into Google. He predicts this trend will continue, with Google protecting any data that they can.
I agree that all of his predictions on what Google will do in 2012 are based on their past behavior, and that Google will attempt some of these things. But I also believe that pursuing some of those goals aggressively could get Google into some big time trouble. Much of Google’s past behavior has pushed the envelope on fair competitive practices. More telling to me than any arguments he made was the volume and tone of the responses that his blog post received. Read his blog post and comments here. The comments were overwhelmingly and vehemently anti-Google.
Is a backlash building against Google for their over-commercialization of their power? Another way to look at Google past behavior to predict future behavior would be to examine this list of some Google 2011 highlights:
- In March, Google settled with the Federal Trade Commission over “deceptive Privacy practices” in the rollout of its Buzz Social network. That agreement requires 20 years of “privacy audits”.
- In August Google made a $500 million settlement with the government over knowingly placing ads for illegal Canadian pharmacies.
- In September, Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, was called before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights.
Now, on December 19th, two senators have called for another FTC probe into anticompetitive practices.
Will 2012 be the year that Google gets held accountable for using their power and deep pockets to crush any competition? Is 2012 the year that the growth of mobile search gives us a whole new way of search (like Siri) and Google is reduced to a bit player?
If you are a business with an Online Presence, a large piece of your online presence is getting found by search. It is important to stay abreast in all of the trends of search if you want to maintain a strong online presence. Whatever the future of search brings, a good online presence manager can keep your business viable in this ever-changing world that we live in.
Senators call for an FTC Inquiry into Google
On December 19th, two US Senators, Herb Kohl and Mike Lee, the Chairman and ranking member of the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) calling for an investigation of Google’s trade practices. In the letter, which you can read here, they cite the testimony from Eric Schmidt, Google’s Chairman who testified before them in September. They specifically cite his admission that Google has a monopoly on search. They go on to cite the extent to which search now pervades commerce. Statistics they cite include 240 million Americans use the internet, eCommerce was $170 Billion last year, and 92% of Americans use search engines. They go on to state that Google started as a search engine who’s only goal was to redirect users to relevant sites. They state definitively that Google’s business model has changed dramatically in recent years. They say that Google has made numerous acquisitions, and question whether it is possible for Google to remain an unbiased search engine when they have holdings in so many vertical markets where they tend to favor their properties. They point out that Google has been known to penalize certain websites in their search rankings, and questions whether Google uses these penalties fairly, or to favor their properties or maintain their domination of search. They go on to state that they are not acting out of an interest to protect any specific competitor, but to maintain robust competition in search, especially the mobile search market.
One of Google’s most vociferous opponents, the FairSearch Coalition (fairsearch.org), Released a 44-page paper in October about Google’s “anti-competitive” conduct.
Google’s main response has been a June blog post that they keep referring back to, that according to Google, states their 5 driving principles that will stand up to any non-competitive scrutiny. Those five principles are:
- Do what’s best for the user.
- Provide the most relevant answers as quickly as possible.
- Label advertisements clearly.
- Be transparent.
- Loyalty, not lock-in.
(Read more about these principles here.)
Besides citing these five guiding principles, there other main defense to anti-competitive charges seems to be the “competition is only a click away” argument. This kind of arrogance, in light of their own admission of nearly complete dominance of the search space, is just the kind of hubris that will make me root for the FTC in the coming battle.
Online This Week: Dec. 16, 2011
This is my review of noteworthy things that happened this week involving Online Presence Management, search engine internet marketing, search engine news and website SEO. I’ll also be mixing in some technology business news, tech gadgetry news, and tech-culture news.
Here’s my list for the week of Dec. 12 -Dec. 16, 2011
Google Buys Clever Sense
Google purchase a company called Clever Sense, which makes a local mobile recommendation app called Alfred. Alfred creates an “interest graph” that maps physical locations according to style, characteristics, and attributes, similar to the way Pandora does for music. Google clearly sees a need for mobile recommendations, is this part of Google getting ready for a looming battle with Siri? Read more about it in this SearchEngineLand article “Google buys Clever Sense: An Answer to Siri?”
Amazon Price Check App
Amazon introduced a controversial new app for the iPhone and Android, along with a special promotion for using the app. The app allows you to scan the barcode of a product while shopping in a brick-and-mortar retailer, and then shows you the same product and its price on Amazon. The promotion pays you 5%, up to $5 for up to 3 items, if you end up purchasing the item you have compared from Amazon. The promotion caused usage of the app to triple in one week. It also brought a huge backlash from small business owners and retail trade groups. There is no question that this is a brilliant marketing move, catching consumers right at the point of purchase and potentially enticing them to order online, but has Amazon gone too far? Is this an anti-competitive practice?
Carrier IQ Story Update
The story of the Carrier IQ software, which earlier this month was discovered to be installed on nearly all smart phones, has taken a few more interesting turns this week. Carrier IQ now admits that due to bugs in the software it is now possible that under certain conditions, text messages may have been captured.
Requests were made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to the FBI to review any documents, manuals, or records it has collected with Carrier IQ, and the requests were denied. The reason the FBI gave for denying the requests? It would interfere with ongoing investigations in that the records contained “information compiled for law enforcement purposes”.
It was also announced this week that the FTC and the FCC have opened investigations into CarrierIQ, to see whether consumer rights or privacy was invaded. Read more about FTC and FCC Investigations here.
Facebook Timeline now available to all
On Thursday Facebook announced that the timeline feature will be available to all users. The timeline allows you to “Tell the whole story of your life on a single page”, according to Mark Zuckerburg. The timeline feature sets up a chronological timeline that starts with your birth. Facebook events are automatically added to the timeline, although you can remove them. You can then go in and use tools to add all kinds of significant events in your life, including pictures. Significant events include graduations, job changes, moves, signing a lease, buying as house, adding a pet, roommate or vehicle, travel, medical history like broke a bone, had surgery, or overcame an illness. I personally tried this feature when it was in Beta, and I’m not sure everyone is going to be thrilled with it. I liked the idea of having a place to journal your life history, but my very next thought is Facebook is NOT the place to do that. I couldn’t get past this creepy filling that Facebook was just trying to pump me for more information about my life so that could better target me for marketing. It felt like it was not good enough that had chronicled my life since I created a Facebook account, now they wanted everything I was willing to give. So I just stopped. I put very few things on Facebook. I almost never post on walls, I use it to keep in touch with friends by direct message only, and except for my profile pic I never post pictures. I think people are starting to feel a little violated by Facebook, and when that feeling overtakes the convenience of keeping in touch with friends, Facebook will be in trouble. I also think that with the Timeline feature, they may have pushed users another big step in that direction. Read more about it in the WebProNews article “Facebook Timeline: Now You Can Put Your Whole Life on Facebook. Will You?”
13 Gadgets that are going to be huge in 2012
Here is as review of a businessinsider.com article predicting what should be the 13 biggest tech gadget stories for 2012:
Cheap, super-thin Ultrabooks and other laptops.
Quad-Core Smartphones like the HTC Edge
Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) Tablets
Nokia Lumia 800 Smart Phone Could save Windows Phone OS
Big iPhone redesign
The Next Nexus by … Motorola?
Blackberry phones running QNX
Refreshed MacBook, including 15 inch MacBook Air
11.6 inch Samsung Tablet
iPad 3
New Larger Kindle Fire with 8.9” or 10” screen
Samsung Galaxy S III
Will Apple Television change your living room?
Top Ten Stories of the Year in Search and Social Marketing
It’s that time of year again, the year in review lists for just about anything you can think of. Search Engine Watch released its list of the top ten stories of the year in Search and Social Marketing. Here’s a summary:
- Google’s Query Encryption Update –Google began encrypting search data, so that Google Analytics will no longer provide the search terms used if the user was logged into Google when they did their search.
- Google’s freshness update – Google modified their search algorithm to give more weight to fresher content, this change affected 35% of all searches.
- Google’s ‘Panda’ Update – rolled out in February, the purpose was to improve relevancy of search results, affected 12% of all searches.
- Facebook becomes biggest site for display ads on earth – In a May report comscore announces that 1.11 trillion display ads had been delivered to US users. Facebook delivered 346 billion of those, nearly 1/3 of all display ads.
- Google adds real time search
- Google+
- Facebook Timeline and Gestures – The timeline and the ‘like’ button
- 1st Digital revolution, The Arab Spring – The vital role of Facebook in the overthrow of Mubarak, “If you want to liberate a country, give them the internet”.
- Google Get’s Premium – Google began charging big time users of it’s map API. A sign of things to come?
- Death of Digg – This pioneer in the social news movement was once such a heavy hitter that a front page story about your business would probably crash your server.
Online This Week: Dec. 9, 2011
This is my review of noteworthy things that happened this week involving Online Presence Management, search engine internet marketing, search engine news and website SEO. I’ll also be mixing in some technology business news, tech gadgetry news, and tech-culture news.
Here’s my list for the week of Dec. 5 -Dec. 9, 2011
Facebook Reveals trends of the year
It’s that time of year, time for all of the “year in review” and “top 10 of the year” lists. So this graph in mashable.com showed the ten most talked about stories on Facebook for the year. The graph shows the number of occurrences of the story in status updates on Facebook across time.
Will Google be around in 2 years?
An article in searchenginejournal.com summarized a Ted Presentation given by Roger McNamee where he predicted some extraordinary changes in the internet, including the marginalization of Google as a major player. He claimed that what he calls “indexed search” is on the decline, and there is a rise in other search that serves particular niches, like Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, and Yelp. This trend is being pushed by more sophisticated users and the growing trend of tablet and mobile search. I gave some more of my thoughts on this in a blog post yesterday.
Twitter Changes, Going after Facebook?
New twitter brand pages allow greater customization, make it easier to embed tweets in blogs and websites, and allow pictures and video to be embedded, as opposed to just linked to, in tweets. According to this article in memeburn.com, they also add what they call the”promoted tweet”, which allow brands to have tweets that include embedded photos and video, that will display in the tweet. This article in marketingland.com calls it a boon to brands. This article in Mashable.com says these changes make it “loud and clear” that Twitter intends to “go after Facebook. So twitter is becoming more commercialized. Marketers call it a boon for brands. What will the users think? Isn’t the main draw of twitter the lack of commercialization? Isn’t part of its draw the fact that you are not bombarded by pictures and video unless you want to follow the shortened embedded link? I personally think twitter may have just shot themselves in the foot.
Google Launches Google Currents
Google has launched a digital magazine that is currently available for iPad, iPhone, and Android smartphones and tablets. They partnered with 150 publishing companies for the content. The app will be integrated with Google+ to allow sharing of stories and to push stories that are trending. Read more about what they are saying about it at allthingsd.com and slashgear.com. Does this fit well with their core business? Is this part of a strategy to make news content a bigger part of search? Will this be another failed step away from that core like knol?
Food for thought: The web will die and be replaced by…
An interesting article in memburn.com summarized a presentation by George Colony, the head of Forrester Research. He makes an argument that the web is not keeping up with the powerful technology of the devices we are using.
He says there have been two major computer models. The first was the PC-based model where we put executables on the desktop. This model is dead. The second model is to put everything in the cloud. He says this model will fail because it fails to utilize the incredible power of the devices we now have. The iPad has roughly the equivalent computing power of a 1986 Cray supercomputer, the fastest computer in the world in 1986. Processing power now doubles every 18 months. Storage doubles every 12 months. He foresees the rise of what he calls the “App-Internet”. In this model very powerful cloud based servers will interact with powerful device based apps. For example, a retail shopping app in conjunction with a powerful server of product data could more completely model a real world shopping experience.
Who are the winners and losers if his predictions are correct? Google and Facebook lose, because they are so tied to HTML that they cannot leverage the increasing computing power of the devices. The winners? Amazon’s silk browser is one of the first models of the next generation of “app-internet” type of integration. They have put in place the infrastructure with their silk browser. It is not only a web browser, but an app that enhances the shopping experience and leverages the computing power of the device. Cloud based servers interact with the silk browser(app) to provide content. Just some food for thought…
Online This Week: Dec. 2, 2011
This is my review of noteworthy things that happened this week involving Online Presence Management, search engine internet marketing, search engine news and website SEO. I’ll also be mixing in some technology business news, tech gadgetry news, and tech-culture news.
Here’s my list for the week of Nov. 28-Dec. 2, 2011
Challengers to Google?
There were two interesting stories this week about little search engine start-ups with big dreams, and if either of them is successful, you may be hearing a lot more about them. I call them the little search engines that could. The first is called Volunia. It is interesting because of the driving force behind it. His name is Massiomo Marchiori. His presentation on HyperSearch concept at a 1996 conference has been credited by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as the basis for the concept of PageRank that Google now uses. Although the concept for Volunia is highly secretive, Marchiori made an analogy that that Volunia would be a “fencer’s foil” to Google’s “club”. Read more about Volunia at Search Engine Watch. Apply to be a power user of the beta version (when it launches) at Volunia.com.
The second search engine startup has already launched. It’s called Yacy, and it is a peer-to-peer, distributed, open source search engine called Yacy. Think Google meets Napster or Limewire. This is the kind of search engine that right now only a true geek can appreciate. The upside is that it is infinitely scalable if it does catch on. The downside is that although you can use it without downloading their software and becoming a peer in their network, it works much better if you become a peer. There is a good description of Yacy and its aspirations at Memeburn. You can read my blog post here on why it’s nice to know the geeks among us have worked out a backup plan in case Google gets a little too free and easy with our private information and we lose faith in Google.
Facebook settles with the Federal Trade Commission over Privacy Concerns
On November 29th the FTC announced that it had reached a settlement with Facebook over all of the privacy concerns they had been investigating. Those concerns included granting third party apps access to all personal information, even though they had stated they would only be able to access information necessary to use the application. Facebook had also said they had certified the security of all of those approved apps, and they had not. Facebook said they would not share personal information with advertisers, and they did. Under the terms of the settlement they must establish a comprehensive privacy program within 180 days, and submit to privacy audits every two years for the next twenty years. Read a more detailed list of the charges and settlement terms at WebProNews. Read Mark Zuckerburg responded to the settlement in a blog post. Did the FTC go too far or not far enough? An interesting article on Mashable is entitled Did the FTC Just Ruin Facebook?
Microsoft Office Coming to iPad?
A report in Business Insider on November 29th cited unnamed sources that reported that Microsoft may be bringing Office to iPad next year. It also said they may be planning a major update to the version of office for the Mac. This news is interesting in that it highlights a couple interesting trends. If true, it would mean that Microsoft is conceding that the Mac and iPad are making inroads into its core enterprise market. The new strategy for Microsoft may now have shifted from using their software to try to force their enterprise clients to stay Windows PC based. The power of the iPad may have caused them to concede, and they have decided if you can’t beat them, join them. If true, this could have many ramifications for enterprise hardware.
Is your smartphone tracking you? The Carrier IQ app and Privacy concerns
This story slowly unfolded this week that an app that is installed in virtually all smartphones may be recording every keystroke you make and transmitting it. All major smartphone platforms except Windows Phone are affected to varying degrees. The Carrier IQ controversy was sparked when a hacker named Trevor Eckhart discovered and reported on the full functionality of the Carrier IQ application on his website. As the technical websites picked up the story and it got bigger, the cellphone manufacturers began to release statements distancing themselves from the app, and blaming the carriers. The CEO of the company that developed Carrier IQ, defends it in a video here by saying that the information broadcast by your phone is only used by the carriers to know where service outages occur, so they can better their coverage. On December 1, Sen. Al Franken sent the CEO of Carrier IQ a letter giving him a Dec. 14th deadline to answer privacy allegation questions. There is a summary of the whole mess on ZDNet entitled Follow the money and it’s the carriers behind it. So this little app can record everything you do on your phone, including texts, websites visited, etc., and where you’re at when you do it. It’s on almost every smartphone, and it broadcasts that info to the carriers. They only use that information so they can make our service better? The manufacturers and carriers are both trying to point fingers at the other, but someone has some explaining to do. Something tells me this is going to get worse before it gets better. Stay Tuned….
Kindle Fire is Here
On September 28th Jeff Bezos announced the Kindle Fire, Amazon’s full color entry into the tablet computing market. After a month and a half of speculation and hype the new Kindles shipped yesterday, a day ahead of schedule. The hype included stories that reported the Kindle Fire had pre-launch demand numbers higher than the pre-launch demand numbers for the iPad, and analysts estimates that Amazon was losing $50 on every Kindle Fire sold. The reports by October 5th were that Pre-orders for the Kindle Fire had reached 50,000 per day.
This week, reviewers finally got their hands on the Kindle Fire, and the reviews seemed to be mixed, but mostly positive. Most of the reviews that were negative seemed to be when they compared the Kindle fire to the iPad, which hardly seems fair when the iPad still has a $499 price, while the Kindle Fire has a $199 price. Here’s a good summary of the reviews of the Kindle Fire from Engadget, Gizmodo, Wired, and Mashable.
To step back from the hype that is trying to position the Kindle Fire as an “iPad Killer”, you need to think about what Amazon is trying to accomplish with the Kindle Fire. Are they trying to challenge the iPad? If they were, wouldn’t they have made a larger device, raised their price point a little and tried to compete head on? Apples core business is hardware sales. Amazons core business is content. Their goal was to develop a content delivery tablet for the masses, which will then give them a delivery medium for their core business, selling content. If the price point for the Kindle Fire allows them to put the device in millions of hands that will then begin purchasing content, do they even care how it stacks up against an iPad?
While everyone else gets caught up in the hype and the inevitable iPad comparisons, check out this interview in Wired Magazine, Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think. It lays out Jeff Bezos’ post-PC vision of the web, and how it is different than Apples vision.
I just received my Own Kindle Fire and have been playing with it for a couple of hours. Initial impressions? It’s like a little slice of an iPad. If you were used to using an iPad, it may seem small. I’ve used an iPad, but I don’t own one, and so to me it seems big enough for what it does. Web sites looked good. I emailed a word document to my new kindle email address and was able to view it. It came pre-registered with my Amazon account and credit card info, so I had purchased a book within 15 minutes of unpacking it, which is< I believe, the whole idea. Also, I tried to load music, and found out that “free” storage in the cloud of all media really means free storage in the cloud of any media you purchase from Amazon. If I want to store my existing mp3 library of music, that would be an additional $20/year for 8 gig of space. I was able to hook the Kindle fire up to my computer and move my 1.5 gig of mp3’s directly onto the Fire, and I am able to play them, but if you have a lot of your own music or videos, don’t expect to move them all to the cloud and store them for free, and the 8 gig will be chewed up pretty quick if you have a large library of media content.
So how does the Kindle Fire stack up? As an “iPad Killer”? Maybe, maybe not, the jury is still out. As a content delivery portal to fulfill Amazon’s vision? A definite home run, no question.