Content and services

Cory Doctorow, writing in the Canadian Globe and Mail, says that some of the more than 4.5 million World of Warcraft players are taking aim at Chinese communist censors. The popular multiplayer online game has a worldwide audience of participants, including many in China.

Blogs certainly have not caught on the way blog advocates thought. A Gallup poll says only 9% of Internet users read one regularly, and those numbers have not changed in a year. In Internet time, that's a very long time.

I have always been more interested in the technology that enables blogging, rather than the blogging itself. The weak link in blogging is the writing.

I got this link from a friend. It's a short video clip hosted on Google, and when I click on it, I get this message (so do many other people).

This video is not playable in your country.

As my friend asked, "Are living in China now?"

Google has stepped on a banana peel at the top of a very steep hill.

Update 2/22/06

I was completely wrong about this...see the comment below for a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Google's share value has declined 23% of late, mostly fueled by investor worries that the company has really overreached on its plans for global domination. Google's plan to build its own, parallel Internet just smacks of a "Let's party like it's 1999," when numerous high flying firms burned through billions of investor money chasing the same pipe dream.

Rocketboom is creating a buzz online. It's a daily video Web log, or vlog, for short. Video blogs have been around for at least a year, but Rocketboom's minimalist approach, couple with an eBay auction for advertising, may just catch on as a model for both managing video content/commentary and for selling ads.

Google's new version of its Desktop toolbar will copy the files on your computer to its servers, where you can search them. Ostensibly, this free service is designed to make life easier for people that have multiple computers (like a desktop machine and a laptop). By letting Google index all the files on both computers, you can find any file on either machine simply by searching Google.

I worded the title of this article carefully; I used "may," not "will." Google may end up as de facto owner of the world's information, and I could be wrong. Time will tell.

Google's early success came by doing something well that no one else was doing--searching the Web. Google studied the behavior of early search engines like Alta Vista, and came up with better search algorithms. Everybody liked Google because it did something no one else could do--produce relevant search results.

In yet another example of "...the sky is NOT falling," video downloads of popular TV shows appear to be actually raising the ratings of some shows.

In other words, people are downloading shows they have not watched on TV, and then decide that a) they like the show, and b) they tune in during prime time to watch it.

I still see too many community organizations taking their Web sites for granted. It's not uncommon to find community and economic development Web sites that are badly out of date, with stale information, poorly designed graphics, and/or hard to find content. A new study shows that people form a first impression of a Web site in as little as 50 milliseconds. Researchers previously thought that it would take at least a half second to do that.

The National Consumer Council in the UK says consumers are losing their rights to the music and videos they are purchasing. As content publishers try to fight piracy, they are making it more difficult for legitimate purchasers of digital content to actually play and own what they think they are buying. Publishers want restrictions on what machines can play what content (forcing hardware manufacturers to include built in controls), when it can be played, and how often.

Via BoingBoing, some companies are painting the tops of their buildings so they can be viewed from space.

If this elicits a "Huh?" response, keep in mind that tools like Google Earth give everyone on the planet a free satellite view of their neighborhood. Target is doing this, but others are sure to follow. And it makes perfect sense; if someone is trying to find a Target store, a giant Target logo visible from the space view works.

Google has announced that it will get into the video business. This was not really a surprise to anyone; the company has been trialing its video service for several months.

Jakob Nielsen probably knows more about the psychology of the Web (how people use it) than anybody else in the world. So when he says, "Search engines are leeches," it is a good idea to pay close attention.

A Marquette University dental student has had an expulsion reversed after the widespread publicity forced the university to back down.

The dental student foolishly made some short-tempered remarks about teachers and fellow students on his personal blog. The school responded like a three year old with a temper tantrum by kicking the student out and revoking a full scholarship.

But a local newspaper and radio station, along with bloggers, publicized the university's actions.

I was looking for a CD the other day, and was surprised to find that it cost $19. The music industry has been crying in its beer for years now, claiming CD sales are down because of grandmothers and 10 year old girls downloading pirated copies of music.

Real Networks president Rob Glaser stated in a recent interview, "Most users that are filling their iPods are still doing it through piracy."

This is the same line that the music industry uses. I have never understood the marketing value of claiming that all your existing and future customers are crooks. And these companies usually go farther and whine that these crook customers "...just don't get it." Where "get it" means they won't buy their stuff.

Down near the bottom of this interview with NBC Television Group president Jeff Zucker, he states that there are a half million downloads per week of just one NBC television show--Battlestar Galactica.

A wave of new search engines are coming. The business theory behind them is that peeling off just a small piece of Google's massive market domination is good money. Also driving things is the growing realization that Google has not done a darn thing to improve their search engine since they rolled it out (not as far as I can tell, anyway), making the company vulnerable to anyone who can provide a better mousetrap.

Apple has added more video content to the iTunes Music Store, which probably needs to be renamed as the video becomes a bigger piece of what is sold. Current shows added include The Office and Battlestar Galatica, as well as a bunch of older shows, ranging from Knight Rider to Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The deal is with NBC Studios.

This very short article discusses a new use for the video iPod. Real estate agents are making short video clips of homes for sale and making them available for download into a video iPod. Other agents can download the videos and to learn more about a property and/or show the videos to prospective home buyers.