A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

(From Wikipedia.)

I think it’s interesting that in the years between being an activity by a few people on the nascent World Wide Web and the mainstream role that blogs have in today’s digital landscape (depending on how you define a “blog”), the idea that a “weblog” is a log of the web seems to have been superseded by the idea of a log on the web.

The blogs of the late 1990s/early 2000s (ie. around the time that the word “blog” was actually coined) tended to be online diaries, telling personal and often quite intimate stories, often hidden behind the veil of an online pseudonym.

My favourite blog ever was mainly from around 1995-1996, so it definitely wasn’t called a ‘blog’ at the time (the term having been coined on 17th December 1997 when Jon Barger used it to describe how he logged the web as he surfed it..) It wasn’t a story about the web, although it was chronicled on it in a series of forum, newsgroup and mailing list postings. It ended up being called “One Love Story”, and was the autobiographical (although not strictly true, as the author later revealed) story of a New York lawyer who had a drug-induced moment of realisation about the “true” meaning behind the Stone Roses’ lyrics and music, which set him on a mission to become the (“real”) Second Coming himself. When events in the media started happening which fitted neatly in with his story, things became very interesting to follow as the numbers of people willing to stick up for someone who believed to have been called upon as the Second Coming grew. (I think it was this two-way nature of watching the story at least seeming to appear outside the internet that appealed to me the most; an idea that’s been capitalised on by activities like Alternate Reality Games.) To me, this chronicling of a story through the web, but as a conversation rather than the more introverted nature of an autobiography or diary is what marks it out as a blog.

But this was back in the early days of the world wide web. As blogs grew in popularity they became increasingly focussed around the world of politics, as they shifted from a relatively small number of bloggers talking to one another about their day to day lives to a larger number of people talking to one another about the things that mattered most to them. Blogging became less of a platform for a few to tell their stories, and more of a platform for ongoing conversation or debate.

Today, blogs are no longer restricted to relating the thoughts and experiences general public; it’s not unusual for large companies to try to sidestep the faceless corporate image by publishing the personal blogs of members of staff, and even the White House dog now has his own videoblog— featuring a cameo appearance by none other than Tony Blair….

Some companies even encourage such activity, which has resulted in something of a blurring of the lines between a personal blog and professional PR exercise. On the other hand, there are stories where blogs have caused problems for companies as unhappy workers have told their stories; in 2004, EA Spouse was a blogger who wrote about her fiance who worked as a software engineer at EA Games, and criticised their labour practices and enforced overtime. The blog struck a chord with a number of software engineers, and in 2006 her fiance was the main plaintiff in the successful class action suit on behalf of software engineers at EA, which awarded them $14.9 million dollars.

A key moment marking the transition of blogs as an influential media came in 2002, when comments by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott were discussed at length by a number of bloggers after a party honoring U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond, where Lott praised Senator Thurmond by suggesting that the United States would have been better off had Thurmond been elected president in the 1940s. Lott’s critics saw these comments as a tacit approval of racial segregation, a policy which had been advocated by Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign. Documents and recorded interviews dug up by bloggers reinforced this viewpoint, but even though the comments were made at a public event attended by the media, none of the major media organizations reported on his controversial comments until after blogs broke the story. A political crisis resulted, which forced Lott to step down as majority leader.

The impact of this story showed how bloggers could sometimes lead the way in bringing key information to public light, with mainstream media having to follow their lead. (Although on the other hand, the idea of stumbling upon a cover up thanks to a particular piece of information that doesn’t seem to fit in with mainstream accounts of events can quickly lead to a plethora of conspiracy theories. It’s definitely easy for the real signals to get lost in the noise.)

More recently, the 2008 US presidential election has become an interesting race to watch online, not only because of the more significant role than ever that the internet is playing in the various campaigns, with YouTube, MySpace and Facebook being used by most of the presidential candidates to try to connect with younger voters, and a CNN/YouTube hosted debates between candidates, answering user-submitted questions (selected by YouTube and CNN.)

The lines between bloggers and mainstream media have now become blurred; breaking news on television will often rely on photos and video footage made by the general public, not only before the news agencies have had a chance to send their own journalists to the scene, but also in places where it’s simply not possible for journalists to get access— for example, the footage from the London Underground following the 7/7 bombings.

At the other end of the spectrum, the 2008 U.S. presidential election is looking likely to be heavily influenced by the internet; already, several large websites are getting involved in the debates; Yahoo! Answers has become a Q&A platform for voters and election candidates to ask and answers questions from one another, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook are being used by candidates to try to connect with younger voters, and CNN and YouTube hosted a series of televised debates between presidential hopefuls from both the Democratic and Republican parties, with questions submitted by the public through YouTube.

A variant on blogging is “liveblogging”, which is posting to a blog as a situation actually happens (such as posting immediate reactions to a televised speech as it happens, or explaining what’s happening at a press conference or presentation for those unable to attend (frequently seen in the technology industry, such as the MacWorld opening earlier this year.) Then there are forms of blogging that make the most of specific communication technology “vlogs” (or video blogs) and Phlogs/Photoblogs and moblogs (mobile blogs.)

There are also new types of blogging emerging; “sideblogging” or “microblogging”, consisting of much shorter but more frequent posts and often featured at the side of a blog page. Examples of this type of blogging include Status Updates on social networking sites like Facebook, or the Twitter network (which also operates over SMS messages, Instant Messenger or email, beyond the confines of the web.)

Social Networking sites are now so popular that they can be called mainstream; an average of 1 in 2 at least occasionally using them, 68% of 20-24 year old women and even 1 in 8 45-55 year olds saying they use them regularly. Of course, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter change the visibility of the “blog”- if you’re posting updates to a private network of approved friends, behind a password-protected barrier, is that still fulfilling the “web” side of the definition?

This brings me back to my initial question. What is blogging? I’m not going to say that I can answer it definitively- blogging is clearly different things to different people, and not everyone who regularly posts online updates of what they are doing at any given time to a Facebook status update would call themselves a blogger (even less a ‘sideblogger’), even if what they are building still fits into the more technical definition of a ‘blog’. For me, blogging now means simply to put something up on the internet. Whether that’s on a personal site, a social networking site or a blogging network is irrelevant. What it’s about- yourself, your opinions, or just your favourite band- is equally irrelevant. Whether it’s part of a single collection of data or scattered across various websites is irrelevant. It’s simply the kind of activity that was done by “webmasters” back in the 90′s, and is done by bloggers, Facebookers and MySpacers today; actively creating content on the internet. But how you define a blogger definitely shapes how you answer what might be a bigger question.

Is blogging now mainstream?

When you want to look at a web page, the server that it’s on needs to know what information to send out, and where to send it. So, for example, for your visit to this site, there is some information that you have had to send, which can easily be recorded.

Your user agent (that is, the is type of operating system and web browser that you’re using to see the page) can be identified as CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html)

The page you came here from was

Your IP address is 38.107.179.212

Many websites rely on the ability to “remember” certain information. For example, when you log into a website, it’s obviously important that when you go to a different page on the site, it somehow knows that you’re still logged in under your own account. If you add something to a shopping basket then leave the site, it’s helpful if it’s still there next time you visit the site. If you choose to personalise a website in a certain way- for example, to change the number of results per page that a Google search shows you- then you want it to stay that way when you come back again. Or if you see an advert that leads you to buy a product, then the advertiser wants to know, because that’s the only way they can judge whether they are getting value for money from their advertising. (Especially if they are the kind brand who cares about their image and doesn’t want to litter thousands of websites with flashy and obtrusive advertising…)

To make this “memory” work, most sites will use cookies.

Cookies are simply small text files that are saved on your computer. You can see what’s stored in them- you will have a “cookies” folder somewhere on your computer which you can look in to see what cookies are being stored on your machine, and you can look at what information is stored in them by opening them up in a simple text editor like Notepad. Usually, these will mostly be things like unique numbers which correspond to an entry in the web servers’ database, identifying your computer with your online identity.

As is usually the case with technical matters, the level of understanding about cookies amongst most consumers is probably best described as “confused.” One of the findings of a study by InsightExpress in 2005 were that 77% of people said that they knew what cookies were, but when asked to describe them only 25% could give a correct description. That means that there are more people who don’t have any idea what they are than who actually know what they are— and that most people think they know what they are, but don’t.

Many of the incorrect definitions said that cookies were executable files placed automatically on a computer, or “hidden attachments that allow unauthorized access and tracking abilities.” Others stated that while cookies make Web sign-ins easier, they can also let spyware in to infect a hard drive. Some wrong answers confused cookies with cached Web pages or temporary Internet files.

In a second survey, users were asked to pick the most accurate description of cookies from a set of possible choices. Almost 29% chose to say a cookie was “a small file enabling a server to identify a browser end/user”, a reasonably close definition of the term. But another 25% said a cookie was “a program that tracks all of the sites a browser/ end-user visits”, a notion that brings cookies into close relation with spyware. More than 13% said cookies can record users’ e-mail and Web activity”, while about 3% said they generate pop-up ads.

The indication that users are ascribing evil intent to cookies was made clearer in another portion of the InsightExpress survey. Asked to check off all the reasons that they delete cookies, two-thirds of respondents—66.5%– said they erase cookies to “protect my privacy/ prevent tracking.” That response was the second most widely given in the survey, following only “clean computer/ free up disk or memory”, something 77.4% of those polled said they agreed with.

Cookies carry a technical restriction, in that they can only be read and written from a single domain (ie. a cookie set by “domain.com” could be read and written by any page that falls under that domain- such as “domain.com/home.htm”— but not by “someoneelse.com.” However, pages can contain content that comes from other domains— such as advertising on other domains. So if you visit two completely unrelated websites that carry advertising from the same ad server, then your movements between those websites can be tracked using cookies.

The thing that makes it interesting is that people simply aren’t generally terribly interested in your personal information— that is, what you as an individual are doing on the internet. However, when your personal information is added to that of hundreds and thousands of others’, it becomes much more interesting, and valuable to online marketers. For example, if advertisers for a new car see that 20% of people who come their brand’s website leave, visit a financial website and then come back again, it suggests to them that people looking at financial websites to see what loans they can afford will be worth advertising their brand to, so that people who might be shopping for a different car might see it and want to investigate the competition. Alternatively, they might want to track how they got to a particular website and choose the adverts accordingly- so someone who came to a car website from a Google search for “cheap car” might be shown an advert that highlights the value, while one who came from a search for “eco friendly car” would be shown a different advert, highlighting it’s green credentials.

I talked about Facebook in pretty broad terms back in May;

There is always the possibility that a large corporation will buy them out, or advertising will increase to an unacceptable level, and users will start going on strike or boycotting the site in protest. The fact that Facebook has already turned down some very large offers from the likes of Yahoo makes me think that is very unlikely.

I believe that the future of the web lies in trust— who do you trust to give you the information you’re searching for, who do you trust with your credit card details, and who do you trust with your name and address?

Well, the recent launch of two new Facebook advertising programs have made the possibility of advertising “increasing to an unacceptable level” look somewhat more likely— not in terms of the volume of advertising, but in the way that advertising is targetted and delivered.

The first programme is Facebook Pages, where brands or companies can create their own profile page, and users can sign up as a “Fan”— much like becoming a “Friend” of another user, this lets the brand post items as notifications in the Fan’s news feed, and for Fan’s “interactions with the brand” to be posted in their friends’ news feeds.

The second, and much more controversial programme, is Facebook Beacon. This involves affiliated websites using cookies to share Facebook members’ activity on their own sites with Facebook, so that they can have their activity shared with their friends.

There are two key things that make Facebook’s Beacon different to the kind of tracking that we’ve seen before.

Firstly, they are showing a clear interest in you as an individual. Not just as “cookie number 46462156731242571″ who was one of 1000 people who visited sites x and y on their way to making an online purchase from site z (which might indicate that site y a good place for site z to advertise) but as Joe Websurfer, 23 years old from London with 120 friends, 40 of whom are interested in similar bands and hobbies etc. etc.

Secondly, they are pulling back the curtain and showing what’s happening behind the scenes. If you see your actions on one website being tracked on another, your first guess might be that they are sharing information— maybe you use the same email address for both websites, or if you clicked through from one site to the other, there might be something stored in the link address. But when people aren’t using the same usernames or email addresses, didn’t go from one to the other and simply don’t understand how Facebook knows what they were doing on eBay (or whatever affiliate they’ve been using), then it seems to be some sort of mysterious unexplainable voodoo. Because people don’t get any indication of what adverts other people might be seeing, they don’t know how, or even if, they are being tracked and targeted.

Of course, with the Internet being such a new and relatively unregulated medium, perhaps it’s up to the governments to ensure that individuals’ privacy is protected. The U.K. has something of a reputation for being a “Big Brother” state, due to the high numbers of CCTV cameras watching most of our towns and cities. But don’t expect the U.S. to be taking the lead either; a recent report by research agency Forrester said;

“We evaluated the sites of Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thompson. All of the sites failed our privacy and security criteria. Candidates should make trust a major element of their site design requirements.”

Meanwhile, the website for Harvard alumini, 02138 casts a critical eye over the ongoing dispute over Facebook’s origins. It’s not a new story— it’s been going on for a few years now, involving stolen ideas and code from the “ConnectU” social networking site which Zuckerberg was working on before launching Facebook, and his subsequent inconsistencies in his story about his involvement— but coming at a time when people might be questioning exactly what they are getting from Facebook for “free” and why they are being given it, it might be interesting to see how public awareness and perceptions of the issues surrounding Facebook and online privacy and security will change over the next few months.

One definition of New Media is ‘where technology meets communication.’

Another is ‘digital media.’

Yet another is ‘interactive media.’

All point towards the world of information technology and the ability for many-to-many communication; for the audience to be able to speak back to the producers or broadcasters, and enter into a dialogue or conversation.

My own generation may have memories of casting a critical eye over pictures sent into "The Gallery" in Tony Hart’s Hartbeat (now in an online form!), or remember the Saturday morning television TV jingles to encourage viewers to phone in to ask guests questions, play games and enter competitions (at a time when they were simply London numbers, rather than premium-rate lines.) So, is the new idea of "interactive media" fundamentally different to television show’s competitions, phone-ins and Points of View’s letters?

Well, yes.

The nature of TV, newspapers, magazines, cinema and "traditional media" in general is that it’s all built around the idea of sending a message out to the public/audience/consumers. Sure, amember of the audience can speak on the phone, or have their drawings shown to the country, but you can’t get a situation where every member of the TV audience can see their own content.

Digital television is finding ways to interact with a broadcast- a choice of commentators for a sports event, with playercam to take control of the coverage and chatrooms to talk about it yourself. No need to worry about phone rates (and fake callers)- just press a button on the remote control and have your own say.

The internet (which most digital media is in some way connected to) is the first many-to-many mass medium in the history of the human race, and the human race is still in the early stages of getting to grips with exactly what it is, how it works and how best to unlock it’s potential.

In other words, there’s no more need for fake audiences in a TV studio filled with mirrors to create the illusion that it’s more crowded than it actually is. There’s a whole new form of crowd noise to replace the prerecorded TV audiences.

Old "New Media"

In the past, whenever a new medium has been created it has always taken time for it to develop it’s potential. First, people use it in a way that they are already familiar with— the same way that they use existing media. Then they experiment with new things that can be done with it. Eventually, the new medium becomes established in it’s own right.

For example, when the printing press was created it’s immediate impact was in making it easier, cheaper and faster to copy information. A bible that had to be hand written could now be printed with a fraction of the time and energy. However, the consequences of this went far beyond it being easier to make a bible; all written texts easier to make and easier to get hold of, so literacy levels increased as more people had the opportunity to learn to read. Before the age of the printing press, news and other information had to be passed on through public assemblies and speeches; once literacy had been improved by the availability of texts, it was possible to take stories or information away, to be consumed at the individual’s place and time of choosing. The idea (if not the terminology) of "Timeshifting" and "Spaceshifting" was born.

As Marshall McLuhan has written about extensively, the relative importance of the senses had changed; news and stories were seen, rather than heard. The importance of voice, intonation and timing were diminished, and the importance of the actual words (now that’s all that were being passed on) increased. No longer did everyone have to go to church to hear the news, when they could take the news home with them.

Around 1450, Gutenberg’s printing press was most likely in operation. In 1517- Martin Luther’s 95 Theses was posted, and within months, printed copies were distributed across Europe- a major factor in the reformation. In 1660, the Royal Society was officially founded, with the motto "On the words of no one" ("Nullius in Verba"), signifying a commitment to establishing the truth of scientific matters through experiment rather than through citation of authority.

More recently, when television was invented, radio was already an established medium. So television was treated in the same way as radio- a presenter would sit down in a studio and read the news, only with a static camera pointing at them, sitting still in a chair, reading pretty much the same news that was read out on the radio. It took time for the medium to develop, and for producers to exploit the fact that the presenter didn’t need to be in the studio— they could go out and actually show the news from where it was happening; outside the Houses of Parliament or 10 Downing street. (Obviously, this also depended on the development of the technology; for cameras to get smaller, lighter, and batteries to improve.)

The Impact of New Media

So where are we with "New Media"; the internet, digital TV and radio, mobile phones and iPods, and whatever other devices that we can hardly imagine now, but won’t be able to imagine life without in ten years time?

So far, we’ve seen the initial stages, where it was seen as a new version of print. Online newspapers or magazines, catalogues and brochures; the early Web was much like a catalogue without the paper. Online advertising, as a result, mirrored print advertising; it’s easy to see the parallels between the standard advertising columns in a newspaper page and the clickable adverts around the sides of a web page, or the pop-up windows and the leaflets that fall from the pages of a magazine.

More recently, we’ve seen the explosion of broadband; with more bandwidth available, video has become a viable option. Suddenly, it seems that the internet isn’t the new Print any more; it’s the new TV. So, like they do with TV, advertisers have replaced static adverts with video clips and animations- even sound effects.

I mentioned in an earlier post about how the internet simply isn’t capable of delivering a real-time, national broadcast event like a world cup final or even a Christmas soap opera special in the way that existing media can. If it ever does catch up with TV and is able to broadcast high definition video to a nation, will it provide an alternative that will kill off television? Or will it just be a different way of delivering exactly the same content?

You could argue that we haven’t yet seen anything truly new in terms of advertising on the internet, and that the "real" innovation must still be around the corner. But perhaps it’s been there all along— instead of looking at how advertisers can buy a part of someone’s website to try to push a message across, simply look at their own brand’s websites.

So, once we’ve all figured out how best to use the internet- from customers and consumers through to advertisers, producers (hell, why not even governments?), what is going to be the longer lasting impact of the internet and digital media?

One possibility lies in the nature of the information which can now be transmitted cheaply and quickly. Perhaps the internet and increasingly advanced technologies will mark the end of the written word as the dominant method of communication and a return to the pre-Gutenberg art of storytelling, as video and audio become feasible alternatives to written texts, and letters and emails are replaced by podcasts or YouTube clips. I would imagine that it’s quicker for most people to record a short message on a webcam than to type an email saying the same thing, but whether it’s better probably depends on the nature of the message and it’s audience; what sort of effect being able to hear the tone of your voice would make to how it’s received.

Although an interesting idea, I think that it’s very unlikely to actually happen; just looking at the popularity of SMS messages and MSN messager, it seems that less is more when it comes to communication; people would still prefer to paint their own pictures; to tell people about where they are than just show them their surroundings. (Besides, if communication technologies became obsolete when
something "better" came along, then why would people listen to the
radio after TV was invented?)

Another possibility (and one which to me seems far more likely to happen) is in what’s currently labelled "Web 2.0"; blogs, social networking and user generated content, where the information uploaded is just as important as what’s downloaded. The reason I put so much importance on this is that the one feature of the internet that distinguishes it from television, radio, newspapers and all the other mass media that have come before is that it’s a two-way line of communication; "consumers" aren’t passive receivers of a stream of information, limited in their choice to a selection of television channels, radio stations or newspaper titles. Now they can be their own editors, choosing the sections of the news that they are interested in, selecting their preferred sources. They can even be their own journalists, writing their own editorials as blog posts or comments, or messages on social networking sites, or be their own directors, uploading their own videos to YouTube— even their own paparazzi, taking photos of celebrities they pass in the street with their mobile phone cameras and uploading them to the website of their choice.

Another more recent trend (one which isn’t necessarily related to "new media", but more with the increasing volume of media consumption) is the multitasking consumer, and the idea of "continuous partial attention". While someone may be primarily surfing the internet, playing a computer game or reading a newspaper, they might also have a TV on in the background which they are monitoring, ready to switch their attention to it if something interesting catches their eye. (Not necessarily a TV— it might be a radio, or an eye on an email inbox or MSN messager window, or watching out for a mobile phone alert.) Asking for a minute of someone’s time isn’t much— but asking for 60 seconds, continous and with their undiverted attention is becoming an increasingly large demand. If visitors to a website are then being presented with distracting adverts on the page to further add to the barrage of information they are trying to simultaneously process, then the actual attention that they are going to give to an advert is likely to be minimal— unless it’s something that they choose to give their attention to.

One interesting trend in online advertising that doesn’t really follow in the way it does with traditional media is that advertising is seen as directly supporting the website. Because users don’t usually pay to look at a website (in the way that we pay to read magazines or most newspapers), and running costs aren’t on the same scale, the connection between advertisers money and the work done by website owners is much more visible and apparent to the users. This might be a reason behind the fact that 18-34 year olds report being much more receptive to advertising on User Generated Content sites- because they see the advertisers as funding the service that the site provides them.

Same content + Different media => Different reactions

It’s not just the way we process media that’s changing. Technological advances mean that the media itself is also transforming. Is there a difference between watching a TV show in the living room, and watching the same show at a different time- or a different place? The obvious differences come from our surroundings— as anyone who has missed a bus or train stop while engrossed in a portable video or handheld game will know. But there’s also a difference in the media itself.

It’s clear that the same content will affect people differently when shown it in different ways. For example, there is a clear difference in the experiences of reading a novel, listening to a novel as an audiobook and watching a film or television adaptation of the novel. While it’s still (usually) the same story, apart from the more obvious aspects that while reading a novel allows the reader to create their own mental picture of the locations and characters while a film or TV adaptation creates the visual imagery on the audiences’ behalf, there are other more subtle factors that also change the way we process the different media.

Similarly, the experience of watching video on a mobile device or a computer at a desk is fundamentally different to watching it on a TV at home.

The printing press transformed the way we told each other news and stories- from something we were told by other people into something that we took in on our own, at our own pace and timing rather than those of whoever was passing on the information.

While authors and directors alike can play with the portrayal of time and general pacing of a story, a reader is more in control of the speed that a story proceeds; whether reading more quickly through an exciting or action packed passage, or the slower pacing of a more dialogue-intensive chapter. (Of course, saying that the reader is entirely in control of the speed and pacing of a novel would be to do a tremendous disservice to the skills of a writer; when Stephen Fry can criticise an author, saying that he is a "writer of absolutely zero interest, insight, wit, understanding or ability" based on no more than the first word of a novel, the importance of every single word becomes apparent.)

With the Fordham Experiment in 1970, Eric McCluhan set out to illustrate the more subtle differences between the perceptions of media more clearly, showing how similar audiences will respond differently to exactly the same content when presented it in different ways. Two groups, after watching the same piece of film when shown it as either a film-style projection from behind the audience or a projection from behind (to create a television-like appearance) give significantly differring reactions.

The researchers concluded that the ‘light on’ (film-style projection) subjects exhibited a sensory shift characterized by a drop in visual sense and an increase in tactile sense; the number of comments on specific scenes or cinematic techniques dropped, while comments on a sense of involvement and a loss of time increased with "light-through" (TV- style) projection.

Whether this is because of the way our senses process the information or due to the cultural differences to the way we perceive or preconceive television and cinema as different media is difficult to say, but the indication is that there is certainly a difference in the way that we process the same information when it’s presented in different formats. I think that’s something worth bearing in mind at a stage where the approach to the internet seems to have shifted from "digital print" to "digital television", and still on it’s way to being a genuinely new medium.

Handing control to the consumer

Charlie Brooker has been credited with the observation that when internet comedy hits television, it immediately stops being funny.

When a programme is broadcast on the television or radio, the vast majority of the audience will listen to it at the same time—the moment determined by the broadcaster. For internet use, on the other hand, the consumer is much more in control; the fact that content is being delivered rather than broadcast obviously lends itself more readily towards time-shifted or space-shifted consumer behaviour. When you’ve chosen your search engine, your search terms, which of the results to click on, and which page on the site you land at to look at (and at the time that you feel like looking at it), there’s a personal connection that goes beyond your choice of TV channels or shows, or which is your favourite national newspaper.

Perhaps there’s something in the nature of a medium so fragmented, yet so interacitve and immediate that makes it feel somehow personal when it’s exposed on television to the masses; in the way we would react differently to seeing the same story when it involves a complete stranger, compared to when it involves someone we know?

In an age where devices with 160Gb and a colour screen can fit into the front pocket of a shirt and be taken in people’s stride as regular a day to day device, wireless internet connections are (to me) the area of technology where magic still exits. The fact that on the latest iPods, I can watch videos on a screen which takes up more of my field of vision than my TV but is thin enough to fit into a suit pocket without spoiling the lines impresses me- but it’s when I’m near an internet hotspot and I can instantly watch one of hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos that I’m still amazed; especially when considering that just 5 years ago, broadband internet penetration in the UK was at just 7%, and the restricted bandwidth meant that the idea of just streaming audio was difficult to take seriously- let alone streaming video.

What’s happening in the industry with WiFi in the UK is quite interesting— particularly when compared to the 3G mobile networks, the other wireless high speed data channel. Unlike 3G, as WiFi operates in an unlicenced frequency band, there haven’t been any licences for billions of pounds to be paid to use the frequencies. You just need a wireless router (about £40 in the shops, but usually freely provided by broadband suppliers) and you can set up your own hot spot, allowing access to whoever you want. If you like, you can set up a landing page, so that anyone who connects is directed to a page of your choosing before going on with their internet browsing- a whole new space, which could be a branding or advertising opportunity, or a payment area if further access is something to be charged for.

However, there are still problems with the technology; security on wireless networks has come under fire- WEP (the simplest but most widespread form of protection) is generally seen as being insecure; WPA and WPA2 are more secure but devices which support them are less widespread, with WPA2 only being mandatory on new devices since September 2006.

Last week, McDonalds announced the roll-out of free high speed wireless internet in almost 1200 UK restaurants by the end of the year, which will make it the biggest provider of free wireless internet access on the UK. Network provider The Cloud will be delivering the service- other services on the Cloud network are free access for Nintendo DS owners, free access for iPhone users through the O2 network, and exclusively for iPod Touch owners is the £3.99 a month unlimited WiFi service. (The iPod Touch is essentially the iPod element of the iPhone- with no phone or bluetooth functionality, but with WiFi connectivity so that you can connect to the internet at a hotspot and buy new music from the iTunes store, browse the web or watch YouTube videos.) Also last week, the BBC announced that it’s online services will be free to all over the Cloud’s network.

National Express are also introducing a WiFi service on their Milton Keynes to London services, and in December they plan to introduce free WiFi to trains, when they take over GNER’s licence.

Meanwhile, also in the world of the wireless internet, BT have announced a partnership with the FON wireless network community. FON members allow one another to use their wireless access points, effectively creating a network of semi-public WiFi hotspots at their own homes. This requires either a special wireless router or modifications to an existing router, which the terms and conditions of most Broadband suppliers (including BT, until recently) forbid.

In the US, Starbucks have partnered with Apple to provide a special service in Starbucks cafes; when a customer with an iPhone or iPod Touch comes in range of a WiFi hotspot in the cafe, it connects to the in-house iTunes player and a special Starbucks button appears on the menu, listing the last 10 tracks played and linking to an easy download through the iTunes Music Store, which is also available through the service.

As well as the opportunities for online services such as the iTunes Music Store, or local services (ie. wifi hotspots for the public), there is also an opportunity to provide services in between. Taking a visitor directly to detailed menus for a restaurant, perhaps, or show listings at a cinema, or a stock catalogue for a shop. When online information is a key part of the shopping process and users can check Amazon prices from their mobile phone- perhaps while contemplating a purchase of the same item instore, there’s an opportunity for in house services that can be provided on hand to provide a competitive advantage.

Ultimately, the internet is built on a "many-to-many" principle; instead of one pathway between any two points on the network, there are many alternatives. Where many pathways converge at a single point, there can be problems.

Server Strain

A site like YouTube can certainly provide television-like content, and the distinction between online video like YouTube and television broadcasts are being blurred; devices such as the Apple TV, which send YouTube videos directly to a television set, while IPTV provides television broadcasts over the internet.

However, even YouTube would probably struggle to provide a single live, nationwide or global event in the way that television can.

The most watched YouTube videos have yet (at the time of writing) to break the 60 million views mark- that’s the total number of people across the world who have watched it over the course of 18 months. Compare that to record breaking TV broadcasts, such as the Eastenders Christmas 1986 episode when 30.15 million viewers simultaneously watched Den Watts divorce Angie in the highest rated soap in British TV history, or when 32 million households watched the 1966 world cup final. (Although even these figures pale in comparison with the most watched film, with an estimated 2 billion views worldwide.)

Nobody (outside some serious NDAs) knows how many servers YouTube or Google have or how their server software has been designed, so it’s hard to guess how they would handle large numbers of simultaneous hits to the same content. However, the bandwidth that every one of the UKs Internet households would require would probably cripple exchanges before Googles servers had a chance to deal with the challenge. A typical household might have signed up to a 4-8Mb connection, but tests reveal that broadband speeds are significantly less than advertised in the UK, especially when the networks are busy.

Even without the high load from streaming video, large websites can still be crippled when many people try to access them at once; such as in September this year when 25 million tried to register to buy tickets for a one-off Led Zepplin reunion concert. Even though the tickets were being sold on a lottery basis rather than "first come, first served", there were still as many as 100,000 hits per minute on the servers— enough to put them out of action. (In fact, such events are very similar to a typical Denial of Service attack; where a website or server is deliberately flooded with connection attempts, making "genuine" connections impossible.)

Packet Filtering and Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality has been a hot topic in the U.S. for a while now, probably made most famous by Senator Ted Steven’s “series of tubes” metaphor (probably better known as a running joke on The Daily Show than an accurate summary of a technological problem.)

The debate is over whether “Net Neutrality” regulation should be passed, forbidding ISPs from filtering network traffic. At the moment, there is no legal or technical reason why ISPs cannot prioritise or block particular types of internet traffic so that, for example, one ISP might provide online video that they provide themselves (or provided from their affiliates) at faster download speeds than a competitor’s content, or particular applications or technologies could be blocked completely (for example, if an ISP decided to slow down internet traffic for the iTunes Music Store that travelled through it’s networks, in favour of it’s own music sales platform), creating what’s referred to as a ‘tiered internet’.

Much of the argument mainly revolves around whether or not the internet (much of which has been publically funded) is a public service, and should be regulated in the same way as services such as television or telephone.

It’s not just Senator Stevens who comes across looking slightly ridiculous, talking around a technological subject that they don’t appear to fully understand. For example, apparently, NBC have spotted an unusual angle in the debate, and have argued that peer to peer filesharing costs corn farmers money; the logic behind the argument being that if people don’t go to the cinema, choosing instead to stay at home to watch downloaded video, then they aren’t buying overpriced popcorn to eat while they watch the films, which of course is bad for the farmers who grow the corn (presumably even more so than the theatres selling stale popcorn at a hugely inflated price.)

The issue is further muddied by the changing business interests of some service providers; while just a few years ago, broadband providers who were offering high speed internet access were obviously popular with users who downloaded large amounts of data. While this data may or may not have included illegal music or video downloads, it didn’t conflict with the interests of the telecommunications companies who were providing the internet service, so they were more than happy to remain tight-lipped about how their customers were using their services, citing privacy issues when asked.

More recently though, as bandwidths have increased enough for streaming media and VOIP technology to become more widely usable, this has created a conflict of interest for telecommunications companies who are effectively providing a cheaper alternative to their own telephone services.

The issue of bandwidth seems to be on the verge of becoming a significant issue in the UK. Bandwidth-intensive online video is becoming increasingly popular, with YouTube now a household name, BBC’s iPlayer in it’s public beta and Channel 4′s 4OD having been released, the line between television and online video is becoming increasingly blurred, with the apparent goal of online delivery channels replacing home video recorders. Both these new players involve a networking tool, where videos (or parts of videos) are downloaded from other users, rather than a central server.

However, this means that instead of the main strain being on the content provider, it is spread across the network; instead of users simply downloading data, they are also uploading data to other users. While this is unlikely to have a noticable effect on the individual users, it will have a more noticable impact on ISPs.

Public Enemy Number One: The Public.

The main target of network filtering seems to be peer-to-peer traffic. Peer-to-peer systems are based on the idea of spreading the load over a network; for example, instead of 50 people downloading the same file from a single server (resulting in a high load both on the server and on it’s available bandwidth), users can download either parts of the file or the entire file from other users who have already downloaded it from the server, easing the load. It came to prominence with the attention that the Napster network and related legal cases brought, as well as a number of similar networks (such as Kazaa, bittorrent networks etc.); because there often wasn’t any centralised server in such peer-to-peer networks, it was difficult for copyright holders to attack the networks, and instead had to deal with individual users. This has given peer-to-peer technologies a reputation of being used for illegal downloads of music, films and software, as well as giving organisations like the RIAA an (in some cases, justified) reputation for harshly cracking down on individuals.

However, there are a number of perfectly legal applications for peer to peer technologies; the Skype VOIP service uses peer to peer technologies, as do the BBC and 4OD’s online video distribution channels. Bittorrents are very popular for the distribution of free software, as they don’t require costly servers to deliver the software, relying instead on the cooperation of users.

At it’s most straightforward level, filtering involves checking each packet of data to see what sort of data it is, and then processing some sorts differently from others. For example, much like a firewall might be set up to block data which isn’t either from the web or part of a recognised email system, an ISP might set up a filter to block (or throttle) traffic on a similar set of rules. Not a problem for a user who only uses the web and email, but a significant problem if they decide to legally download some music from somewhere like iTunes, or play a game of Counter Strike (a game which at one point was said to generate more internet traffic than the whole of Italy.)

Because of the way the internet works, the throttled traffic might instead find an alternative, faster path across the network, increasing the load on other parts of the network which aren’t applying such rules. As a result, the internet could fall victim to the tragedy of the commons (a social trap where a finite resource is diminished because of how individuals treat it; best illustrated by the example of farmers keeping cattle on a piece of shared land; if one farmer increases the number of cattle they keep on the land, the quality of the land is diminished as more animals are grazing; although the negative effect is felt equally by all the farmers, the gain is only experienced by the farmer who is keeping more cattle.)

The decentralised nature of the internet means that it’s difficult to get an accurate picture of what the traffic on the internet is made up of; (because there’s no central server or exchange point that all traffic goes through, where traffic can then be monitored from— the subject of a future post), but there are estimates that peer-to-peer filesharing traffic is responsible for at least 50%, and possibly as much as 90% of all internet traffic. Others argue that HTTP is the majority of traffic- especially since the advent of YouTube.

Historically, web browsers have been given away for free; Netscape’s browser was freely available for noncommercial use, while Netscape made their money from selling server-side software. Internet Explorer was given away for free with the Windows operating system, it’s development being funded by other parts of Microsoft’s business. Firefox is a free, open source web browser that is steadily increasing it’s market share (“Open-source” means that the source code is also freely available; so that anyone with sufficient programming knowledge can modify the browser to work the way they want it to, or offer improvements to be included in future releases.)

It’s not a surprise then, that there is something of an expectation that content on the internet will be free; you don’t expect to have to pay to visit a website, or to read an article. The news is free, weather forecasts are free, and reading about other people’s thoughts is free. Where websites do charge money for access, it’s usually for some sort of premium service with a free alternative, such as a free trial for 30 days, or a free but restricted membership with a paid-for but unrestricted or advert-free alternative.

However, websites aren’t free to run; apart from the time taken to put a website together, the site also needs a computer to act as a server (which needs to be kept running and it’s software up to date), a connection to the internet (which needs to be paid for), and of course power to keep the whole thing going. The way website owners cover their costs depends on the nature of the site; perhaps the site is an integral part of an online business, such as an online shopping company where the website would be a part of the operational costs, or possibly a part of a branding or advertising project funded by a marketing budget. Where there is no obvious revenue source, website owners often cover their costs (and sometimes make a profit) by selling advertising space.

There has been some fuss recently about a website that’s appeared, encouraging website owners to block users of the Firefox browser; http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com. The site includes an explanation as to why users have been redirected to their site, along with instructions for website owners explaining how to block visitors using the Firefox browser and redirect them to the WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com site.

The issue revolves around the AdBlock Firefox extension which, if installed, allows users to block certain adverts from websites they visit. Using the Adblock extension, pages which were previously littered with adverts (which might be distracting, irritating or even completely obscuring the actual page content) are stripped down to the actual site’s content. WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com argues that, because the advertising is of value, being paid for by the advertisers, “Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing. Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software.”

It’s easy to think of the internet as something like a room with a one-way mirror that you can look into but that nobody can look back and see you (unless of course you want to be seen- perhaps by posting comments or interacting with a site.) Well, that’s not really the case; when you want to look at a website, the server that it’s on needs to know what information to send out, and where to send it. Your browser sends some information to the server about what you want to see, how you got there and what you’re using to see it, and the server sends back the web page as a response.

So, for example for your current visit to this site, the server can see the following information;

Your user agent (that is, the is type of operating system and web browser that you’re using to see the page) can be identified as CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html) (where Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 running in Windows XP would identify itself with ‘Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1′), the page you clicked through to get here from was , and your IP address (the unique address that identifies your computer on the internet) is 38.107.179.212

Users of the Opera web browser may also be familiar with the sort of problems that can arise from the identification string— particularly if they were aware of the controversy when Microsoft’s MSN web portal page started serving different styling information to Opera users, which resulted in their web page appearing broken. (Opera responded with a ‘special edition’ of their browser which in turn transformed the MSN page into the language of the Swedich chef from the Muppet Show. “Bork bork.”)

Martin Matusiak argues in his Adorable Muppets blog that since Firefox users are a small percentage of online traffic, and AdBlock users are a percentage of that small percentage, that there isn’t actually a problem with a volume of people “stealing” content in the first place. On the O’Reilly blog is the point that that of the +/-2.5% of web users who actually click on adverts, it’s very unlikely that many of them are amongst those who have installed AdBlock.

Also, Firefox users who have installed the AdBlock plugin may also be aware of the flexibility of the Firefox browser, and it’s ability to mask the browser identification string using another plugin, making it appear to the server that a different browser is being used. In other words, of the visitors being blocked, the fraction who they are trying to block are probably technically savvy enough to get around it!

Of course, just because there isn’t a significant problem today, doesn’t mean that there won’t be a genuine problem at some point in the future. While many websites either cover their costs, or exist to create a revenue from advertising, the fact that it’s a fairly straightforward task for a user to install Firefox and AdBlock and enjoy an advert-free surfing experience means that anyone relying on this business model is unlikely to have a long-term successful project. If web owners continue to reply on selling advertising space, advertisers continue to make their adverts more and more obtrusive and distracting, and web users are faced with more and more increasingly obtrusive adverts, there is clearly a conflict between advertisers and consumers.

It’s worth noting that Google, one of the biggest advertising agencies on the internet (with over $10 billion in revenue from advertising in 2006 alone), have partnered with Firefox on a number of occasions; from releasing a Google toolbar for Firefox, to providing the default search engine for the browser, to cooperating with anti-phishing protection in Firefox 2. (On the other hand, Google’s adverts are unobtrusive, served in plain text rather than as animations, and designed to be as relevant to the site as possible.)

It seems to me that if the only reason for a website to exist is to sell advertising, it’s unlikely to be a great loss if advertising doesn’t generate enough revenue for it to be worthwhile writing. If a business is built around a flawed or obsolete business model, then it must either adapt or fail.

So, given that blocking adverts is unsurprisingly more effective than blocking the visitors who are blocking adverts, how should advertisers be reacting?

It seems to me that the problem ultimately stems from the fact that online content is traditionally viewed in much the same way as existing, traditional media, where adverts are designed to be as eye-catching as possible. As I’ve already talked about, website owners and designers are increasingly breaking free from the “online newspaper” model and exploiting the potential of the Web as new media. But there’s a significant difference in an advertisement on a page that a reader can simply choose to ignore, and an advertisement that can distract you with it’s animation alongside the text you want to read, or react when your mouse happens to wander over it (such as by triggering animations and sounds which can irritate the user.) Some adverts will literally obscure the content of a web page, demanding that users read the advert if only to figure out how to make them go away.

So long as advertisers continue to make online adverts increasingly intrusive, users will continue to seek ways to avoid them, in much the same way that 78% of owners of Digital Video Recorders will always or almost always skip through the commercials when watching a programme they have recorded. (It’s also worth noting the distinction that while online adverts will often encourage web users to visit a different website, television commercials won’t suggest that the viewer turn over to watch a competing channel, and newspaper adverts don’t encourage readers to pick up a different newspaper.)

So if the way online adverts work is flawed, what could replace them?

Just as the interaction between users and websites has evolved from the one-way “online catalogue/magazine” of the late 1990s into a more interactive “Web 2.0″ model (where user generated content is of increasing importance), the interaction between websites is becoming more predominant. Many websites will publish their API (Application Programming Interface), allowing developers to integrate other websites into their own website; for example, an estate agents might integrate their website with Google Maps to show the location of their properties, or a blogger might recommend books from Amazon with an affiliate link, earning them money from readers who click through and buy the books. Instead of visiting a number of websites regularly to check for updates, users might use an RSS feed to notify them of updates, sending the content directly to their regular users instead of waiting for the user to visit their website.

It seems to me that the future of online advertising lies in making the most of these new ways that technologies are being used. Instead of using increasingly obtrusive advertising to try to “hijack” a website by luring their visitors away, advertisers need to make their own content into something that will appeal to those who see them. Instead of building Flash games and putting them onto their own website to entertain visitors (then trying to entice visitors to visit their website), they could be making games for other websites; perhaps a branded Blog plugin which would allow bloggers to challenge their readers to a competition, or a branded Facebook Application which would let Facebook users challenge their friends. People are far more likely to look at something because a friend has asked them to than if a nameless advert has suggested it, and people are increasingly less likely to even look at the online adverts that are trying to get them to look at something else in the first place. (There is even a symptom being referred to as “right column blindness“, where users don’t even consciously register the right hand column of a website, because it’s so often used soley for displaying adverts.)

The simple problem is that if people don’t want to see something, they won’t look at it. So the simple solution is to make sure that adverts are something that people want to look at.

The meteoric rise of Facebook continues to astonish me. No doubt it’s in part due to my own demographic positioning; apparently living in London (the largest geographic group on Facebook with around 840,000 members- which is around a tenth of the city’s population) and being in the fastest rising age group (25 and over), it makes sense that I’d naturally be seeing a lot of my friends joining up and talking about it.

Earlier this week, after an apparent security glitch, Facebook closed down for a while (about 90 minutes or so, it seems.)

Now, there’s a number of websites that I’ve visited regularly over the years that I’ve been using the internet, ranging from functional tools like search engines or web-based email, to social sites like chatrooms or discussion forums (the Web 1.0 version of a Facebook group, I suppose), to the newer Web 2.0 sites like Digg and Flickr. I’ve followed the progress and speculation about films, TV programmes, bands and festivals. As a result, there have been a number of times when I’ve gone to a website and been momentarily horrified to find it temporarily closed down.

But I can’t remember a single instance where 90 minutes of a site’s downtime has been as newsworthy as earlier this week, when Facebook closed down for about an hour and a half for “upgrades.” I had pretty much expected to read stories about it on sites technology-oriented sites like Digg.com (which had a couple of stories speculating on the reasons behind the downtime) but I was a bit more suprised to read about it in the Metro this morning. (Not that I normally read the Metro I might add, but I’d just finished the book I was reading at the time…)

The thing that I’ve found particularly odd is that in the pieces I’ve seen, the story seems to be more about raising the security issues that happened than about the time the site was down; some users saw other (random) users inboxes (although not the actual messages, apparently.) Although there is speculation that the issues and downtime were due to the site being hacked, so far there doesn’t seem to be anything to back the theory up.

Meanwhile, Facebook Applications are spreading like wildfire, no doubt due to their viral nature (possibly best illustrated by those that turn users into zombies/ninjas/pirates/werewolves etc., allowing them to improve their zombies/ninjas/pirates/werewolves etc. rank by “infecting” other users.) At the end of July, there were over 2200 Applications— even though the Applications API had only been launched on 25th May.

The way Facebook applications work is that they interact with code on a third party website; so the Application can ask questions, then deal with the information however it likes. For example, a “Zombies” application might ask the question “how many of this users friends also have the Zombie application installed, and how many of them were referred by this user?” From the answer it gets, it can then work out what Zombie rank to give you. Great fun… However, once you’ve approved an application and given it access to your Facebook profile, it could also be asking questions about your personal information on your profile, the groups you’re a member of, events you’re attending, who you’re friends with etc. etc. Basically, opening up the information in your profile to the stranger who created the Application.

As I said in a previous post, trust is a very important factor with a site like Facebook, where lots of personal information is being stored, which could be used for a number of different purposes. It’s slightly strange (although fairly predictable) that an incident like Facebook being unavailable for an hour and a half attract more attention in terms of security and privacy than the information being made available to anyone who feels like making a Facebook Application.

Obviously, most Facebook users aren’t going to care about the mechanics of how third party applications work, any more than most web users care about the W3C’s specifications for HTML4.1. But it seems to me that we’ve become so accustomed to clicking OK to a bunch of legalese in a EULA (End User Licence Agreement) that we don’t really stop to consider what it is that we’re agreeing to. As long as users don’t care about how Facebook’s modified SQL works, what data it has access to, or what the consequences of their data being made available to third parties is, it’s not going to be a newsworthy story about how your personal information might be being exposed to the world— at least, not when it’s far more apparent that not being able to use Facebook for a bit when you’re bored at work= bad, but seeing how many of your friends you can turn into vampires = good…

(As an aside, just to illustrate Facebook’s growth, there are now 77 Dave Gormans, and 450 people who share my name on Facebook, compared to 50 and 352 about 2 months ago.)

To put this into perspective, the largest library in the world is the United States Library of Congress, with more than 134 million items, including 20 million catalogued books, 60 million manuscripts, 4.8 million maps and 12.5 million photographs. It’s estimated that the text held in the library (ignoring all the maps, photographs and illustrations) would constitute around 20 terabytes of information.

Currently, the English Wikipedia alone has over 1,850,703 articles, and the combined Wikipedias for all other languages greatly exceeds the English Wikipedia in size, giving a combined total of more than 1.74 billion words in 7.5 million articles in approximately 250 languages. The English Wikipedia alone has over 609 million words.

The term “information overload” was coined in 1970 by Alvin Toffler in his book “Future Shock.” In it, he argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, with an accelerated rate of technological and sociological change which leaves people feeling disconnected, suffering from “shattering stress and disorientation.” The irony is that one of the driving forces behind the Information Age of the 20th century was to solve the problem of information overload- where there was simply too much information available for any individual to keep track of it.

One example that’s often used to illustrate the matter is Mendelev’s experiments with cross-breeding peas and meticulously observing the characteristics of the new breeds. In his experiments, Mendelev effectively discovered genetics at around the same time that Darwin was creating the theory of “survival of the fittests”, but without an explanation of how traits were passed down to future generations. However, it wasn’t until his work had unknowingly been repeated that his well documented works were rediscovered and brought to a wider audience decades later.

In the 1940s, Vannevar Bush proposed the “memex”, a hypothetical device which would allow text to be cross-referenced, so you could jump from (for example) an article to the texts that an article quotes from, or to an index of related works, making more information immediately available. This hypothetical proposal today reads like a description of a mechanical version of a computer connected to the internet, which is no coincidence; much of the pioneering work done in the 1960s which formed the foundation of how computers work was inspired by Bush’s proposal.

The information overload of the 21st Century is slightly different. While there is undoubtedly an enormous volume of information bombarding us from day to day, with every conceivable space being used to remind us of products, brands and logos, the information overload on the internet isn’t so much a case of too much information, but with the quality of information.

It used to be the case that if you knew how to look for it (ie. how to use a search engine), you could find pretty much anything on the web; searching for the name of a hotel or restaurant would probably lead you to it’s web site (if it had one.) As the web became increasingly commercialised and search engine traffic became more valuable, the amount of information increased and using search engines became more of an art than simply entering a name— you needed to know what additional information to add to keep the results relevant, as well as knowing which search results to ignore. If you’ve ever searched for a website for the contact number for a hotel or restaurant and only found pages and pages of reviews, referrer sites and booking agencies (ie. people who take a commission when you place your booking through them) with no sign of the actual site you’re looking for, you’ll understand this problem.

Now, it seems that even if you’re the kind of person who has no problem with using advanced search terms and can find the information you’re looking for, the main problem is whether you can trust the information once you’ve found it.

Personally, I’ve found that when I need to know something, it’s easier to find reliable information about what I’m looking for in the 609 million words in Wikipedia than the 100 trillion words in Google’s index (so long as you check Wikipedia’s sources.) The quality of the information might not measure up to something like Encyclopedia Brittanica (which is about a third as many articles, and a fifteenth of the word count), but it’s easily verifiable (thanks to the policy of quoting references), and it’s more reliable than the free online alternatives. If I need information about a problem, such as using a particular piece of technology, my first point of call is still a Google search, but instead of searching for the answer to my question, I’ll start off with a search for a wiki or community discussion forum where the question is likely to have already been raised.

There is also a blurring of the lines between private and public space. On one hand, so much of the web is easily accessible to anyone that it feels public. Anyone can start a blog, share pictures or stories, or even take someone else’s pictures and email them to their friends. On the other hand, anything on the internet can just as well be seen as being private space; whether it’s the private property of whoever owns the server hosting the information in question, or the private correspondance of an individual that’s stored on an email server. This also means that a site which appears to be the work of a dedicated individual can turn out to be a corporate creation, engaging in “astroturfing”— corporate marketing campaigns masquerading as grassroots activity. A famous example of this was Sony’s “All I want for Xmas is a PSP” website; the site contained a blog which was purportedly written by “Charlie”, a teenager attempting to get his friend “Jeremy”‘s parents to buy him a PSP, providing links to t-shirt iron-ons, Christmas cards, and a “music video” of either Charlie or Jeremy “rapping”. However, visitors to the website soon discovered that the website was registered to a marketing company, and Sony was forced to admit the site’s true origin in a post on the blog. The site has since been taken down.

As far as I can tell, it’s a problem that isn’t going to go away; as more and more spam appears in all it’s forms (email, blog comments or domain squatting sites), the signal to noise ratio will keep getting worse. While print is restricted by financial factors (such as the cost of printing and distributing, or the brand value of a book or newspaper) as well as physical (such as the disposability of old newspapers), in a cheap and unregulated environment like the internet there’s nothing to restrict it’s growth. The way forward appears to be in finding new ways of applying an editorial control to how we select our own information.

The internet is hardware- a physical network of computers, all connected to one another and communicating using a set of open standards (including TCP and Internet Protocol.) The “web” is software- a virtual network of interlinked documents, built on a set of open standards (including the HTML, CSS and Javascript.)

The internet dates back to the ARPANET project of the 1960s, when computers were large, expensive machines with several terminals, so that they could be used by a number of people at the same time. Before the internet, people who used more than one computer needed a seperate terminal for each machine; by networking the computers, users could access 2 or more different machines from a single terminal. (There are also networks using the same technology but not connected to the internet; these are usually called intranets, creating a clear distinction between the two.)

The Web is much more recent, dating back to the 1990s when Tim Berners-Lee found himself with access to a network to hundreds of computers, but needing to know how each one of the hundreds of computers worked in order to actually access the information on them. He started the World Wide Web project as a way to solve that problem, by creating a platform that allowed information to be shared over different computers, regardless of their hardware, operating system and software. Although the World Wide Web operates over the internet, web technologies can be used over an intranet; technically, there’s no distinction.

In other words, the difference between the Web and the Internet is a little like the difference between a currency and a banknote; although they are both closely related, one is an abstract concept, and the other is a physical object.

To push the financial analogy (I’m not an economist, so this could be dangerous ground for me to tread), lets say that I were to create my own currency— let’s call it Some Random Dollar— and to say that it is worth exactly the same as the British pound, so I’d happily sell SRDs for one pound each; I wouldn’t even charge commission.

But as shops don’t accept them, it would seem that nobody would want it. (Like Scottish banknotes, only more so.) On the off chance that anyone would accept it, they would be far less likely to have trouble spending British Pounds than Random Dollars, so would obviously prefer not to. However, take a step into Random World, my wonderful theme park in a hidden location in Britain, where all the shops have to follow my rules; here, shops will only accept Random Dollars. Suddenly, the Random Dollar has a use, and people have a need for Random Dollars, so they buy a few to spend in the shops. Only now, it becomes clearer that I won’t change people’s money back; I’ll sell Random Dollars to people with Pounds, but I won’t buy them back again.

If you suddenly found yourself in Random World, you’d probably want to get out and into the world where you can spend your money more freely. When you found that your Random Dollars weren’t all they cracked up to be, you’d probably want to get your “real” money back.

My Random Dollar currency is kind of like British Pounds- they cost the same, they can be spent in shops, but it’s quite clear that they aren’t the same thing.

So what’s this got to do with the web? Well, as I mentioned, one of the ideals of the web is that it’s device independant- it shouldn’t matter what browser you’re using to look at a web page, and you shouldn’t need to know anything about the server the page is being delivered by.

The W3C’s specifications for HTML allow “objects” to be embedded into a page- for example, a Flash animation might be embedded to make a page more interesting, or music might be embedded in a page. However, some websites rely on those embedded objects— say, if Flash is used to create a website’s navigational menu (so that you can have pretty animations when your mouse hovers over a menu item), which renders the website unusable if you can’t see or access the Flash object.

With a site like this, if you went out and bought the latest computer and installed the latest web browser, you wouldn’t be able to see it without installing additional software. Or, more to the point, a different device (like a mobile phone) with a fully functional web browser wouldn’t be able to see them because the software needed hasn’t been written for it.

Meanwhile, Microsoft are also in the process of rolling out a project called Silverlight— a competitor to Adobe’s Flash. It’s only available for Windows and Mac OSX- there’s no sign of any Linux support from Microsoft. Windows 95 is no longer supported by Microsoft, so it’s unlikely that older machines with that operating system will ever be able to see web pages which rely on it.

Should sites like these, which rely on more than simply a web browser on the client’s machine, be called “websites”?

You could even take it a step further, and consider “normal” HTML/CSS websites which only work in Internet Explorer in Windows, because they rely on components that are only in the Windows operating system, such as ActiveX controls. (Such as those you get when you export a Microsoft Access report as an HTML page.) Or to take it to the next step, where the devlopers have built a layout that works in Internet Explorer, but fails to function properly on a standards-compliant browser…

The point is; should we be making a clearer distinction between the World Wide Web and the Internet, and calling sites which rely on proprietary plugins like Flash something other than “websites”, saving the term for pure HTML/CSS/ECMAscript sites?

Realistically, it’s never going to happen, but I think it’s interesting to ponder on what we’d call them instead.

With the advent of computers and the World Wide Web, it became much easier to share, index and search huge amounts of information. In fact, most of the ideas that modern computers were built around were specifically formulated to deal with the problem of information overload. As a result, it used to be (and still is, for many) that if you wanted to find out something, you’d search for it with Google. Google would search it’s index of thousands of websites, and try to guess what was the closest to the one you were looking for; one of the top four or five results would usually take you to a website that specialised in whatever subject you were looking for information about; more often than not, it would be someone’s personal, labour-of-love page. No matter how mundane or obscure a subject seems to be, it seems that there’s someone out there who is proud to be an expert in it.

Along with the results of its searches, Google also displayed (and still displays) ”sponsored links”- websites that had paid to be shown alongside relevant searches. A great strength of this was the clear separation between the search service that Google was providing and its business interests- although Google were selling spaces in its search results, your search results were the closest match possible- not the highest bidding website. This was extended to selling advertising space on websites- website owners would allow Google to put relevant sponsored links on their site and a portion of the advertising fee would go to the website owners.

In extending its business interests outside of its own pages, something changed. Websites that ranked highly in Google’s search results and benefited from the traffic that came from the search engine could be more profitable from their Google ads. If sites that made lots of money from their Google ads did well, then Google profited. The line between Google’s search results and advertising schemes was starting to become blurred.

There is a massive commercial value in a site that is at the top of a Google search, a considerable amount of money is being spent on search engine marketing (ensuring that websites appear at the top of search engines) and an increasing number of websites which are simply link farms or Splogs are appearing. All of which aim to make you click on their links (which aren’t necessarily the ones you are looking for), all serving to effectively dilute the results you get from a search engine.

Meanwhile, the kind of people who make websites for their particular passions tend to choose to spend their time and effort on improving their sites, rather than marketing or working on improving their Google rankings, and as a result will slide down the ranking and off the first page. Information overload is once again a problem.

As a result, I’ve found that if I’m looking for information- maybe something about a prominent public figure, an event in history or a brand I’m not familiar with, Google isn’t my first port of call anymore. Rather than search the entire world wide web (or at least as much of it as Google had indexed), I search Wikipedia. More often than not, I find what I’m looking for.

Do I trust Wikipedia? Well, as much I trust anything I read on the internet, which is to say that I take it with a pinch of saltm, wouldn’t invest my money based on what it says, and try to corroborate any information I do rely on with a second source (preferably from someone with an opposing point of view, who would be more likely to argue against it if it were false.) But it’s in trying to find the second source online which highlights one of the problems with a Google search- you tend to find that quite often, in looking for something to verify a Wikipedia article, you simply find word-for-word copies of the same article on different websites; sometimes crediting the original Wikipedia article, more often not.

On the other hand, maybe Google will be able to react effectively to the problem and find a solution to separate the ‘real’ websites from the spam and link farms- I personally believe that if anyone can do it, then it’s Google. But without having skilled people checking each website individually (and remember that Google prides itself on being a fully automated search tool), how do you tell the difference between a website built by a fan of a company or product and something built by the company themselves? It seems like a Herculean task at this stage- with over 8 billion pages indexed in September 2005, when they removed the number from their home page, and an estimated hundred trillion words now indexed.

Of course, the idea of Wikipedia taking over from Google is a flawed comparison; after all, it can be easier to find a particular Wikipedia article using Google rather than Wikipedia’s own search tool. However, it does seem to me that the days of a search engines results being the starting point in a quest for information may soon be drawing to a close.

Maybe its the start of a new trend; if the increased prominence and popularity of the Wikipedia project brings more understanding and awareness of the Wiki format, maybe we’ll see more specialised wikis appearing, devoted to more specialised subjects. Maybe alternative ways of searching for information will become more popular; although they still come under the Google umbrella, the Google Images, Maps and Froogle are all effectively specialised search functions (which specifically search for images, places and prices) offering alternative ways to look for specific information. Perhaps its simply that the world wide web has become too large to condense into a single meaningful index, and a more accurate starting point is needed?

Whatever happens, it looks like the problem of information overload is still going to be with us for a while.

In much the same way that information technology using computers has mimicked and adopted terminology from the paper based office, the art of typography has moved on from Gutenberg’s movable type printing press. (For example, we still use the term “leading” to refer to the space between lines of text, even though the strips of lead used in printing no longer have anything to do with the process.)

Before the word processor, typography was the domain of professional editors and typesetters. With the introduction of the word processor, users had much more control over the layout of the text; the distinction between a typewriter and a printing press became blurred. Todays word processors are closer to desktop publishing applications than electronic typewriters, with a wide range of font faces and sizes, page layouts, and even the ability to include images. Features that are available to pretty much anyone with access to a computer, but very few people are being taught how to use them.

Although basic English, such as grammar, spelling and punctuation are taught to everyone at school, the art of typography, which is increasingly becoming a part of day to day life, isn’t a subject which gets much attention. While an average school leaver could no doubt correct most of the spelling mistakes in a copy of the Guardian and probably point out the aberrant apostrophes in signs over market stalls, it’s a tiny minority who could point out where a hyphen has been used in place of an em-dash, or where an inappropriate font has been used for a particular purpose.

After all, in handwritten text there’s no discernable difference between a hyphen, an em-dash and an en-dash (“-”, “—” and “–”), so these fine distinctions don’t come into play when learning to read and write, but in the closely controlled text of websites, emails and MS Word documents, they each have different roles to play. (In the context of the semantic web, the difference becomes more important still— a machine can’t guess that you probably meant something different to what you typed.)

Typography is a tool that can be used to give the page a natural rhythm. When people read text on a screen, they tend to skim, rather than take in every single word. It’s very easy for a reader to click and move on to something else. That means that it’s even more important than on the printed page that anything disturbing that rhythm should only do so in a planned, deliberate fashion. If something needs to be emphasised as a part of the text, then there is a set of tools available to any writer to manipulate the rhythm of the text, drawing attention to certain words or phrases; punctuation. Typography offers ways to draw attention in different ways.

Changing the style of text— using a different size, different colours, different fonts, or even simply changing the margins— can make it feel as though the reader is being “spoken to” in a different voice.

Inset text or italics can be used to imply that a piece of text is a quotation, or being cited from a different source to the main text body.

Smaller text can also draw the readers attention to it— despite the smaller size indicating less importance in the hierachy of the text, the break in an established pattern and rhythm draws the readers attention to the text.

Like poor grammar, poor typography is rarely an actual impediment to communcation. However, coming across badly gramar in the middle of a sentence can be the literary equivalent to hitting an unexpected pothole in a road (yes, the mistake at the beginning of this sentence was a deliberate illustration of this point.) The sentence still makes it’s point, the meaning comes across fine, but the flow is disturbed. Also, there is the implicit suggestion that, as an author hasn’t bothered to properly proofread and correct the text that you’re reading, maybe it’s not worth your time to bother to read it? Or maybe the author simply doesn’t have the education to recognise the mistake that they’ve made; in a medium where an audience can jump away in the click of a mouse, it’s not a good idea to leave your reader asking themselves how much the author cares about the fundamentals of written English.

The first generation of websites (retrospectively dubbed “Web 1.0″) were based on the idea of a fairly static website being seen by many visitors- not much different to an online version of an existing shop, magazine, newspaper etc., but existing in “cyberspace”, and without the overheads that go along with the “traditional” businesses.

Exactly what “Web 2.0″ means varies depending on who you talk to. To some, it’s about a particular visual design style; rounded corners, pastel shades, soft reflections and so on. To others, it’s about interactive sites; social networking, user generated content, and a platform for the sharing of information. To others still, it’s about the implementation of technologies such as AJAX, breaking pages down into smaller independent units for more efficient transfer of information, and allowing parts of a page to change and update without refreshing the entire page. The one thing that can usually be agreed is that it represents the second generation of websites, and it’s principally a marketing concept, rather than a genuine “new version” of the web.

Whenever any new media has appeared in the past, it has tended to start out being used in the same way as an existing media- the first printing press was used to print lots of copies of bibles quickly, which were previously copied out by hand. Radio broadcasts started out by reading out books before they moved on to broadcasting current news events. TV started out with people reading the same stories to a camera that were already coming over the radio before they moved on to going out and actually showing people what was happening in the world, rather than just telling them.

The pattern is that each time, the new media has appeared, people have learnt how to use it, then it has developed. The Gutenberg Press was originally used to print lots of copies of bibles, which previously were all hand-written. The wide availability of printed texts that the Gutenberg press brought to the world then led to increased literacy levels, meaning that after some time (as a potential audience developed), the press could be used to distribute new books, or to spread new ideas (such as the spread of protestant works in Catholic Europe.) Stories became something that people could read privately, rather than have read out to them, and there was a shift from an oral to a written tradition of storytelling.

From Gutenberg’s invention, it took over two hundred years before it became possible for an author to write a book, print many of copies of it and then sell the book to make a profit. In comparison, from the announcement of the World Wide Web project to “Web 2.0″ took just 14 years.

However, the majority of the concepts that make up “Web 2.0″ have been around since the original proposal of the World Wide Web. The interesting thing about “Web 2.0″ is that it isn’t so much a revolution, as simply a greater realisation of what the web was originally intended to be; a way for information to be freely exchanged over the internet. It seems to be a significant step in the web establishing itself as a new media.

I don’t think it’s so much a mark of something new as it is an acknowledgement that so many of the companies that tried and failed to succeed during the dotcom boom were falling so short of what could be done with the web. Rather than trying to make a screen version of paper products (books, newsletters, brochures etc.), website designers and developers are now recognising that the web is a new medium, and treating it as such; making the most of the huge potential audience, the interactive nature of a web page.

So what comes next? Well, it’s possible that Web 3.0 will come to have meaning in terms of something like the next-generation of distributed computing, where computers share the workload over a network. As PCs get faster and more powerful, they actually use the power for less and less time- meaning more and more unused capacity- via the web (and with much more bandwidth than is currently widely available), they could be networked to share and process information over a global network. Perhaps it will represent the web moving away from the PC and integrating seamlessly with other networked platforms, such as mobile devices or televisions. Maybe it will mark the day when your fridge works like a hotel minibar, notifying Tesco when you’re out of butter. But as Web 2.0 is simply a revision of the idea behind the idea of the World Wide Web, it hasn’t set the web on a path with any clear “next step” to take.

Not yet, anyway.

The art of writing online headlines is slightly different to print, because you tend to be writing for a completely different audience. In print, you need to stand out more than the other newspapers in the newsagent and be the one that your target audience reaches for and buys- because that’s where the money is. Online, you don’t need to attract the attention of potential readers- you need to attract the attention of search engines, so that you’re higher up the search list when someone’s looking for a story about your subject.

While a newspaper headline will benefit from a snappy phrase, an amusing pun, or something that makes an otherwise dull story appear worth reading, these techniques can have a negative effect on a stories search results- the same stories online will benefit more from having the key words in the title, focussing on the search engines to bring in more readers (and therefore increase the value of their advertising)- ultimately, trying to predict what someone might put into a Google search for the story, rather than focussing on the readers they are ultimately aiming at. (This is one reason that I keep my own personal pages free from adverts, and focus on writing what I would want to read for myself.)

So sometimes the headline is the story- the actual article just fills in the dates and ages, and maybe some eyewitness reports to fill a column inch or two. But sometimes, a story is only a story because people are telling it, and when you take away the attention grabbing headline, there isn’t actually a story behind it. Such as in this article from the BBC;

Kryptonite’ discovered in mine

Kryptonite is no longer just the stuff of fiction feared by caped superheroes.
A new mineral matching its unique chemistry – as described in the film Superman Returns – has been identified in a mine in Serbia.

According to movie and comic-book storylines, kryptonite is supposed to sap Superman’s powers whenever he is exposed to its large green crystals.

The real mineral is white and harmless, says Dr Chris Stanley, a mineralogist at London’s Natural History Museum.

“I’m afraid it’s not green and it doesn’t glow either

Ok- so this “kryptonite” isn’t physically the same as the Kryptonite from the film and comics. It’s very different. That’s not the connection…

“Towards the end of my research I searched the web using the mineral’s chemical formula – sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide – and was amazed to discover that same scientific name, written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luther from a museum in the film Superman Returns.

“The new mineral does not contain fluorine (which it does in the film) and is white rather than green but, in all other respects, the chemistry matches that for the rock containing kryptonite.”

So that’s both physically and chemically, this substance is not the same as the Kryptonite from the film and comics.

The mineral cannot be called kryptonite under international nomenclature rules because it has nothing to do with krypton – a real element in the Periodic Table that takes the form of a gas. [...] Instead, it will be formally named Jadarite when it is described in the European Journal of Mineralogy later this year.

So apart from it’s physical appearance, it’s chemical structure, and it’s name, it’s just like Kryptonite!

In a similar vein, I think the Superman comics are based on my own life. Sure, there are a few subtle differences- I was born in Bolton, England, rather than on the planet Krypton. My alter ego works in administration, rather than journalism. Superman’s alter ego spells his name with a “K” (Clark Kent), while I spell my name without a K (“Scott Thompson”.) I don’t wear glasses while in “disguise”. Oh, and I don’t have the ability to fly, run faster than a speeding bullet, or to shoot laser beams from my eyes.

Apart from that, the coincidences are breathtaking.

(Apologies to the writers of Six Pairs of Pants, whose superhero joke I stole.)