Slashdot Mirror
The Commercialization Of the Internet
YorickFinn writes "Common Dreams recently posted an article by Norman Solomon on "Denial and the Ravaging of Cyberspace." In short, Solomon argues that the commonly held view of the net as the last bastion of truly democratic mass communication is, in fact, a myth. For instance, he points out that "Websites operated by just four corporations account for 50.4 percent of the time that U.S. users of the Web are now spending online...." Ultimately, Solomon claims that the net may become more like "interactive digital TV," with the decline in the use of browsers and the increasing prominence of technology such as MTV.(The "M" is for Microsoft, formerly WebTV.) All told, his forecast is somewhat bleak, but not entirely unfounded. Worth the read."
Its not all bad..The money that was thrown in the tech sector made the internet a better place..Sure that money has all but dried up now. But without it technology wouldn't be as far along as it is.
...cuz, I sure spend a lot of my time at slashdot.
Help clean up the net and return it to its original and rightful owners
The slogan "imminent death of the net predicted" is one I know from usenet, but it applies here. Instead of asking whether non-commercial sites are the majority, ask whether they are growing. And whether they are cool, informative, etc. I mean, I doubt we need a zillion different people all providing stock quotes and weather - I don't see a problem if that kind of thing is owned by a few big companies. But are the small sites finding it harder to make it than in 1995? I'm guessing not - the small and cheap to run hobbyist site isn't affected by what is happening to banner ad prices. Just to pick a random example I ran across recently, Hippo World has everything you ever wanted to know about the hippopotamus.
Don't give up hope just yet...the Web is just a first try at global hypertext, and it has flaws that make it susceptible to this junk. But some of us are already working on its successor...
While most people might spend most of their time on commercial sites, that doesn't mean everyone does. It also doen't mean that they are forced to. If a user feels like spending his time on commercial sites, it isn't my problem.
The whole point of the internet (ok theres not really one point to the internet) is to ALLOW everyone to be able to have their own sites or visit the sites they want. This doesn't mean that everyone should be forced to go to the "underground" sites. If someone wants to go to a sanitized news source, that does not hurt me in any way. I've never understood the problem with letting people use the internet how they want. There will always be an "underground" on the net for people who want to go there.
people have been saying this since flash and shockwave first arrived on the scene. exempting maybe a few of the 'true' interactive sites (heavy, etc.) i really doubt this is going to happen.
then again, the fred durst generation is probably plotting our demise while i'm reading old cDc text files.
your jesus is another mans xebu. chew on that hypocrites.
I haven't read the article, only Hemos' summary, but I have to say I don't agree. You can create your own high quality content for free with many of the tools out there, even get free hosting, etc. Decline in the user of browsers? I don't buy that either. WebTV still uses a browser of some sort - it has to - AFAIK anyway...
80% of the wealth is controled by 10% of the population. If we have 50% of the web controled by 1% of the population, that's a little bit better in some respects.
The thing that scares me is that we have so many opinion sites that are advocating new products and they arn't revealing their affilations. A good example is Tom's Hardware. And while this is a guy who had a bias from the start (and the bias isn't that bad), what happens when we have only a few media companies and everything is spawn by them? You might read some reviews on yahoo, unable to know they are owned by the company that is releasing the products. And while not directly lying about what's good and bad, they might put the 'good' reviews of their own products closer to the top.
Eventually, you'll have things like "AT&T would like you to get 3 months of free cable modem service, but only if you go see the great movie 'Plotless'!" The ideas of cross promotions are only just starting to be explored on the internet. Or imagine that search engines tend to exclude items. It just goes down hill from there.
This is why grassroots sites will always be helpful, until places start astroturfing. The question is, where does slashdot fall in this range?
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
The point is anyone CAN communicate with other (possibly many) people via Internet. TV, Radio, even phone network does not allow this.
Internet is a very different medium from everything that was available before. The closest analogy to it is literaure, not TV.
I don't want my MTV.
Got Rhinos?
The net has always had an access cost -- you had to have a machine, you had to have a connection. In the "ideal" net of late 80's and early 90's, it wasn't necessarily more democratic. Only people with computers and net connections had access.
With commercialization came lower costs and greater access. So while the proportion of content has become less democratic, the number of people who have been given the opportunity to access it has become more.
No, it's not the wacky little connection of home grown websites that it used to be, but it's not necessarily a bad thing that more people have been given access either.
Makes it a perfect /. article :)
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
The Internet doesn't need to be 100% free of corporations to be "the last bastion". People still spend 49.6% of their time at sites not run by the 4 biggest corporations. When that number drops to zero, it will be dead. Until then, it's mixed.
4 corporations account for 50.4% of web traffic.. sounds like 50.4% of web users 'vote' for those sites with their usage. That doesnt mean those are the best websites, or the most worthy of their attention, just that most people use them. I guess that has some vague notion of democracy.
however-
democracy != freedom
As long as we're free to go to whatever websites we want to, and free to communicate with whoever we want to, the web will be free. It doesnt matter if one website gets 99.9% of all web traffic (democracy in action there) as long as the other 0.1% can look at something else.
Democracy is about majority rule. Freedom is about no one, not even a majority, having the right to tell one what to do.
So, sometimes freedom and democracy overlap, and sometimes they collide.
-J5K
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
Anyone going to DragonCON this year. I haven't seen anything on Slashdot about it and I was wondering if anyone from the 'community' was planning on going.(I am)
Ok, let me get this straight; the internet is democratic mass communication only if everybody picks the "right" web sites?
There's no chance at all that the reason 50% of people's time is spent on web sites belonging to four companies is because those four companies are providing a service that Americans feel is worth spending 50% of their time reading?
Freedom of choice means freedom to make bad choices, and freedom of the press includes freedom to print crap.
That without commercial support (sellout) we wouldn't be here (nowhere) today.
Not only that, but 90% of the "traditional media" (newspapers, television, and radio stations) are owned by a grand total of eleven corporations. The fact that web usage is beginning to trend the same way surprises me not at all (and in the end, I suspect it will be the same players - already AOL/TW is in there).
Unfortunately, this is just another sign of the new "American way". People want things fast and simple. Corporations have the money and power to deliver them. What most don't realize is that the information being delivered will be biased based on the agenda of whichever corporation is delivering them. However, increasingly the public has displayed a sort of almost domestic animal mentality. They want information, and don't care to look into the motivations behind those delivering it. They assume that it must be truth, since it's published. That's the assumption that gives the corporations more control.
Everyone's got an agenda, but only the observant notice it. Too bad the observant seem to be in the minority now.
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
The fact that more than half of internet time is at the top four companies sites doesn't have anything to do with free speach. That's like saying Americans lack a basic freedom to live where they want because most people live in big cities. The only important issue is can I publish any ideas or beliefs that I want. From what I can tell I can on the net easier than I can any other way. Whether or not my views capture the interest of anyone else is a different issue.
Well, just last year, people wanted to encrypt our harddrives to prevent copying of documents. People want to limit what software we use. It sounds like people don't want us to have computers anymore. As opposed to building a new device to distribute their media, they'd rather cripple our computers. The thing is, how much of the public is doing much "computing" these days anyway? I've been to offices where it seems that they have people who browse the web for a living.
"THE INTERNET" continues, as always, to be bandied about by people who believe that the net they see is the net that exists.
But the Internet is really chaos, as any situation where more than a few people communicate becomes.
This world's Internet is a mirror.
It is a lot like a funhouse mirror at times.
It can make our mouths disappear, or make them larger than they need to be.
It can make our heads very tiny, our eyes very big, and our credit cards larger than our hearts.
It all depends on where you look.
Every one of us wants to make this funhouse mirror reflect ourselves onto others.
What needs to be preserved is not anyone's vision of a mirror that puts a business suit on everyone, or a black mask- but a mirror that reflects everything.
I wonder if we're mature enough as a civilization to do this- I suspect we may just end up breaking the mirror, because we can't get our minds around the fact that other people see different things in it.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
So what? The volme of commercial traffic probably funds most of the development of road infrastructure (including gas stations, insurance companies, snow removal, etc., etc....).
As long as that "commercial" traffic doesn't prevent me from making use of the roads for whatever purpose I see fit (like going for a drive on the country, or going out for a spin on my bicycle), then I can't see how that hurts me.
(True, the Internet isn't what it used to be, but I don't see that the original ideals of free, global communication have gone away... if you take the time to look for them. The "unwashed masses" may still be duped by the forces of commercialism, but that will always be true. The Internet isn't going to "Save the World" any more than any other technology is.)
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Which desktop do you use????
KDE
GNOME
Motif
Windows98
Windows2000
Sure, maybe eight years ago there was no such thing as advertisement on the internet, and it was almost completely free of commercial activities. But it was also pretty expensive to run your own website, and most websites that were actually useful or fun were contributed for free by universities and other non-profit organisations.
Sure, 50% of all American time spent online is spent on sites of 4 coporate giants, but let's assume this 50% wouldn't have even been online if the popularisation of internet made possible by banners wouldn't have taken place.
It's simple: if it's cheaper and easier to run your own website, more people will do so, making more content available, making the web more interesting for people, getting more people on the web, making it more interesting for advertisers, etc. etc.
I personally seldomly go to sites run by AOL, microsoft or whatever, but I'm pretty happy with the extra infrastructure their money provided for me to do my thing on the net.
The commercialisation of internet is in essence the incorporation of internet into mainstream economics and culture, and this has its good sides and its bad sides of course, but as long as the other 50% of the users (and remember, these are only american figures) can do their thing without being dominated by money, I think we have a pretty good thing going here.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
What on earth does AOL/Time Warner do that's 32% of the Internet? I visit CNN occasionally, but as far as I know that's about it for me and AOL/TW.
I suppose AOL users spend quite a bit of time at AOL/TW sites, and since they represent such a large percentage of Internet users, that skews the figures. But that's hardly fair to the rest of the net, since AOL itself is dedicated to giving people an experience that sticks with their services.
If you consider the argument that AOL users are AOL users first and Internet users second, the picture starts looking a lot less bleak, with Microsoft at 7.5% and Yahoo at 7.2%. The fourth company must have such pathetic market share they don't even tell us who it is! But we can tell - the total is 50.4%, so subtracting out AOL, MS and Yahoo we get a titanic 3.4% for number four, whoever it is.
This hardly strikes me as a good case for massive concentration, and certainly it doesn't show how Slashdotters use the net. It is true that I explore new sites just for the fun of it a great deal less than I did before, and I concentrate on specific sites I already know. But every query I type into a search engine exposes me to new places, and Slashdot does the same, and some of those will wind up in my mental list of cool sites to visit.
So the situation is not so bleak. The fellow who wrote this, however well-intentioned, has blinders on. He starts with the idea that anything controlled by private business is bad, and inevitably comes up with the same conclusions writers on the left always do.
He forgets about millions of personal home pages, including my own, whose owners develop an expertise on various issues they are happy to share. He forgets about community sites such as Slashdot, where people speak freely about what matters to them, and help evolve an uncontrolled consensus. The soul of the net is still alive and well.
Any mass medium develops a large variety of users. Some of those users are passive, others are active, as many of us are here. In the end, though, that's a choice made by each of us individually. And the mindless drones are drawn to heavily advertised sites, but that surely doesn't mean the sky is falling; if they weren't here, they'd probably be watching TV, which makes viewing any web site look like an intellectual exercise.
D
that's right, that's why we're ADAMant about folks deepending on more than just a few open-sources for their information/interaction. what if VA rob et AL, gooes under? anyhow, we're here, As well as 100 or so "other" places, & we recommend that everybody consider having themselves GNUked, so the lights can remain on somewhere, no matter how bad the devastation from the ongoing fud0cide is. take a look at these guise, before we get around to GNUking them. if you want to help, call us.
Ahh, the good 'ole days before every site popped up "Shock the Monkey" and "The amazing X-10 perv cam."
/. just guided me to that site, up yours Hemos!"
"The alternative seems to be a move toward closed networks, not unlike America Online, in which the user experience is guided, shaped and far more controlled -- something advertisers and online retailers are demanding."
All I can say is, "arghhh!!, Oh wait...,
I gave myself to Jesus, but now he never calls
So all those pr0n sites are really just 4 companies? Weird.
Wait a minute -- on the one hand, the net is horrible because people can distribute copyrighted material, and on the other hand the net is horrible because big corporations control everything?
I think the 50% stat is a little misleading. People spend a lot of time using free web applicaitons that sites like MSN and Yahoo give them. But should a person's time on Hotmail really be counted as the same sort of thing as a person's time reading the NY Times? If AOL forces its users to hit their page first, how does that compare to a site like this one (/.), where people choose to view it?
The Drudge Report is a good example of what the net can do. It's one guy with a massive audience. Andrew Sullivan's site is another example of a single guy with a big audience. I think sites like Indy Media have big audiences as well. Even if they don't, when compared to Time/Warner/AOL, it's an enormously powerful tool for getting the word out.
I think there's a parallel here to Linux vs. MS. People started businesses, everyone started talking about "world domination" and all of a sudden Linux is failing if it can't compete on MS's home court, the corporate world. But that's not the way Linux started -- it was a great way to learn, it was something that allowed everyone to participate. It's still great for that stuff, and it always will be.
Debian can't be killed, it will probably go on for decades. Seriously -- what possible scenario could you think of that would cause it stop existing? Why isn't that the relevant fact, instead of the VA Linux stock price?
Alternative media don't have to compete with commercial media to succeed. They just have to survive and provide high quality information. The net makes that possible, and it's going to continue to make that possible. And the net's going to make sure that almost every family in America, and in most of the industrialized world, is going to have access to that information.
Sure, most people aren't going to bother with it. But what did anyone expect? That the net would change human nature? Most people don't care. But a lot of people are going to take the trouble. They already do. And those people can make a difference.
Nope. It was never university supported. It was run by various organizations funded by the government.
I would like to accumulate a variety of viewpoints on this issue as well as your opinion on what should be done by the U.S. government.
(For those interested, I am actually working on a bill for Model Congress)
I was thinking that something along the lines of some type of tax on companies using the internet for commercial purposes. The revenue collected could be used in some sort of program to expand and upgrade the backbone of the net.
No way. Any government run system will be inefficient and poorly run. Let the private sector run it.
As an example, I worked for years at a Navy facility that was connected to the Milnet (part of the original Internet). The Milnet was built on 56K leased lines, and became over loaded long ago. The organization that ran the Milnet was so over bloated that they were trying to charge our facility somethine like $25K per month for the right to use their 56K network. We replaced our Milnet connection with a T1 line from a non-goverment source. The T1 line (which is 24 times the size of a 56K line), cost less than $25K / year and worked a hell of a lot better.
The governement is needed to help motivate us to "do the right thing" and as a social tool for determining what "the right thing" is. But trying to use it to speed up development of a new technology is foolish. The best way to help the Intenet is to get the goverment as far away from it as possible.
A corporate Tax is not free money. If you tax a company, then they are just forced to rase their rates to pay the tax. So, instead of getting an internet account for $20/mo, I might end up paying $25/mo. So, in the end, the money comes out of my pocket, one way or another. And if my money is going to be spent on the Intenet, I want to choose who and when I spend it. I don't want some goverment agency "investing" it for me.
I would appreciate any type of comments, esp. if I am factually misguided either by e-mail and/or follow up post. Thanks.
The porn problem on the net is an interesting problem to try and solve. Try to figure out how the goverment might be able to help with that. Any law that trys to ban some use of the net will fail - but laws that lean more towards forcing industry to create a solution to a problem might work.
And this whole issue of cryptology and export controls is something that needs to be "fixed" by goverment. It's an example where current laws are tying the hands of industry (preventing the export of strong cryptology), which is slowing down the development of the net. Research these laws and try to find some alternative that helps the Internet grow, but still maintains some type of national security.
A significant proportion of people can't be bothered to vote for the government that will (theoreticaly) serve them - peoples attitudes need to change if the internet is to be "saved" from commercialisation.
Just because you can't, doesn't mean you shouldn't.
I saw this study. The top four sites were AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and I believe, the Napster site.
First of all, Napster is obviously evidence of decentralization. (Presumably that's why the article listed only the first three of these sites.)
Second, I have seen actual traffic numbers for Yahoo. You know what most people are doing on Yahoo? They're reading e-mail! Presumably that's what they're doing on MSN and AOL as well. Again, this is evidence of decentralization, not centralization--people are talking to each other, not listening to what a corporation is telling them.
No doubt the best there is.
It was WebTV. It is not any good. Only the uninformed would use it or sometimes a granny. Worst is that Bill Gates has access to all your personal records when you use MTV. I don't like MTV.
Sometimes you need things to work.
They just want better TV, and now they're going to get it.
There's nothing stopping you from creating a web site devoted to your hobby or your pet or your summer vacation or whatever. And if you do so, that site will be viewable from anywhere on the planet. If that isn't democratic, I don't know what is.
Websites operated by just four corporations account for 50.4 percent of the time that U.S. users of the Web are now spending online, the authoritative Jupiter Media Metrix research firm reported in early summer. At the top of the heap were AOL Time Warner's sites, with 32 percent of all minutes spent online in the nation, followed by Microsoft (7.5 percent) and Yahoo (7.2 percent).
First off.. AOL isnt a website it is an intranet. Nobody sits on aol.com, so knock of at least half of the 32%.
Part of microsoft's 7.5% is because people dont change the default IE webpage.
Yahoo Kicks ASS
These figures dont represent anything. the 20+ million people who go on AOL to chat and play Slingo dont count unless they are surfing. Have you ever surfed with AOL's browser? Please.
If you knock off 2-3% off MSFT and remove Half of AOL's users from this stat then you might have an article
Who told this guy that he could count all AOL users as Net Users???
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/cxsr/ces/ in dex.shtml
This link shows what the future is : what companies are investing in droves : Cisco content engines. Not exactly webservers, they are powerful servers that deliver pure content. Mostly now for corporate networks, they soon will dominate the internet as more bandwidth becomes available. This is our future. Multicast television shows on televisions with ether-out.
welcome to a brave new world!
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
With the web, all you need is a $1000 computer, $20/month and a free-hosting site to publish.
I really don't care all that much that a significant fraction of the web is controlled by a tiny fraction of aggolmerations, as long as (1) the cost to publish remains as low as it is and (2) there are no barriers to prevent one from obtaining any outside of the agglomerates. (1) is pretty much going to remain as it is, but (2) may be questionable, with the suggestion that AOL-TW could effectively wall their garden in both directions, possibly allowing their members to only see sites they control, or prevent non-members to see their sites.
As long as the infomation is unwalled, people will visit a off-beat site if they believe the information is good. There are, for example, game review sites that have no corporate backing and are only in it for the fun, not the advertizing dollars, and their reviews are much less biased than one can read on the corporate review sites. Heck, USENET to some extent serves this same purpose.
So while agglomeration of content owners is somewhat distrubing, it's not a concern until they wall off their garden, at which point the barrier to web publishing goes up, and the death of the web would then be imminent.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Yes, once again we have a report that the net is dead, companies are taking over, we've all lost, etc. I've heard this in one form or another for about three years.
Guess what? It's not dead, it's changing. Everything changes. Did people think that companies would NOT see the massive opportunity? Of course not. Look above you - as I type I see a banner add.
So, it's changing. Everthing changes. The question is what are we going to do if we don't like it?
If you don't like it do something about it. Change it sneakily. Change it cleverly. Go down fighting at least and show some dignity.
The future is for those that will make something of it. Just showing up doesn't count.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Is this Norman Solomon the same idiot who published the The Trouble With Dilbert??
/. -- a website owned by a publicly traded corporation --
He obviously has a problem with corporation or person who is willing to market themselves to make a little money. Yeah, Dilbert is a little overmarketed, but somebody is still buying all the crap, right? Yeah, the internet is dominated by a few corporations, but everyone is still going to their websites, right?
This guy doesn't care that the internet is becoming more of a corporate entity. He doesn't care that the commonly held view of the net as the last bastion of truly democratic mass communication is, in fact, a myth. He's just pissed that people aren't buying books or going to his website, so he decided to fire off a few well carefully worded editorials, and try to extend his 15 minutes of fame.
And the really sad thing is this: He got his 15 minutes from
The shame! The horror!
Do you have Linux and a DotPal? Click here now!
I guess I don't represent the average user with my browsing habits. I don't visit AOL/TimeWarner or Yahoo sites if I can avoid it and only visit M$ to download patches. I quit using most of the search-scam engines about two years ago when I realised that I was better off trying to randomly guess the URL of the site I was looking for than ask one of them to find it for me.
However, theis article isn't telling us anything we didn't already know. The same thing thing is true of any media type. Take TV for example: 90% of the viewers tune in to either NBC, ABC, or CBS (or FOX if you really want to kill brain cells) and receive their dose of mindless pap, and a few in the minority will look for something a little more intellectually stimulating aired by an independant. Movies can be categorised in much the same way. So can radio, books, etc... So what? When the majority flocks to the big-media spawned garbage that calls itself "entertainment" or "information", it is more of an indictment of human nature than it is an indication of a conspiracy on the part of corporate interests to squeeze the internet into some kind of ugly, corporate-controlled, profit generating monster.
You're using her as bait, Master!
"Search engine optimization is the number one strategy for generating qualified traffic to your site," said a recent sales pitch offering prominence in search-engine listings."Eighty-five percent of all traffic is generated via search queries and over 90 percent of that traffic is driven to the top 30 results. If you're not in the top 30, you're not in a position to compete!"
The dot-com flameouts have sped up the Net's commercialization -- as quests for cash-flow, market share and multimedia synergy become more voracious.
The underlying assumption shared above is that traffic is important. The market moron is looking for profit. Sollomon seems to agree with WSJ analyist who state that "severe market dominance" is possible. Who cares?
Traffic is not important, access and control are. As long as you and I can serve freely, the old internet will continue to grow. People who bother to look will find it. New search engines will be made when old ones suck. The only thing that can kill the web as we know it are the companies who would own the physical media itself, and change it's standards to resemble broadcast toll roads.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
At one time, web pages were a kind of super large collaborative effort, with the objective of sharing information. The whole idea of links was basically so you wouldn't repeat what other people had said. The web of links created a knowledge/opinion bank of the world, where you could find out anything, or for that matter, people's opinion on anything.
Commercial enterprise has the objective of making money, and guess what, business approached the internet intending to use it to further that goal. Like the real world, you could take over information resources to make yourself bigger, gain a larger audience, and possibly, make more money. Those with money could buy themselves content.
Coming from the above perspective, I'm not at all surprised that a few companies have managed to garner the most web site visits. It's just a mirror of the rest of the world.
What remains to be seen, IMHO, it what will happen to the 'individual on a soapbox' sites. Certainly it's tougher to be heard now a days, but will the few rich and powerful manage to drown out the many who might have something to say that the rich and powerful don't want you to hear?
W9x:Thanks for the make-work project Bill.
o how can they tell how much time somebody spends at a site? There's no way to tell how long I actually spend at a site -- just how often I load it.
I'm not terribly surprised that AOL, etc. tops the list (given its popularity among the unwashed masses), but is that sites run by or hosted on AOL? That'd be a significant difference.
Furthermore, so freaking what? Most people think they are network TV's customers and that network TV should respond to their wishes. I am not network TV's customer: the advertiser is network TV's customer. I am network TV's product: they are selling the advertiser the opportunity to present a message to me. TV Programming is merely a means to that end. So what if the web goes the same way?
Sure, let's go back to the pre '93 Internet, when it was only used by the government, big universities and bigger corporations. All at taxpayers expense I might add!!!
Premise 1: Webvan burned through $1 billion and disappeared. Dozens of other companies burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and also went bankrupt.
Premise 2: Not a single amateur personal site has gone bankrupt.
Conclusion: The dot-come crash is a force for decentralization.
No, you don't understand. Common Dreams is a "progressive" news source and in that lingo "democracy" really has nothing to do with majority rule - it just means "morally good". They can't use the terms "good", or "moral" since that would be judgemental which we all know is immoral.
I had to take a second look at this one...even MS isn't thickheaded enough to challenge MTV (Music Television) in a head-to-head trademark war. Even MSN TV may be too close for comfort for MTV. This trademark issue might become interesting - especially if MSN starts streaming music videos.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
I'll go see a stupid movie once every 3 months in exchange for free cable modem service. (let's see, $7.50 movie, that means.... $2.50/month cable internet... Win!)
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
Am I correct in understanding that among that 50.4% are sites like Yahoo's Geocities and AOL personal pages? Which is to say, the sites are hosted by Yahoo and AOL, but the actual content is put there by individuals.
If that's so, then I'm not overly concerned at the moment. It's like saying that there's no free press because 90% of the paper in the US is manufactured by three corporations.
Okay, it's not exactly the same, because paper companies don't require you to agree not to print porn on their paper and they don't sell ads on letters to your grandma. But I think there's a wide difference between 50.4% of the sites being hosted by a few corporations, and 50.4% of the content being generated by those corporations.
If you don't want my koalas, baby, don't shake my eucalyptus tree.
It is nice article. Passage about search
engines reminded me that google started
inserting "Sponsored Link". I feel it is beginning
of demise. I stopped using Altavista when they started doing that. Time to look for new
search engine...
my favorite ""The most heavily trafficked sites are overwhelmingly devoted to commercial activities in one form or another, such as online shopping, financial services, investment, corporate-screened entertainment, travel deals and market research. ""
Any more commas and he would have covered 99% of what you can DO on the internet.
The internet has been sold as a means of buying stuff and finding information. It is pretty obvious to those who think for themselves that corporations are much better at selling themselves than individuals are. Nearly everyday I see the three companies he wrote about being mentioned in one form or another on different mediums. It is very hard to compete with entities that people encounter on the web, radio, tv, and print.
Is that bad? No, because as we have seen, no amount of advertising keeps a bad company on the net for long. People will go where they feel is suitable for their needs.
As for 50%+ of people's time being spent on only certain sites, I would like to see what constitutes "time spent". Are we refering to time actually using the resource of the site, or including idle time or just passing through time.
Last. People here and in the tech fields love to over estimate the intelligence and willingness of the common web surfer. Most would never know how to search, let alone where unless they were taken by the hand. Same goes for shopping, after all if its on AOL it must be safe! (ask my Grandmother why she shops where she does, and I have other relatives who are convinced QVC is the place - and why? BECAUSE)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Where's the confusion here? Mainstream people with real money made "The Internet" what it is today, and if it weren't for them, we'd still be using Archie, Gopher, & Lynx et al as the extent of our experience. Most of the grid would be a 56k phone line, if that, and only the priveleged few in major cities or near research facilities would stand a chance of getting a decent connection.
How would those Voices of All That is Good and Holy spread their Good Word to the world if they didn't freeload on real money? The whole thing was started by military and academia, then developed by corporate/government [Your country here]. If there was some sort of "freedom", it was only the residual glop clinging to the edges of the bowl. If that "freedom" is "disappearing", it's only because the true nature of this tool is finally becoming clear to the clueless college and high school kids who think they have some sort of God Given Right to it.
The Voices of Freedom are pissed because their free ride is over. Sorry kids, but institutional mommy and daddy aren't going to support you forever.
LOL! I loved Plotless!. I especially like the tearful farewell between Julia Roberts and Haley Joel Osment, right before all the ninjas attacked (led, of course, by John Travolta).
m00.
The reason big companies can have so much web traffic is pretty obvious: they have the money to pay for the bandwidth.
It's easy enough to put up a web site off your DSL link or what have you, but once you get some serious traffic, such as the well-known slashdot effect, boom no one can get to your site any more. This is why no private individual that's not independently wealthy could ever try to compete toe-to-toe with cnn.com, say.
But that's not necessary. Very few people, with the exception of Matt Drudge of the self-named Drudge Report, want to compete with CNN. And it's much easier to compete on the web than it is in TV markets-- anyone can put up a web site overnight, but good luck starting a cable channel and getting cable TV carriers to carry it. The independent web is alive and well, and any talk of the death of it is greatly exaggerated.
The only thing that could possibly kill the web is control of the browser, which would be Microsoft. And you know that AOL-Time-Warner will fight them tooth and nail on that. Now if those two ever merge, then we should all be Very Very Afraid.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
Consider a typical session where an AOL user is looking for information on Natalie Portman.
1. www.aol.com (homepage)
2. search.aol.com
3. search.aol.com?Natalie Portman
4. www.adoredcelebrities.com
5. search.aol.com
6. search.aol.com?Natalie portman
7. www.anycelebrity.com
Now I'd call that one hit for AOL, and one each for the celebrity sites, but AOL acutally racks up 5 hits here, or 5/7 = 71percent of the traffic. So users are using www.aol.com as their homepage, cause they don't know how to change it, and search.aol.com as their search engine, cause they don't know there's anything else.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
I don't know about you.... but my take on all this is to ask them what time were they counting? The internet is not just the web, nor is opening up a window to AOL and letting it sit there for several hours. Trying to count peoples time online is like trying to count the number of linux users. A good example would be my mom. Who logs on the network, opens netscape to her ISPs home page... then settles down and works on her E-Mail for an hour. Anyway... tata
How these statistics are being used? I mean, there must me millions of computers out there with their homepages set for www.msn.com or www.netscape.com... are these bad boys counted as part of the 50+%?
Democracy is about majority rule.
Not exactly. It's about people being able to make informed decisions, and influence the forces that control their lives.
My worry with the increased corporatisation of the internet is not even so much that people's control over their lives will be reduced (that's pretty low already, what with pretty undemocratic political systems and zero effective control over corporations) but that with the majority of people getting their information from the same sites (that 50.4%) people will end up less informed (or only observing the news/internet from the biased perspectives of a few corporations) than they would have been otherwise.
That is just as direct a challenge to "democracy", as without informed participation democracy does not exist in any meaningful way.
The Wall Street Journal tilts toward the delusional on its ideology-laden editorial pages...
You've just got to love the irony of it.
See this? It's the smallest violin in the world, playing for the loss of the once ubiquitous "Hamster Dance" faction of the Internet.
The one real draw of the internet, the low cost of entry, still is true. You are still free to go and make your own sites, just go ahead and do it. Just don't blame people for not visiting it if it isn't interesting...
(On a slightly different note, did anyone notice that the "top 4" companies were all portals? Maybe people's web browsers have set those sites as thier home page, and they get a "free" hit every time the browser loads up.)
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
The adverts do bother me. It's up to us to make sites that suck less, and put those stupid bloated carcase sites like doubleclick out of business. If 50% of web traffic is going to those stupid sites, 49.9% of web traffic must be adverts.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
One is noting but a bunch of corporate whores, selling themselves out for just a little bit more power over its consumers, trying to claim status as a cultural icon and a driving force in Western societies and economies, while the other is operated by Microsoft.
We act like what is happening now is the final word for the Net. It's not even close -- someone just invented the horseless carriage, and we're really concerned because a couple of big companies have started making them.
Yes, those companies could be Ford and GM, but they also could be nobodies. We have only just begun; the technology is very young and very immature, and so are just about all the internet's users.
Don't worry yet. Worry in about 25 years.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
If 50% of web time is to these sites, 49.9% of web traffic is adverts. That's bad. Getting those adverts from just a few overloaded sites is worse. My wife was wondering why certian suck sites took forever to load. It took me a while to figure out that the advert loading was the problem. She now surfs with images turned off. MSIE is an evil thing that will not let the user do that.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
90 percent of the traffic is from the top 30 results of a search?
I don't see how that puts someone in a position such that they "can't compete." When I use a search engine, it's generally to find information, which is usually free, and usually on individual's web sites. When I want to buy something, I use indexes or newsgroups to find the site I use.
Anyhow, I wonder what percentage those 4 companies would have if you EXCLUDED all AOL and WebTV users (especially the AOL users)...the people who are probably least likely to ever venture out of the playpen that has been set up for them.
Yes, people are boring. Your high school science teacher isn't going to become the next Karl Marx just by sitting in front of a connected computer. The internet has revolutionized the communication between "fringe" groups. Commercial interests have benefitted as well, but where else can you find This sort of thing. TV? Radio? The New York Times? Your local library?
Take the quoted statistic, that 50% of traffic is from four companies. Compare this wih TV, movies and music and see who's doing better. I'd bet that even most fringe oriented people spend a lot of time viewing mundane, commercialized content (checking weather, buying books, reading news). I'm sure that doesn't make them bad people.
Anyone who thought about it would have realized it even back in that day. Even without commercial content, there would be lots of inane, mainstream garbage. The internet is for everyone , even capitalist, commercial oriented, boring people. Unfortunately, there are a lot of them.
The television in your livingroom will likely become the family PC in the near future, with internet content becoming more and more intergrated with the growing universe of specialty channels and vice versa. One medium won't usurp the other, both TV and the internet are evolving into a new hybrid media. We see it already with interactive cable and satellite TV w/ TiVo.
Heck, the keyboard, tower and monitor setup may be an historic archive sooner than we think...
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
80% of the wealth is controled by 10% of the population.
And 80% of the skill is possessed by 10% of the hackers. Why is this a problem?
Most of the wealthiest people in the US are also on the list of the highest income EARNERS. The rest got their wealth mostly because somebody earned it, then left it to them in his will.
Is it a bad thing if some folks work hard and successfully? Is it a bad thing if a man leaves his possessions to his kids when he dies?
But isn't the percentage of americans voting at the presidential elections around 50% as well?
So the entry cost is low, but only as long as your site stays small. With the horrible on-line advertising market, if you generate a lot of traffic, you're probably going to have to go out of business, or come up with some other revenue model.
The question is, where does slashdot fall in this range?
:)
Well, in my bookmarks it falls right between Sex Maniac and StileProject.
Now what does THAT say about the Internet, hmmmmm?
If people spend a lot of their day on Slashdot, but read the resources of 100's of different articles that are posted, Slashdot would still boast the most usage. Just because the top four account account for the most traffic, that doesn't mean anything else is excluded.
How the FUCK are they not getting sued by, you know, those music television people?
Its just because all the mainstream average everday people from real life have started using the Internet. Most of what these sort of people want to use the internet for can be easiest found on those 4 web sites.
All the techies and other people who use the internet for other stuff besides shopping and chatting still make use of a wide variety of sites and publish a wide variety of stuff just like they always have.
The stats are just skewed by the influx of lots of Joe Smiths.
It looks nice by default, and doesn't have an ugly-as-sin foot.
One of the first things that jumps out at me after reading the article (try it sometime, it adds a new perspective to posting) was the comment about the 50% of the time being spent on four big commercial websites. Maybe this will be seemed as a troll, but quite possibly couldn't a lot of this time be credited to those folks that live and die in the chatrooms?
Also, he seems to be missing one important fact: online banner advertising is failing miserably. Click-through numbers are painfully low, pay rates are even lower (if the web admin gets paid at all), and banner companies are dropping like flies. And X10 is making more enemies than friends with their pop-under ads.
There will always be a large segment of society which will stick with what they feel is safe on the Internet and stay within the confines of the major providers. What makes the Internet truly great is the ability to get information out to the masses in a matter of hours when it used to take days, if not weeks.
This commercialization will be well on its way once Microsoft releases XP. This will start the subscription based model which will divide Internet users between those who pay for Passport and its services, and those who don't.
.NET will become is the most personalized and efficient advertising vehicle ever developed. As commercial web sites become more interactive with greater bandwidth, we will see this Interactive TV start to happen. Only commercial interests will be able to afford to provide such services.
What the subscription will promise is online storage of favorites, personal data, preferences, files, email, etc, just like Hotmail does right now. What
The Internet as we know it today will continue to exist, because the infrastructure is there, and won't go away. The user base, however, will be completely different, as the general public will give up web browsers and PC's in favor of Interactive TV's. Let's face it, people don't want computers, they want information and entertainment.
We computer nerds lose site of the fact that people don't enjoy using computers for their own sake, they want to be entertained. PC's will be here for a while longer, but the average joe won't be using them any more. We already see a move to more specialized devices like cell phones and palm pilots for the killer PC apps, like email, word processing, etc. It won't be long before PC's and your average web site will resemble Amateur Radio as far as user base and interest level.
I'm not as annoyed by those at most people; it's a lot better than the pop OVER ads I've seen. All I need to do is close the silly thing.
For what it's worth, I saw it at Fry's. Picture quality is beyond awful - you'd might as well be watching random video noise for all the good it does you.
Someone reviewed it and noted that they didn't like it but their 8-year old kid loved being able to watch fuzzy, out of focus, noisy images and would stare at it for hours. So perhaps it's not entirely useless, but I fear it's hardly competition for my Canon XL1.
Their home automation products are plasticky but do work, although sadly the built-in light dimming, which I had high hopes for, was not very effective. But for controlling hard to reach light fixtures, it's realistically hard to beat. From what I understand, the products that do it right (non-plasticky quality, nice dimming, etc) cost thousands of dollars.
D
The problem is that at the entry level you can put up a web site very cheaply ($10/month or less) On the other hand if you want to have interesting content you do need to spend time or money to create it. Yes for 1 hr of work and $10 a month I can put up a web site. But to have a large complex site costs money. Or someone being dedicated and doing it as a hobby. I've seen good and bad sites in both catagories.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
IMHO, based on my observations of the "average" internet user (ie, my in-laws), here are the "forces" that result in that traffic statistic:
* Many think AOL == WWW == Internet, so they only are aware of 1% of what's available. Someone will come up to me and ask "where's store X or how do I spell Y or how do I find out more about Z" and in 30 sec. I find it for them (mapquest.com, m-w.com, google.com). You then hear "wow, how did you do that dude?" If AOL doesn't lead them by the nose or if they don't hear about the site on TV, they will not find it. For example, my in-laws ALWAYS go to yahoo.com to find things (heard it from someone on TV), which may not be the best way to find something (it's one tool of many). Most people just don't know any better.
* Most people I know want to be passively entertained (except for AIM). It NEVER dawns on them that THEY can set up a web page! A lot of people I know have digital cameras, but they always send me one or two pictures by email. They can set up a web page and put ALL their pictures for ALL to see at once (http://balder.prohosting.com/~jkb0859/vacation.ht ml). My kid's teacher is blown away when I take pictures of the school's artwork and whip out a web page on it and kid's relatives from Australia see them.
* As everyone knows, it's not exactly easy to find things on the WWW, even with the search engines available. You need a different skill set (mind set) to "dig" for the information, as opposed to having it shoved in front of your face or having a comprehensive index. For most people I know, that means they just don't do it. My in-laws or wife would rather just ask me to find it than do it themselves.
Because of the lack of education (let's face it, not everyone wants to just sit there and explore or dig for things by themselves) and lack of easy to use tools, it's no wonder that most are going to a few sites. The fact that these sites are run by corporations is probably due to exposure by TV (news) or other popular media
50% is pretty low. Think about TV or Radio - in any given region for the top 4 networks to have only 50% of the audience leaves a hell of a lot for the others to pick up.
Most people don't surf small sites because most people don't have the need - people are sheep - small sites that satisfy the sheep become big sites and get bought by the big 4. That doesn't mean that the other small sites that just satisfy the few don't still exist - its just that they'll never figure in this kind of article individually.
In publishing some of the most successful and profitable magazines are tiny circulation niche journals run by a couple of people for a few thousand or tens of thousand readers. As these move online, if peope continue to PAY to see them, you'll get more and more of them as costs drop. They may pick up a few readers, but they are niche interest and so have a limited audience - doesn't stop them being profitable - true democracy! MARKET democracy!
I disagree with this view provided the barriers to entry on internet remain low. What I mean by this is that internet and the associated freedom of speech really took off because there was very little preventing anyone off the street from posting a page, an idea, or a thought. This allowed ideas (good and bad) to all have equal footing which is necessarily a Good Thing. (You have to have access to bad ideas to be able to see them for such.)
While 50% of web content may be owned by a few big corporations, there's still very little barring the average Joe throwing a race relations thesis online for others to comment on. While it may not get tonnes of traffic there has been no barrier to the free flow of information. So long as these barriers remain low, internet will remain Free. (You may not *like* the corporate sites, but they have as much right to existence as Joe's thesis.)
Things that could put this freedom at risk include rising web hosting costs that could potentially limit sites to only wealthy commercial ventures. ISP's that pull content at the slightest complaint are another risk. Content filters, especially politically-motivated ones are another risk (ie - Country-specific content banning). Even the spiralling complexity of markup languages and browsers could make it cost prohibitive to publish content. Not to mention proprietary extensions!
I don't think any of these possibilities have really hit us yet and the web is still quite free. After all, think of how easy it was for me to fill this space with my opinion! However these are the things that we need to watch most closely. As long as there remains simple means to share information (the new, ripped Britney Spears CD probably doesn't count!) on the web I think we remain free.
The moment the Internet becomes the 21st century's version of TV is the moment I rip out my modem and throw it away. I won't watch television, and I won't tolerate an Internet that works like television.
******
"What makes you think I care about your opinions?"
I'm thinking MTV (Music TeleVision) might have a problem with Microsoft using their acronym.
-Shade
"The art of flying is to throw yourself at the ground... and miss." - Douglas Adams
One glorious day in the not too distant future I imagine that the mother of all bullshit-detectors will be born (oh, and it'll be "p2p networked" too--buzzbuzzbuzz. :-)
When a SlimyCorp(tm) or SlimyHuman(tm) attempts to pull the wool over your eyes -- and trustworthy sources have validated the stench of the BS -- a seemlessly integrated klaxon alarm will sound to notify the ignorant of the scam and offer up the 'truth' instead.
A few examples that would trigger The Bullshit Alarm(tm):
- When MSNBC downplays yet another "email virus" that only affects MS Outlook.
- When a karma whore gets moderated to +5 with opinion presented as fact.
- 99.9999999% of the time that the word "FREE" is used in any context (eventually people will learn and can disable this filter.)
- Anytime someone tries to sell you overpriced crap that you can buy cheaper from a less greedy merchant.
- When a search engine sellout boosts paid listings, but doesn't mark them as such, the BS detector will cover the culprits in shit for you.
- When a retail store announces a yet another sale, but shoppers failed to notice that prices had predictably inched upward for the past few weeks leading up to it.
- When Yet-Another-Diet-Pill-Scam begins to rev up it's marketing campaign. (input fewer calories/output more energy.)
- When a politican speaks.
- When a lawyer speaks.
- ...........When Krusty the Clown impersonates George Carlin...badly.
- When Austrailia claims that The BullShit Detector(tm) is liable for defamation..
- Too much other bullshit to list...
I didn't mean to go on and on like that. The simple point is to network experts, insider knowledge and uncommon-common-sense so that it's not as easy for reptiles to exploit the uninformed as it once was.(preemptive postscript: this whole post is bullshit -- ignorance is bliss -- mindless consumerism and entertainment-as-news is good for the economy!)
Power to the Peaceful
The masses are spoon-fed by corporations, and individuals looking for a voice or something different will seek and find it.
This is just like music, where 99.9% of the music out there is pushed by majors, paid off by song promoters, and bribed onto radio stations that play the same song over and over. You want Alejandro or the Vigilantes of Love? Too damn bad, right? No...you just have to look, listen, and use word of mouth to do an end-run around the business.
Why should web content be any different? Feed the masses, but leave the interesting underground sites and URL's. I'm smart, I'll find them, and I won't need an interactive portal with them.
RB
----------
ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
I would like to add that, just because the vast majority of the hoi polloi spend a lot of time on the big corporate sites doesn't bode ill for anything. They're the same people that make the vast majority of daytime TV be soap operas, game shows, and trashy talk shows.
If someone would just get an easy-to-use micropayments system going then maybe small sites could survive a little more. Like a small button on the welcome page that said "click here to pay $1.00 to have 1 year's access." Click, bam, in, no worries, no hassles, no credit card entry crap each time, etc. etc. etc.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
So the top search engines are prostituting themselves out? Imagine the reaction if Mapquest secretly inserted "detours" in travel routes based on the number of McDonalds (or Burger Kings) along the way. And they charged millions for it.
When I do a web search, I want the results sorted by relevance! Too bad the FTC can't get involved.
I work from home. I go to work to check my Slashdot post scores.
8 bit computing - It may be 2007 out there, but it's 1983 in here!!
We are 1% into the age of information. With the introduction of the Internet, and it being available at an affordable cost to most people of the world, whatever happens with the commercial news and entertainment side of the Internet is probably going to be little more than a blip on the radar screen of the life of the Internet.
As long as corporate control of large chunks of the net doesn't impact my own ability to both share and obtain unpopular information, I don't especially care about it. I'm far more worried about (e.g.) the potential for single-chokepoint content controls when there are only a half-dozen giant ISPs left.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
s/he said this much better than I ever could have, but hits DEAD ON my experience w/ local cable (f*cking Adelphia). How do we stop this?
The key difference between the Internet and traditional mass media is that the Internet is not of fixed size. I can find (or create!) a site that caters to a small set of people, and offers them information and resources that they won't find easily in other mass media.
A perfect example: my new favourite web site, Equipped to Survive is the personal page of a guy who's done a lot of research on wilderness survival, particularly for pilots in remote areas. He has detailed essays on what makes a good survival kit, general emergency preparedness topics, and reviews on everything from Leatherman-type multitools to large inflatable life-rafts. The site design isn't flashy and polished, but it's extremely well-organized and well-written.
So the mass media outlets still do what they do best: sell sizzle to the masses. That doesn't make it any harder for me to find the REAL gems of the Internet: people scratching their own personal informational itches, and sharing the fruits of their learning with others.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
We counted them, Gore still lost, get over it.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
If you're an average joe/jane user and just wants to 'surf the web' with your new Dell and Cable modem but don't really know what you want, then sure, there are thousands of marketeers and mousekateers ready to take you by the hand and lead you to their store and tell you what to buy and how to be with the 'in' crowd and their fashion leaders.
On the other hand, if you know what you want, say, for example, a spec sheet for a 2N304 dual-gate mosfet UHF mixer transistor, a modern substitute number, and place a web order for 2 to be delivered in 3 days, then you can easily cut thru the crap, pop-ups, and freebies and find them, place your order, and get your parts, Bada-bing, bada-bang, bada-boom.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The settings got reset everytime I started the stupid browser. Might be the way things are set up here at work, but it sucked enough that I just use Netscape instead. The autoreverse of settings is pure evil.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
> The porn problem on the net is an interesting
> problem to try and solve.
Why solve it? It's driving broadband to the home much the way it drove the introduction of VCR's twenty years ago.
People don't hire a government to regulate the sex lives of consenting adults.
Sign here if you think otherwise:
"I hereby give others authority over my consentual sexual activities _______________"
We shouldn't let things like 50% of people on the internet visit only these sites bother us. What they really mean is that 50% of the people we were able to survey only visited these sites.
Statistics lie more often than not.
Of course, it was inevitable that any successful medium causes advertising, PR, and corporate interests to move in. But while they may dominate percentage-wise, the fact is that in absolute numbers, we have access to much more diverse content than ever before.
(Oh, I've been running Debian as my only OS since the 0.98(?) days...)
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
Okay, so let me get this straight...
So these people are making a claim about the amount of time people spend on websites. I'm still hunting for the reference, but the question I ask myself is, how did they collect this data? I can think of at least three different ways.
I would doubt method three was used, as it would probably be a violation of rights, and I doubt most ISP's would give out that info without a court order. So that leaves us with at least two other possibilities, either direct observation or requesting logs from websites.
As I'm sure most will agree, neither of these methods is going to give you good data. In the first case, I guarantee people are not going to surf the same way being observed as they will unobserved. Who volunteers for this kind of survey and looks at pr0nography, stileproject and other disgusting sites, looks at pr0nography, illegaly downloads music and movies, looks at pr0nography, grabs spl0its for some kiddie h4x0ring, and looks at pr0nography while being observed? If they were actually observed in a lab, I would almost guess the researchers might have warned against illegal activity while surfing. If the subjects were interviewed, do you honestly think they would say this is how they spent their time surfing. If you were to ask Joe Sixpack on the street what websites he looked at, he will probably only remember the names of most of the major sites (because they are so visible), and wouldn't have the guts to name his favorite pr0n site.
The second method has its share of flaws too. The researchers are going to, of course, request the logs for all of the major (ie visibile) sites. But how can you get logs from the multitute of little known sites out there? You will never get them all; the best you can do is estimate, at which point you are making up your own data.
If someone can get find the reference for this "study" and post a link here, I would appreciate it. I think Jupiter Media Metrix web site is mediametrix.com but I can't get in with my non-Javascript enabled browser. :P
This sig is false.
Real communication is one person communicatiing with another. If I put a page up that touches another person then I have communicated. It only matter that yu drive massive trafic if you have a business plan that depends on it. Who cares if most of the traffic on the net is going to AOL to read gossip about this 15 minutes diva or sports jock. The fact that you and I can communicate is important and thus the net is relavent for our communication. If AOL & M$ run the business opertunities on the net into the ground, wll, so be it. I'll talk and listen to people who are thoughtfull and the net is still a good place to do that.
-Peace
They don't want everybody to make content, that's very dangerous.
OK, this is what we need: We need lots of people to make content, and it must be feasible to make a living from it. Only that way will a large part of the internet remain like we want it.
So, we need, public domain payment standards, for example for making micro-payments, and we need that fast!
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
It's just the nature of capitalism. If something looks worth while, that it can make money, then it's only natural for a corporation to exploit it. There is nothing evil about it. We just have to put up with spam and banners. Everything has its price.
The point that's missed is that TV was already there when the internet started.
The point isn't that suddenly people who using TV decided to utterly forego the TV experiance - though that would be nice. It's that the interactive experiance started to be compelling to a sizeable minority.
There are many things that might be criticized about the commercial web but this guy seems too clueless to get any of them. As noted, much the content of Yahoo or microsoft is user generated rather than simply piped from the corporation. In a society based on money, even the most rapid communist will use the internet for commerce if they use commerce.
Here an example of the real, rather than the cooked-up problems of commercialization:
Yahoo buying egroups didn't really prevent free-expression on egroups but it made it more fragile. But this isn't that different from the problem of any choked-point abusing it's power (see over-net).
I don't think you get his point....I don't remember the specifics or names, but let me try to help you out here. Prior to our election, all we heard was Gore & Bush campaigns being shoved at us, as if nobody else was even running. Now, you and I are aware of a few other canditates (as I hate HTML, since it's NOT really coding, I'll just slap this up here real ugly like this: http://www.opensecrets.org/2000elect/index/AllCand s.htm ), but look at the numbers in the link. Do you think every American that went into a booth on election day had really even had a chance to make a fair decision of any of the "other guys'" policies, values, etc? Heck, I have a hard enough time trying to find OBJECTIVE info about anyone, let alone the unknowns that were on my ballot. So, what the previous poster is complaining about isn't that the Rep's chose Bush as their canditate or whatever...he's talking about the lack of information and coverage given to anyone but the 2 biggies, and how that isn't really even a choice. Do you remember (probably not) that when the debates where going on there was a number or people PUBLICY complaining about the fact that nobody was allowed to debate except Gore & Bush? Look it up, moron. Now with that example (and the near absolute lack of media coverage of the barring of other CURRENTLY RUNNING candidates from the debates), how can you say we have a "real choice"? You stay with your 2 choices, pal, I have a few others in mind, and I'll never know how they debate or react under pressure since they NEVER GOT A CHANCE !
yep. that's all i have to add. it's true though, and never forget it.
IF you don't mind that nearly all 'information' on the web that people actually know about comes from 4 sources then fine. Likewise if you don't mind that one way or another those sources are biased by politics or economics or just plain ignorance then fine - it's all good. If you don't mind that there is little distinction between those 4 sources and sitting calmly in front of the TV then fine - this is the best of all possible worlds. If you don't mind that the economic forces usually work to marginalize that which does not agree with it then, fine. If you don't care if there is any difference between editorial agenda and actual news or if there was you couldn't tell the difference and it wouldn't make any difference to you anyway then once again I agree - all is fine.
It's the flip side of censorship in a way. Not active certainly not "hey you can't do that!!" No. But when most outlets are owned by the same few people then all they have to do is put up only what they approve of. Whatever your affiliation, do you actually think its a good thing to the development and maintenance of a critical society when every website is bland version of USAToday or every opinion is the same? It's like those stupid polls on ABC News like "Do you think McV should be fried or pulled apart by horses?" Or "Do you thing women who have abortions should be jailed or stoned to death?" It's that kind of censorship. Is that what you want?
Nothing in the article acknowledges the existence of Internet sites and users outside the US.
I wonder how, say, the percentage of AOL hits would be affected by counting IP addresses from the RoW.
Not that the writer's point is necessarily invalid, but his perspective is a bit too narrow.
Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
So 50% of Americans are consumerist sheep and according to some study, spend their time looking at AOL/Time Warner/Micro$oft/Yahoo-based web sites.
I'm actually surprised the percentage isn't higher...
But really, who cares?
What are the *other* 50% doing? That's a lot of people, remember.
Personally, I never look at *any* of those web sites.
Never...
Do you?
Does that study, and that article, mean that the web that I use, and the web that you use, are going to go away?
In a word: No!
Let the K-Mart Kulture AmeriKan Konsumerist sheep stare at their AOL/Time Warner/Micro$oft/Yahoo-based web sites.
That's all they deserve, anyway...
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
From where I sit -- just look at Memepool -- the democratic, chaotic net is still alive and well. And my ad-free site from '93 is still around and still has no ads, even if 10 others have sprung up nearby.
Not a problem.. simply design and manufacture your own hardware. It's already happening. Most parts of a computer exist in open sourced plans these days. Eventually open hardware will be where open software is today.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
You can't say democracy fails just because people "vote" for something you do not like.
There is no worrisome concentration of power in the Web when it comes to sites. In television, the big 4 "popular sites" represent a high percentage of the total channels on (depending on your service, it can be as low as 10% or as high as 30%). On the Web, there are millions of "channels", and these 4 sites represent far less than 1% of the total sites out there.
Since Solomon complains about it, what solution would he like? Any change involves the big hand of censorship. The current situation is a result of popular choice: do we mandate that these Big 4 web sites can only take 30,000 hits per day? Do we force browsers to go to the sites that Solomon likes and give warnings if the users try to go to sites that Solomon does not like?
Basically, the situation Solomon complains about is not a problem, and any solution to it would be a very big problem.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Determined to uncover a possibly conspiring set of zaibatsu-zoku, I have performed a simple test of common technologies to potentially see where the cred flux, when applicable, burns brightest.
The search engine used was Google
(web browser)
First result points to NETSCAPE.COM
Second result mentions Netscape 6.1
Third result describes OPERA
Fourth and fifth results are INTERNET EXPLORER and LYNX, respectively
(server operating system)
First result mentions the FREEBSD PROJECT
Second and third results are comparison FAQs
Fourth and fifth mention are direct links to Microsoft, and mention WINDOWS 2000
(desktop operating system)
First result, something called ATHEOS
Second result, CALDERA LINUX
Third result, a desktop operating system comparison guide
Fourth and fifth, links to NETBSD PROJECT and GNU PROJECT
(home user operating system)
ALL FIVE top results are being fed on by various open source efforts, with FREEBSD first, LINUX second, NETBSD third, ATHEOS fourth and LINUX fifth.
(instant messaging)
AOL dominates the top two spots, with direct links to AOL, describing AIM and ICQ respectively
Third spot, some non-relevant Italian site
Fourth result mentions JABBER, an open source instant messaging effort
MSN messagenging falls sixth
(online book store)
First, AMAZON
Second, BARNES AND NOBLE
Third, fourth and fifth are lesser important special interest book stores
Conclusive? No damn way. Illustrative? Somewhat. Perhaps the most promising results of my test are that alternative operating systems vastly outrank Big Man himself. Hyperlink purposely witheld. Draw your own conclusions.
ICEPHREAK
Without commercialization, we might not have MP3, but we would instead have open-source alternatives that do not have the Thomson threat that MP3 has.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
You can't compare it to banners; if you don't like web sites with banners on them, that is your choice not go to to them. However, no one chooses spam just by getting an e-mail account in most instances; spam is a result of deception, fraud, and violation: most spam involves someone agreeing to a term-of-service at some place and then turning around and violating it.
OK, so 50% of what people look at is corporate crap, does that == the end of free democratic etc internet?
Sure, if you'll accept that books are now useless because People magazine outsells the classics......
"Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top. " - Edward Abbey
Likewise if you don't mind that one way or another those sources are biased by politics or economics or just plain ignorance then fine - it's all good
Yes it is all good. After all. a huge percentage of the little sites are biased by politics or economics... no more and no less than the big sites.
If you don't mind that there is little distinction between those 4 sources and sitting calmly in front of the TV then fine
There is a difference, actually. I guess they are all the same because you do not like them? Sitting in front of the TV is no different from reading books or magazines in its defensibility; I respect the right of anyone to do so.
If you don't mind that the economic forces usually work to marginalize that which does not agree with it then, fine
In the Web, such marginalization does not work. I can get to the same obscure political alternative sites I have been using for years; in fact, there are more of them now, easier to find than ever.
If you don't care if there is any difference between editorial agenda and actual news
I don't care since there is not any such difference: anything and everything represents bias.
But when most outlets are owned by the same few people then all they have to do is put up only what they approve of.
Agreed. But this is not the case on the Web, where these 4 outlets represent a negligable percentage of the sites out there. Take your argument to the TV dial, where arguments against concentration and limited views work!
It's like those stupid polls on ABC News like "Do you think McV should be fried or pulled apart by horses?" Or "Do you thing women who have abortions should be jailed or stoned to death?" It's that kind of censorship.
You didn't name any censorship. Instead, you presented points of view that you found ludicrous. Someone saying something you do not like has nothing to do with "censorship". I might think those questions are stupid as well, but I would not do anything about it. That would be censorship!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
....is a good example of what you are claiming.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I think a lot of people here fail to get what the problem is. Noam Chomsky (and I'm sure a lot of people just groan at that name), said something to the effect of: The greatest way to keep youself in power is to create boundaries outside of which argument does not take place; but within those boundaries, permit all sorts of disagreement. This is what Solomon is foreseeing.
A parallel situation: the anti-abortion activists (and this is not intered to start an abortion thread) see as their new goal not to overturn Roe v. Wade but to make it so that even though abortion is perfectly legal, you can get one anywhere.
Any *ahem* yahoo can publish his/her own newspaper, but you will never influence the national dialogue with your little rag -- you are drowned out by the mainstream media. And I don't think anyone is happy with the current media situation. Again, this is what Solomon is warning us about -- the fact that web traffic goes to established players, not to the radical voices we think are available on the web.
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
The radical voices are always on the fringe, less popular. Do you think a restructuring of the Internet will make communists and nazis a lot more popular?
The boundaries Chomsky refers to does not exist.
Drowned out by the mainstream media? This is a problem of too much speech; which I do not see as a problem: there can never been too much speech.
Popularity == "a buck to be made here" and that sigularity of purpose streamlines its methods over time as a rule. You get less satisfaction for more money because someone else will pay more for less. At the same time the big fish eat all the small fish and the sources of satisfation become limited. Its the same with any product. The easy-to-use browser made the WWW popular and it followed that pattern but that doesn't mean the internet belongs to BigAssMedia, Inc. Make the internet what you want. The media companies can't keep up with grass-roots innovations. Let them have the sheep and you just use the 'net for cool stuff.
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
Because sometimes a win-Knockoff doesn't cut it.
Why did we let them in in the first place? They thought they were gonna get rich and make billions of dollars from the web doing stuff like extracting personal and private information and forcing us to buy stuff from insecure and badly administered web sites. We knew this was not what the internet was about, and we (most of us) knew there wasn't that much money to be made on it. So why did we let them do it? Is it because we wanted to "stick it to the man" without him realizing until it was too late?
Why do we keep trying to make it easier for people of lower IQ to use computers, especially when it just makes computers less useful? Just look at all those "Dummies" books that popped up (must be a lot of dummies out there).
The sad part of "commercialization" is that it is necessary to attract the masses in order for the commercialization to be a success (in their goal of getting rich). I don't mind the commercialized aspect of it but I really hate the dumbing down it brings with it. Is there any possible hope of separating the two? Is there any way to commercially do anything on the internet strictly for smart people, and make at least a decent living at it, besides being an ISP (as if that even does it).
And then there's the troll issue on Slashdot.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
this is funny
As long as you can read what I can write and vice versa, the net will never be television, no matter how much Time and Microsoft want it to be.
mt
Dear Norman,
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d istance.htm
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_ 1.html
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This mail is a response to your article, "Denial and the Ravaging of
Cyberspace".
> While some view it as an expansive bastion of decentralized
> communication and democratic discourse, the Internet now functions quite
> differently overall. In total, the World Wide Web is scarcely more
> civic-minded than your local bank.
Had you not used the terms 'Internet' and 'World Wide Web' so
interchangeably, I might not be writing this letter; but your claim that
the decentralized and democratic nature of the Internet is an illusion is
grossly misleading and technically incorrect. Beyond the confusing
interchanging of terms, you imply that the biggest demonstrated use for
the Internet is for commercial profit, which is simply outrageous.
To validate your gross generalization of the purpose of the Internet,
you cite the statistics quoted after these next two paragraphs. These
statistics apply not to the Internet, however, but to the World Wide Web,
which is what your article is really about - though to many it would appear
otherwise. Indeed, to the average Joe, the Internet is composed solely of
the World Wide Web, despite the popularity of Email and instant messaging,
which have nothing to do with the Web.
But these statistics appear to be flawed even when applied solely to
the Web.
> Websites operated by just four corporations account for 50.4 percent of
> the time that U.S. users of the Web are now spending online, the
> authoritative Jupiter Media Metrix research firm reported in early
> summer. At the top of the heap were AOL Time Warner's sites, with 32
> percent of all minutes spent online in the nation, followed by
> Microsoft (7.5 percent) and Yahoo (7.2 percent).
America Online's software will open the AOL web site when a user starts
the AOL software. This is not a conscious decision made by AOL users. This
fact, combined with the overwhelming popularity of the America Online
Internet service (not the web site, mind you but dial-up and ADSL services
that force users to browse with the AOL web browser), should be enough to
render this statistic nearly irrelevant.
In addition to the AOL software's default setting, many AOL user
services are web-based, such as email and instant messaging. This traffic
should not be considered 'browsing'. One wouldn't consider an AOL user
opening Eudora to check their mail or opening AOL Instant Messenger to
converse with their friends a valid statistic for web browsing.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the web browser built into Microsoft
Windows 98 and above, will open the Mircosoft web site when a user starts
the software. This is not a conscious decision made by Internet Explorer
users. This fact, considering that most everyone runs Windows
(statistically speaking), should be enough to render this statistic nearly
irrelevant.
In addition to the Microsoft software's default setting, Microsoft
offers free services similar to AOL.
Yahoo, debatably the World Wide Web's most user-friendly search engine,
seems to be a relevant statistic. I am not aware of any instance where
users are automatically delivered to this site. It should be noted that
Yahoo also offers many free web services similar to Microsoft's and AOL's.
So web statistics don't mean a thing, espcially since services, which
were previously utlilized by applications run on end-user computers, are
now being provided via the web, and have nothing to do with browsing,
reading content, or making purchases.
> To make matters appreciably worse, the owners of some key search engines
> are avidly prostituting their services. (The most powerful search-scam
> offenders include AltaVista, AOL, Microsoft and Lycos. For details,
> visit www.commercialalert.org.) These days, if you use one of the
> Internet's main search engines to find whatever, the chances are good
> that the top results came from dollars rather than relevance or
> quality.
I'm suprised to read mention of this since your article frequently
refers to statistics that are blatantly influenced by the capitalist search
for the almighty buck. In fact, your article exclusively discusses
capitalist interests, forgetting that there exist people in this country
and the world that don't give a damn about money where the Internet
is concerned, and use it every day as a means to their own non-commercial
ends.
In fact, commercial interest on the Internet is the only topic your
article seems to cover. The free and secure excange of information between
_any people anywhere in the world_ seems to be completely forgotten. Your
article could be summarized as follows...
"Based on marketing research, people are spending most of their time on
the web buying things, or thinking about buying things. People are
constantly being spammed with pop-up ads and persuaded to waste their
money on things they otherwise wouldn't be buying. Corporate America is
doing its best to keep people collared and leashed, but judging by the
recent technological slow-down, there aren't enough resources (consumers)
to go around."
Commercial-free Internet avenues, such as communities erected around
ideasls of free exchange of software and ideas, email and instant messaging,
social exchange, and perhaps the most potentially important, FreeNet[1]-
and Gnutella[2]-like de-centralized, distributed networks, are all
excluded from your analysis of Internet freedom. Possibly you weren't
aware that these avenues existed; possibly you were.
The relevant and disturbing reality is that J.Q. Public isn't aware of
these free resources that wait to be tapped. He goes where the Internet's
Big Three want him to go. They lay out his path for him, and consequently,
that path detours him past ads for products and services that he, more
often than not, doesn't need.
No, your article focuses on what capitalist interest tells you you it
should focus on. Not the potential that the Internet already provides for
personal expression and communication that exist outside the scope of the
World Wide Web, but the heaping mess of overlapping, floundering
ecommercialization that _is_ the World Wide Web.
> But faith in the democratic character of the Internet is resilient; a
> myth that will not die. And the more that huge outfits ravage
> cyberspace, the more useful the mythology becomes, laying a thick fog
> over the realities of mega-media domination.
The supposed '[mythical] democratic character' of the Internet is
precisely what makes capitalism on the Web possible. It is the same
character that allows people to exchange data with whomever they please,
as securely as they please.
The corporate eye will watch where the people go, as the corporate body
feeds on them. On the Internet, the eye is intently focused on the Web. If
demographic research showed the public's favored method for information
exchange to be, say, Gnutella or Usenet[3], the corporate bodies would
attempt to dominate these mediums. (In fact, Usenet has degraded much in
the last few years thanks to the influx of small, fly-by-night businesses
spamming the hell out of Usenet newsgroups and making a generally un-
pleasant place.)
> For a time, the Internet seemed to elude the profit-driven matrix
> squeezing media and public life. Some illusions die hard. But hopefully
> we can move forward with new resolve to fight against corporate power
> -- and for truly democratic media.
You're suggesting forward momentum to online ideology that already
exists. In fact, its right under your nose, you just have to bother to
reach for it. Learn and research _FACT_, not marketing and demographic
statistical nonsense. The long, hard road isn't resisting corporate
influence, it's persuading other people to resist and find avenues where
personal freedom reign supreme - which your article hasn't done very well.
You could have attempted to promote your supposed goal of moving
forward to fight corporate power by making your readers aware of tools and
information already available to them - by showing your readers that there
is more to the Internet than the World Wide Web and commercial dominance.
Some of the larger threats to personal freedom on the internet, or more
specifically, those that threaten free speech, have received no mention in
your article. Take the DMCA[4], for example, which has recieved very little
mainstream attention despite the freedoms it wants to take from the
public. Or the idiotic imprisoning of Dmitri Sklyarov[5] thanks to the DMCA.
The MPAA vs 2600[6] case. The insulting hypocrisy spread by Hilary Rosen
of the RIAA[7]. MP3.com's recent legal problems[8] thanks to unsanctioned
activities of their users.
People must be educated; spouting meaningless (and perhaps misleading)
statistics will only confuse.
After all, marketing theory seems to break down once people realize
that they're being marketed. Would fish take the bait if they knew their
was a hook in the middle?
Respectfully yours,
Nicholas A. Zigarovich
---------
Footnotes:
[1] Freenet is a peer-to-peer network designed to allow the distribution
of information over the Internet in an efficient manner, without fear of
censorship. More information can be found at:
About: http://freenetproject.org/
[2] Gnutella is an open, decentralized, peer-to-peer search system that is
mainly used to find files. Gnutella is neither a company nor a particular
application. It is also not a Web site; in particular, it is not this one,
which is merely a hub for Gnutella and Gnougat information. It is a name
for a technology, like the terms "e-mail" and "web."
About: http://gnutella.wego.com/
[3] Usenet is a distributed bulletin board system and the people who post
and read articles thereon. Originally implemented in 1979 - 1980 by Steve
Bellovin, Jim Ellis, Tom Truscott, and Steve Daniel at Duke University,
and supported mainly by Unix machines, it swiftly grew to become
international in scope and, before the advent of the World-Wide Web,
probably the largest decentralised information utility in existence.
About: http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?quer
About: http://www.forteinc.com/agent/freagent.htm
[4] DMCA, or the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, is a bill (supposedly
passed at the request of Hollywood to illegalize trading of multimedia
files on the Internet) which provides a means for corporations to imprison
anyone who uses a product in a way that is not approved by the producing
corporation. This eliminates the consumer's rights of ownership.
About: http://www.nmpa.org/nmpa/wipofinal.html
http://slashdot.org/features/01/06/06/131232.sh
About: http://www.eff.org/alerts/20010816_eff_ftaa_alert
About: http://www.utsystem.edu/OGC/IntellectualProperty/
About: http://www.eff.org/Intellectual_property/
[5] Dmitri Sklyarov is a Russian programmer. He is known for reverse-
engineering Adobe Corporation's encrypted PDF text file format,
effectively rendering any 'secure' PDF readable by any interested party.
He was arrested and charged at the request of Adobe Corp. with violating
the anti-trafficking provision in section 1201 (b)(1)(A) of 17 USC, which
was made law by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the DMCA), and
secondly, with "aiding and abetting" under 18 USC 2.
About: http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/US_v_Sklyarov/
About: http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/US_v_Sklyarov/20010828
About: http://www.dibona.com/dmca/
[6] In early 2000, the MPAA filed suit against 2600, a 'hacker' magazine,
for telling their readers how to access the movie files stored on DVD
discs. The case is still ongoing.
About: http://www.eff.org/Intellectual_property/Video/MP
About: http://www.2600.com/dvd/docs/
[7] Hilary Rosen of the RIAA
About: http://www.salon.com/tech/view/2000/05/01/rosen/
About: http://www.riaa.com/About-Lead-1.cfm
Interview: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,39108,00
Interview: http://www.narip.com/networknews/archives/rosen.h
[8] MP3.com was a hopeful Internet business designed to allow artists to
exchange their music without succumbing to the greed of the record
industry. So the recording industry sued the pants off of them.
About: http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/review/cr
About: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nf/20010823/tc/13032
About: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010822/wr/media
This post is great, and a must-read for any of those remaining recluses who firmly believe that everyone who's not a computer geek is a clueless luser and should eat hot flaming death.
... that's a winning combination!
Why, though, do you group everyone else into the "average persons" category? The average person is not a computer geek becase the average person is not a geek at all. Doctors, mechanics and cooks are geeks as well -- they're geeks of medicine, geeks of automotive technology, geeks of culinary arts. In order for anyone to do such a job well, they have to have intelligence and a love of their art. These are not the characteristics of the average person.
You remember the invention of the "Web"? There were a lot of geeks online then, of all trades. This technology had been invented so that physicists could collaborate on their research. LONG before the mass influx of retards onto the net, the doctors and med students you speak of were online. The Web is certainly not a computer geek invention! No one I know thought that big Mosaic beast was better than the stuff I could run on my terminal.
As a geek, I value geeks of all trades. Today's Internet allows more of them on because they're not computer geeks; it used to be hard to find your way onto the network but now it is so easy anyone can do it. I for one, welcome these people; I don't resent a doctor's (even a Windows-using doctor) presence here any more than I would in the real world; a person being all of intelligent, well-versed in an art, and having chosen an art that I don't know but is useful to me
Certainly, my doctor is NOT the guy sitting there being wooed by all the bright flashing colors in the latest Coke ad.
The real average person is a totally different story. On the net as well as off, they're fucking morons of the highest order. Setting up a dual-boot configuration of Linux and FreeBSD for one of these guys would be an catastrophic overload of their mental facilities and likely to lead to disaster. Some of them can't even handle my Wendy's order. I doubt you can think of a reason you want them on the Net. Remember though, that you surely want them in real life. Who else is going to make your fast food, pick up your garbage?
We are a minority, living in a place where the majority are dumb as a post. To boot, we live in a democracy, which is the rule of the majority over the minority, as well as under mass capitalism, in which you need to pander to the desires of the majority to succeed. It sucks being here, and it has for a long time. For a little while, the Internet was almost like an intellectual panacea. Since then, however, it has grown out into the real world (by "real world" I definitely do not mean the world of big business). Reality's flip side is the dissolution of fantasy. With reality always comes stupidity. The fantasy of a place separate from reality and stupidity is now officially over. The plus side is that the net is now actually good for real, useful things.
Not much consolation, of course, if the technology is the only thing real and useful to you.
THis article is well written, but it has one flaw in arguing that mega corps are taking over the net in that it assumes that people only use the net to shop, use online financial services and view corporate screened entertainment and that the dominance of mega corps over these interests denotes their dominance over the net.
Just found that flawed reasoning. It's like a child saying "there are goblins under my bed trying to eat me" and when you talk to the child you assume that Goblins exist and then detail ways to deal with them and prevent them eating you. It would of been a lot quicker to say "they don't exist, shut up and go to sleep".
Consider the following:
I am sick and tired of people quoting JMM's "reports" like they're the word of God. It's only the word of God if you believe that Microsoft, AOL and company are God. It would be more appropriate to refer to the company as "Stupider Media Metrics."
-Disgruntled Journalist
god god god yhwh jehovah jehovah yahweh jehovah god jehovah yawheh allah
eris ganesha zeus.. um i lost the plot
It can even be argued that we're entering the "Age of the Non-profit" (alongside with electronic governance) on the web, with open/free software being widely adopted (kind of all-of-a-sudden, from a public perspective) and the spotlight moving away from the dot-com's. Those "Business 2.0/Fast Company" magazines have to have something to write about! :)
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
I have not read the article.
In the last 10 years we have used interent to extend the traditional media (newspapers, Television, magazine and games). And the media giants will dominate this kind of world wide web
If you think about it, why email is the most powerful application using internet? Because it broke away from the contemporary standards and placed a powerful tool in the hands of users
Look at the open source movement and at Project Gutenberg type of activities. They are using the power of internet, people from around the world get together, work together and interact for a common cause
Imagine such projects emerging for each group of people dispersed all over the world. Ethinic groups, professionals, hobbyists, consumers all are going to build networks using a common glue. These groups are going to exploit the world wide web and other tools of the internet.
Then not only technologically, but content wise a network of networks will emerge and we will have tru INTERNET.
Do not understimate this technology!
yAthum UrE yAvarum kELir All the places are our place, everybody is our kin. (A Tamil Poet - 2000 years ago)
"Websites operated by just four corporations account for 50.4 percent of the time that U.S. users of the Web are now spending online...."
that's because a majority of the net users are unimaginative plebians who don't visit any webisite that's not linked from their AOL front page. not because the big, bad, evil companies are mind controlling us, or forcing other websites off the net.
This article is blatantly filled with the author's one-sided point of view. It's either that or he's just trying to kiss up to the anti-business-everything people.
So the net is much more corporate than it was in 1993, but that doesn't mean you or I have to be FORCED to visit ONLY those sites? What are commercial-free sites completely extinct? The net is a proactive medium. You choose what, where, when, and how. It's not like TV where you only have 15 stations and that's pretty much it.
And about the search engine listings. He's trying to make it sound like paid-for-listing engines like Goto are filled with nonsense. Well I beg to differ. Why would anyone want to pay $0.80 per click on a "cell phone" listing if their site is about porn? The person who pays for this is a true moron, like the writer of that article.
And as for his simple-minded annoyance at other people trying to make a buck on the net... Well why don't he think for a moment about who's paying for all the routers, load-balancers, programmers, administrators, designers, rent, bandwidth, etc... ?? Back in 93 there were probably a total of 10,000 people on the net combined. Such a small audience is easy to take care of. But what about Yahoo and their 100 million + daily page views? Who's pocket should their costs come out of?
Next time you hear idiots like this Norman Solomon write junk like this, THINK about the other side. Don't be like the leechers who care about no one but themselves. Think if YOU were Yahoo. What would you do differently?
eTrade SUCKS
the part where they race the tanks through the shopping mall is my favorite. typical hollywood that any 15 yr. old can jump into a jet/tank/spaceship and know how to operate it. and the computer-generated Fat Elvis Presley as the cop eating jelly doughnuts is priceless. oh yeah, freeze-frame the ninjas--they're wearing Nikes.
Security focus recently touched on this very subject. Except what they talked about were AV companies spreading virus paranoia to drive sales. If you think about it, there are a lot of parallels in the evil behind writing an inflamatory virus report to boost your ass out of the red and passing off an advertisement as an objective review. Maybe if this shakeout does enough damage to the payees, the backlash will carry over the payers.
BOSTON SUCKS!
... 'cause what he's saying is that in a few years, the majority of present internet users will be couched infront of their i(diot)-boxes, shopping like mad, and the spammers and banners will have abandoned this neck of the woods, leaving nothing behind but all that wonderfully expensive infrastructure and expanded bandwidth for us to play in.
sounds OK by me.
Strangely, there are people out there who still read books, watch theatre and go to art galleries. Sure, TV may not be high art, but most people don't appear to like high art. It survives, nonetheless.
Start freaking out when you're not allowed to read books any more, ala DMCA+ebooks.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT after you.
Actually, I was referring to how these boundaries do not exist on the Internet/Web.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
OK, so people get 51% of their web content from the same four companies. But put it in perspective: they get 95% or more of their movies from the same dozen or so companies. 95% of the music (published by 7 companies) is played on the radio stations owned by the same 5 companies. Most the "news" in your local paper comes from the two wire services. ALL mass media is dominated by a small number of insanely wealthy and powerful companies. The internet is still the one place where the rest of us can be heard. Granted the mainsteam McWeb may be dominated by a small clique, but small voices will always be able to make themselves heard, at least to the part of the population smart enough to look outside the McWeb for their information.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
That level of knowledge is not required. What "we" (I presume I agree with the poster) want is for the average person to know as much about computers as he does about cars, and as much about electronic information as he does about pen, paper and books. In other words, the rudimentary education that will save him from lots of trouble and grief. A society of illiterate savages cannot be a democratic republic. In such a society, the individual citizens lack the conceptual tools to effectively use their theoretical freedom.
We are entering an era when most human activity is mediated by computers, software and networks. The fact that the majority have almost no knowledge of these things, and are in fact plunged in the most profound superstition and ignorance is not a good omen.
Much of the prosperity of the 20th century was powered by widespread literacy. Learning to read and write is hard (much harder than the basics of computers) but as a society we've decided that everyone should have these skills. Yes, even those:
In a sense, the medical doctors have already succeeded in forcing a little of their knowledge on us: health class, or sexual education in high school. It doesn't make you an MD, but it's a reasonable distillation of parts of medical knowledge likely to affect a young person. I think we should draw up a corresponding curriculum of basic computer knowledge and urge its adoption.
We have prominent citizens who accepted knighthoods from an actual monarchy.