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... will it work? Yahoo! tried this back in 2005 and it failed miserably. Too much promised up front with too little returned. Publishers dropped it like a potato before Yahoo! could improve the contextual workings to increase the CTR. I know because I tried it, and quickly discarded it.

Lesson is, don't promise something you can't deliver, or are planning to deliver at a later date. Odds are, publishers will return to the "tried and true" and never look back.

On this very Slashdot it was reported Microsoft was releasing an h.264 plugin for Firefox. It's a lot more realistic to get plugins being used by one browser than to make plugins for every other browser than your own and expect them to see widespread installation.

Chrome market share is growing (taking away some from Firefox, some from IE and Safari). But they do not have nearly enough marketshare even between Chrome and Firefox to dictate anything about video formats.

You are dreaming if you think the combination of Chrome and Firefox exceeds 50%. Even if it were 50%, that is not enough to convince anyone to support the video tag, when they can simply keep using h.264 in Flash players which will cover 99.9% of all browsers hitting them.

[ But, in countries like china, other places, your free speech DIRECTLY has an effect. everything hinges on opinions of people -> not the money people has to exercise their freedoms. You can reach anyone, and you can change minds, if you are let speak freely. ]

Good luck voicing your opinion in China....

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704444304575628410670226430.html

The US is better than china, anyone can be free to twitter and tweet and post on facebook etc..., in china you bad mouth the government and you have to go to a "reeducation through hard labor camp".

http://worldjournalism.wordpress.com/2010/11/19/1-tweet-1-year-of-jail-time-in-china/

Here are two sites where people can bad mouth the government in the USA, not shut down yet...nor should they ever be.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/
http://www.freerepublic.com/

As for your Money=Free Speech in America argument, are you talking about Talk Radio and TV?

Do you think anyone should be able to have their own talk radio station who has an opinion? I don't see any private or public talk radio stations in china airing anti-chinese government opinion, do you? Do you think everyone has a "right" to use a government provided photocopier so you can publish anti government flyers everywhere? Who pays for the toner, the paper?

The internet is a new vast and wild frontier where people can post their opinions to be picked up my Millions of citizens, be it either youtube, twitter, facebook or your own website.

Even the poorest individual in the USA can go into a public library and post things that can potentially be read by millions if not billions of internet citizens.

[this is the recent data about situation in usa. 80% of population only get 15% of income. basically, 80% of 300 million, basically 240 million people, are not in a position to exercise their freedoms. had it been possible, there would be at least any kind of different political or social situation due to these people 'becoming rich' and practicing their freedoms. ]

How many people in the above have internet access or easy access to it?

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/05/14/18-of-us-households-have-no-internet-access

Only 18% of households in the USA don't have internet, most of those are older people who don't care to have it in the first place. And last i heard you cannot be turned away from a public library for being "too poor".

What is the wealth distribution in China? China does have a growing Middle Class, but it is no where nearly as big percentage wise as the US.

"At the keynote today at SXSW, Microsoft's Danah Boyd placed a lot of emphasis on Google's privacy "fails" with Buzz. The topic of the keynote was the relationship between privacy and publicity, and she certainly covered much more territory and social media in general, but it was interesting that Google Buzz was essentially the first thing talked about"

Who's Messing With the Google Book Settlement? Hint: They're in Redmond, Washington

1:http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/06/30/1618216/Regular-Domains-Have-More-Malware-Than-Porn-Sites?from=rss
Regular Domains Have More Malware Than Porn Sites

2:
China is not the source of all hackers or malware.
the USA is still the main source of spam and almost certainly still the main source of malware.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/04/28/us-still-main-source-of-spam

Cut out the racist crap.
China is no worse when it comes to hackers than the US.

We are in a world without precedent. While I share girlintrainings's skepticism and understand the point, I don't write off the capability of citizens to make the world and the government a better place.

THE WEB IS 17 YEARS OLD. Give it time.

Her point exactly. Would you say that world governments as a whole are heading towards less or more restriction of the internet? Yeah, I thought so.

And much of the censorship apparatus is being manufactured by...yep, you guessed it...Americans.

Sotomayor is definitely pro IP, but she is NOT pro corporation. The two are not mutually inclusive.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/06/05/whats-sotomayors-stance-on-intellectual-property

She is not pro-corporation as stated above. One of her first comments while being questioned made that very clear. She believes corporations should NOT be granted any rights of a 'person'.

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/09/17/is-sotomayors-corporations-arent-people-comment-a-harbinger/tab/article/

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/05/27/comparing-smartphone-market-share-by-operating-system

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1126812

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian_OS#Competition

That is all.

If you look just at smartphones, then you see why. Andriod is still a relatively new platform, so the fact it doesn't have much much market share isn't surprising.

Global Market share from early this year puts Nokia in the lead(50.3%), followed by RIM(20.9%), followed by Apple(13.7%). It looks like Apple and RIM are still gaining ground, with Apple at 11% of the global market.

US marketshare is harder to find good numbers for, but it looks like RIM and Apple are beating Nokia in the US. Plus, people actually use their iPhones a lot.

In fact, yes, people have lost data from Google. That isn't even the only example one can find.

A loss leader is a product that is sold to consumers for less than it costs the seller, with the expectation that consumers will buy other products as part of the deal. Unless there are a lot of people who pay for iTunes rather than use the free download (or get it bundled with other Apple products), it is a loss leader, and advertising revenues from the iTunes Store -- or any other B2B revenues that Apple sees from iTunes -- don't change that.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2006/01/24/apple-cents-and-advertising

Apple makes money off of each song and video sold...therefore by definition it is not a loss leader.

MS is pouring a ton of money into advertising bing. I was watching a few episodes of the new Full Metal Alchemist on hulu yesterday and every episode had nothing but adds for a big bing promotional that is going to be live on hulu. They are calling it Bingathon

The poor child can simply forward the offending text to a central authority. The central authority can then call the bully's mom.

Problem Solved.

Unless of course it's a case of the mother being more sadistic than her child, as in the case of the Myspace Suicide Mom.

nah we will just pay 700 billion to prop it up for a few months and let the next guy deal with it.

I think realistically 700 billion could fix the internet in the entire US. It would make up for the 200 billion we lost a few years ago.* Not only that we could use it to help our friends to the north.

* Article, first one I found about it.

Alright, then the only justifiable thing to do, if you want such services, is to persuade your friends, family, neighbors, etc, to want it as well. Show them why it's better, why they should want it, why if they all unite, their desires will be fulfilled.

Sounds like they had done that. Otherwise the city officials would get voted out. If enough people are behind it, then the city can do it without fear of voter wrath.

Can you provide some sources for this?

Sure. Some good articles here, here, here, and here.

Alright, then the only justifiable thing to do, if you want such services, is to persuade your friends, family, neighbors, etc, to want it as well. Show them why it's better, why they should want it, why if they all unite, their desires will be fulfilled.

Sounds like they had done that. Otherwise the city officials would get voted out. If enough people are behind it, then the city can do it without fear of voter wrath.

Can you provide some sources for this?

Sure. Some good articles here, here, here, and here.

Alright, then the only justifiable thing to do, if you want such services, is to persuade your friends, family, neighbors, etc, to want it as well. Show them why it's better, why they should want it, why if they all unite, their desires will be fulfilled.

Sounds like they had done that. Otherwise the city officials would get voted out. If enough people are behind it, then the city can do it without fear of voter wrath.

Can you provide some sources for this?

Sure. Some good articles here, here, here, and here.

You forget about a LOT more "evil" stuff, like Google discriminating against its own employees based on age and such. Couple quick links:

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/10/04/old-guy-smacks-google-for-age-discrimination

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-143920.html

And that's still ignoring the over-charging people over click fraud (for which the settlement was a couple more bucks worth of advertizing) and contless more issues.

They've been doing evil for a while.

Meanwhile, they pretend to care about Linux, yet, there's no Picasa for Linux (no, running under WINE doesn't count), nor Chrome, etc. Lots of talk, but they don't put money where their mouth is.

Yes, they do have a good search engine, but that's about it. They're there to make serious $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ by throwing ads at us.

>The US is a capitalist economy, right ?
Not for long. With the government owning companies, we are fast headed to becoming the USSA (United Socialist States of America)

In a truly capitalist economy the market would have crashed and hit rock bottom by now and we'd have a lot less airlines. However it might be sustainable by now, if the depression were over and it had run it's course. We have become experts at delaying the inevitable.

>Isn't the market supposed to fix this ?
In a market where tax dollars are paying for service infrastructure? There can only be truly one of each type (cable, fiber, telco) That opportunity has been destroyed by our politicians. EG Verizon gets the politicians to spend tax dollars on infrastructure. Other telcos do rent this from them, but ultimately cannot provide the same level of service for the rates Verizon can. They are usually short lived because they can't really compete. Verizon doesn't pay rent on it 8). They are double dipping. They get tax dollars on the back end and charge us for service on the front.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2006/03/09/telco-money-grab-numbers-revealed
"Costs to Customers - We estimate that $206 billion dollars in excess profits and tax deductions were collected - over $2000 per household. "

Not only are we paying for it for them, but we lag behind the rest of the world (#16 for broadband penetration). At least in a real socialist country, you'd get it for free, but we have to pay a lot of cash for bandwidth running on gear we paid for with our taxes.

As it is, we're headed for disaster. The government getting involved just prolongs things. Maybe after the world economy collapses, learns some valuable lessons and starts to recover, we'll have true capitalism again in the US.

I am optimistic in this regard. However, for now, capitalism is on life support because the economy is artificially propped up with tax payer dollars.

I'm sure I'll get flamed for this post, but I'm used to it. Nobody likes to hear the truth.

-Viz

But several countries (Brazil and USA to name 2 cases) required Google to give their user's data to government agencias, or to censor content to comply with local laws.

"Don't be evil" looks like an ok policy. But following law is good or evil? and what if that law (or at least the people behind it) is evil?

Your employer seems to be running out of money, thanks to foolish spending. $6 Billion sounds like a lot for a company that's about to blow its last $20 billion on stock buy backs, but that's just part of the great ongoing collapse. Got your total fuckwad resume polished up? It will do better than one that puts emphasis on any other M$ skillz when they are gone.

Well right now Vista is a work in progress http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/04/18/ballmer-vista-a-work-in-progress .

But maybe after that?

The AOl, Newscorp stuff, is just business as usual, a means by which to force up M$ bid

Actually News Corp proposed joining with Microsoft to buy Yahoo! "Microsoft & News Corp. Joint Bid For Yahoo". News Corp-Microsoft talks are still going on on a joint venture to acquire Yahoo!.

Yang has his head up his a** and he is so darn proud that "oh no this company cannot get taken over by Microsoft."

Except some of Yahoo!'s largest shareholders want Microsoft to raise it's bid: "Yahoo's second-largest shareholder says Microsoft will need to up ante". "Legg Mason Offers Yahoo Some Support".

Personally I would be, "ok you want to pay me a few billion? Hey sure and then I will start a new company again."

I hadn't thought of that and I wonder if the shareholders above thought of it too. Depending on how much they paid for their shares they may come out ahead by selling to MS then taking the money and starting a new business like Yahoo! with ads, search, and communities. The problem though would be in recruiting enough surfers.

The would probably win a proxy fight because those investors who have shares in Yahoo have more shares in MSFT.

Except some of Yahoo!'s largest shareholders want Microsoft to raise it's offer before they will approve it: "Yahoo's second-largest shareholder says Microsoft will need to up ante". "Legg Mason Offers Yahoo Some Support".

2. Yahoo predictably resists the offer, to the point where it's arguably *not* acting in the best interests of it's shareholders.

Except some of Yahoo!'s largest shareholders want Microsoft to raise it's bid: "Yahoo's second-largest shareholder says Microsoft will need to up ante". Legg Mason Offers Yahoo Some Support.

How can an open source software company with $70 million or so in revenue and no profits to speak of be worth $1 billion?

This is where you have to think outside of the box. There are some who believe that Sun may simply be the pawn of Oracle. Oracle could not buy MySQL directly because of anti-trust issues etc.. Not to mention, Sun and Oracle have been "strategic partners" for a very long time. However, another company could purchase MySQL to kill it off.

I am not saying this is exactly what happend, but I do think the above author and Dvorak make some good points. Disclaimer: IANADF - I am not a Dvorak fan :)

"I suspect that they'll (Google) take exception to Rogers fiddling with their carefully designed home page - a page where simplicity and a clean layout are defining characteristics."

You appear to be correct sir.

Bullshit. Public investment doesn't have to come directly from congress http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2006/05/12/telcos-lay-billion-goose-egg. When congress allows the telecoms to charge more, to build on public easements, or to screw their competitors and offer more services than they should fairly be allowed to, it's the public paying the tab. We've let them have more than enough leeway with what is rightfully the public's infrastructure.

"We may wake the giant, but we're ready.

"We may wake the giant, but we're ready.

Even if it wasn't true, one still needs to ask what they did with the money? A lot of telcos got incentives in the 90's to lay fiber optic but laid some copper and, apparently, pocketed the rest of the money ( http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2006/05/12/telco s-lay-billion-goose-egg ). So, now, they want more money and a government bail-out for having not delivered what they were paid to do a decade ago.

Starting in the early 1990's, the Clinton-Gore Administration had aggressive plans to create the "National Infrastructure Initiative" to rewire ALL of America with fiber optic wiring, replacing the 100 year old copper wire. The Bell companies - SBC, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest, claimed that they would step up to the plate and rewire homes, schools, libraries, government agencies, businesses and hospitals, etc. if they received financial incentives.

- By 2006, 86 million households should have already been wired with a fiber (and coax), wire, capable of at least 45 Mbps in both directions, and could handle 500+ channels.
- Universal Broadband: This wiring was to be done in rich and poor neighborhoods, in rural, urban and suburban areas equally.
- Open to ALL Competition: These networks were to be open to ALL competitors, not a closed-in network or deployed only where the phone company desired.
- This is not Verizon's FIOS or SBC's Lightspeed fiber optics, which are slower, can't handle 500 channels, are not open to competition, and are not being deployed equitably.
- This was NOT fiber somewhere in the network ether, but directly to homes.

This one wasn't. I was curious, so I looked it up.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/06/19/youtu be-comprises-10-of-all-internet-traffic

My company hosts an anonymous proxy (see my sig). While there is a fair amount of pr0n and the like, there is a *lot* of traffic from China and other countries with restrictive laws about what you can and cannot research. This only amounts to about 15-30% of our traffic though. Most of our traffic is to sites like myspace, facebook, photobucket etc.

There are actually many good reasons for using an anonymous proxy.

1). You want to search for information regarding an embarrassing physical condition and don't want those URLs logged at your router.
2). You are worried about the site you are visiting trying to infect your machine. Most anonymous proxies will block most scripts (in addition to advertisements).
3). You are researching your competitions website and don't want to show up in their logs.
4). In the U.S. you have a right to privacy and you simply want to exercise that right.
5). You work in government and want to visit sites that might otherwise be logged or blocked.

There are many other legitimate uses for anonymous proxies.

As a disclaimer, my company does not keep any logs -- the logs are rotated nightly at which point a cron runs and deletes all of the previous days logs. Our URLs are obfuscated but not encrypted. A sysadmin on the clients end could log all of these connections at their router and be able to decipher the URLs someone is visiting.

We also offer an SSL encrypted (https://) version of the site. You do have to trust our certificate though :) Logs are rotated nightly and dumped, same as on the "insecure" version of the site.

EMI has been pitching the possibility of selling its entire music collection to the public in MP3 form ...

EMI, which is the world's largest independent music company, reported revenue of £867.9m and £62.7m profit for the six months ending 30 September last year.

"The fact that you are here, writing that, means they are democracies, or at least you have free speech. Go say that in China, or another real regime, and watch what happens"

We have free speech as long as we don't excercise it.

Jailed for blogging ..
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/27/opinion/eds age.php

Blogger arrested at Atlantica conference
br> http://oldmaison.blogspot.com/2006/06/my-few-hours -in-jail-with-saint-john.html

French Blogger Arrested Then Sued
http://www.webpronews.com/news/ebusinessnews/wpn-4 5-20050513FrenchBloggerArrestedThenSued.html

Canadian blogger arrested trying to enter the US.
http://www.ensight.org/archives/2005/03/17/the-end -of-the-story/

A few good points that were overlooked in the original article:

"...First, Google and Ames will focus on cataloguing NASA's "most useful" information and making it available on the Internet. This includes real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars, and real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle.

No, there was no mention of space-based contextual advertising...

...This agreement between NASA and Google will soon allow every American to experience a virtual flight over the surface of the moon or through the canyons of Mars," said NASA Administrator Michael Griffin at Headquarters in Washington..." [source]

OP argued without links, but so did I.

Google may not technically be a monopoly however it's market share is rising and Google is plenty on it's way to becoming a monopoly.

Lastly, as the person who decides where my companies online advertising budget gets spent I have to tell you that Google overwhelmingly provides much of my traffic. Far more than those charts are showing. Many of my constituents have confessed similar circumstances.

P.S. This is a discussion, not a shouting match.

This one.

Also covered here.

And here.

If there was crypto used, it absolutely sucked.

If all you need is a modem line tap or an illegal program to crack ATM's, there isn't much security is there?

I don't think there is crypto. I think the information is sent across the phone lines as plain text. The purpose of the modem line tap or illegal program is to convert the signal going over the line (the same signal you hear when you pick up the phone during a fax or internet connection) to text. From there, no mention is made of encryption.

See this page. "The Modem Line Tap, MLT2400A is a modem protocol analyzer that translates telephone data communications into standard ASCII characters for display on a PC screen."

If the data was properly encrypted before it was sent, the hackers wouldn't have been able to use the data. If there was crypto, it was token crypto at best. Just enough to tell their share holders it was encrypted.

But don't all search engines on the web track all searches? AOL comes to mind...

Yahoo Mail blocks gmail invites as well.
http://www.webpronews.com/news/ebusinessnews/wpn-4 5-20040621AreHotmailandYahooBlockingGmailInvites.h tml

According to this site:

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-2 0060124Apple55CentsAndAdvertising.html

The network/production company makes $1.44 cents per $1.99 download for a tv show. This compares to an "estimated 57 cents in advertising revenue per user generated under the current model." They make over 2.5x as much per download as they do from television.

Flash has been searchable for years. Google Can Now Index Flash (2004 article).

No, he really was thinking of India

The cool thing is that through AWS (Amazon Web Services) Amazon lets you into some of their data. An example here is the sales history of Running Blogs with Slash . TicTap keeps 60-day sales rank history. I'm guessing with this book there was some free publicity on June 13 and July 19, because the ranks shot up a whole lot. You can then see it died out for a while, then shot back up.

First off, Amazon sales rankings aren't that useful. But, it's still interesting to look into them. For example, look at the Clerks DVD. It's been steadily gaining sales, presumably from the theatrical release of Clerks II. (You can see the same effect on sales with other DVDs related to recent theatrical releases, from Pirates of the Caribbean to The Sixth Sense. It looks like the effect kicks in a couple of weeks before the movie; maybe when advertising begins to really ramp up?)

I'm actually surprised this information is given out so openly. In the past, it may have cost thousands of dollars to get this kind of data, if the companies released it at all. Maybe someday Wal-Mart will make their huge database accessible and we can finally find the link between hurricanes and Pop-Tart sales.

Seven of Stevens' top 20 campaign contributors were Telecommunications and Media/Cable Companies.

He's just lifted http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-2 0060428SonyBMGInDigitalMusicTrouble.html and replaced the 'Allman Brothers' with 'Weird Al'.

Artist royalties are generally standardised as a percentage of revenue that the label receives. If you're a big artist with some clout you can negotiate a better deal, but almost all artists will get a basic, low royalty deal. But it is based on record company revenues.

Of the couple of musicians I personally know with songs on iTunes and cds stocked in local stores, they firmly recommend that people buy through iTunes. This is solely because they will receive more money from each purchase - that is the lure with which labels have been drawn to iTunes. Weird Al might have negotiated himself a great deal for physical sales and a poor deal for digital, but on a basic / generic record contract the artist will assuredly get more from iTunes.

Weird Al is probably losing out on selling his filler tracks. On iTunes people often only buy a couple of tracks, rather than the full album. And that is truly the only way that an artist can lose on iTunes.

What, I'm supposed to trust Google's binary?

Well, there were all those little adsense messages down the right-hand side of the screen that said "Google Loves You", "Trust Google", "Google is your friend." - besides, we all know that only Terrorists Don't Trust Google - if yer no w/ us yer agin us, etc.

For my own part, I trust that Google will actually make good on a Linux version of Earth - the current v4 beta seems a cruel mockery of those of us who have been anxiously awaiting their tender attentions since Earth for Windoze came out. This stuff just looks like crap - one of the worst examples Linux graphics pretension I've seen (amongst apps that don't outright crash)...

The best description I can give for the graphics quality of Linux Earth v4 beta running on my (SuSE 9.2 [patched]) laptop that it looks a lot like an 8mm home movie when the belt on the projector broke and you're spinning the reel by hand to keep the heat from the lamp from burning holes in the celluloid film. It looks pretty damned stupid compared to e.g. watching a DVD, MPEG, or AVI under gxine, let me tell you.

Question: Why [make that: "For the Love of God, why...") didn't they write this thing in Java? At least Java mostly works [once you've suffered the agonies of the damned to get it installed], and I hear thtat it has some sort of cross-platform functionality, as well ... or perhaps the "lack of depth" shown by stupid questions like that are the reason they didn't hire me... [bastards] ...

"Fortune.com writer David Kirkpatrick may indeed have set himself up as a prophet. In October of 2005, Kirkpatrick coined the term GEMAYA, an acronym representing a futuristic super-conglomerate consisting of Google, eBay, MSN, Amazon, Yahoo!, and AOL. It may be a safe bet that some form of that will one day be a reality, even if those exact players don't decided to follow the "can't beat'em, join'em" mantra."
-goog v everyone