Tag Archives: Internet

The Future of Publishing

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A really interesting video. I found the link via twitter @FrankieBit

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Weq_sHxghcg&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

The main message is: “Things doesn’t end, just changes”
The publishing industry needs to adapt to the way people consumes information. It’s not about the death of something, but all about changes. Companies that are not able to change and to adapt have a common end: death.

It’s all about that and that’s good. Who wants a society with no changes?

One more message I love from this video is: “People is smarter than you think”
In fact the more information people assimilates, smarter and harder to convince them the task becomes. Maybe some governments try to reduce the education level, just to have more lambs that will obey to any new insane law or regulation. But information technology is providing, right now, a new source of information that is not under the control of few corporations or governments.

Living resume, footprint, byteprints

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people

The development of internet had changed a lot since the beginning of times.
At the beginning people were just simple spectators, reading a Web page and eating information. Little by little Internet changed the way people interacted with it, adding more multimedia, more interaction, and specially becoming a medium that changed according to its users. This is a really important point because nowadays, everybody is a content editor. Any comment, any mini-post on twitter, any picture that we upload to flickr modifies the content of the Internet corpus.

This activity leaves footprints, fingerprints or, in other words, byteprints…
All this data comes from the user, except the one produced by the technical nature of this medium, such as IP addresses, browser versions, OS versions and so forth. We create the byteprints that are cached by search engines that automatically associate them with our identity.

With identity I refer to the one that we provide when we use Internet. I’m not talking about the official one, created by our parents and supported and enforced by governments where everyone of us has a serial number, an official name and family name, a social security number, and so forth. I mean the identity that we are, still now, free to create on Internet.

For example, around 150 years ago people could call themselves as they liked. The name could be decided by parents but actually any person could call him/herself as he liked. There were no pictures, no credit cards, no biometric id systems, no databases, nothing as such. Everybody could be as anonymous as they pleased.
Fortunately Internet is still a medium like that. We can decide our own identity and define it as we want, with the name, picture or whatever we like. We are still free to talk about everything, we are free to think and we are free to be anonymous.
Unfortunately almost all governments of this planet are trying to change this and make Internet a controlled environment where everybody could be recognized, prosecuted, controlled, and monitored. The reason is simple: just to control and make people stop talking against some interests and to filter and censor what governments decide which is true or false.

The freedom to create our own identity has its pros and cons. We control what could be associated to our identity. For example I’d like to be associated with Linux, Photography, Opensource and Japan.
So in the case a company would be interested to get more information about me, not just the resume, they could check the web and see that I’m involved on those topics. Actually almost all companies that decide to hire someone, do a previous search on Google to see more about this person. So the byteprints we leave out there on the Net could be used by companies, particulars or other web services to make a digital personality of ourselves.

Just try to put your name within double quotes in Google and see the results. If you don’t like it that means that the information that you generated in Internet is not the one that you should associate to your name. The process to change this records is slow and painful, its like an Akashic records. So before taking part in any Web site where a login or just a name is needed to be left, first think about who from your multiple ego (personalities) you would like to use and associate with that information.

This is the beginning of the creation of our online personality (or personalities) and online identity (or identities). Not just an id/password but the records of our movements, our byteprints, our comments, posts, pictures, and so forth. If you are not sure about which information you would like to associate with your “identity” a good practice is to be anonymous. Remember, once the information had been cached by search engines it’s really hard to change it.

How to live without google

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Already everybody knows that Google is one of the biggest and more used search engines in the net. It’s not only a search engine, it provide countless services, many of then are really unique with almost no competitors.
I had a happy life with Google and it’s services. I used Gmail, Google Documents, Google Labs, Froogle, Google Chat and many others. Specially I was an user of Google Ads.
I didn’t earn so much by using it, but some few bucks a months was not bad at all. All of these services were centralized with only one company: Google.
I didn’t realize how much of my Internet life becomes little by little more and more Google dependent and I didn’t realize how much effort I should need in the future in case I decided to broke this dependence. Google is a company and after all it only thinks about its own profit, it’s quite normal, that’s the way companies work and all the social aspects are not really social, it’s just marketing to increase the profit.

Well, after some years using Google I decided to change this dependency and come back to a Googleless era. I decided to move my dependency back to me and to other companies and services on the net. I can not have all those benefits from my own, there are no all-in-one-package applications that I could install in my server that provide me with all the services I need. So I prefer to depend on many companies instead to depend on only one. Why? Simple. Google just theft my money in Google adsense a couple of months ago and I couldn’t do anything. No responses, no tech support, nothing.

I had an account with an email that was not a Google gmail account. Lately they decided to merge all those accounts and force users to use a Google account for the adsense services and many other Google services. In that process I lost the money that I had in the adsense account. Just reset to zero and I also lost all my ads as well.

I cannot complain to them, because I just say yes to the agreement they offered me to accept in the moment I created the Google adsense account. They reserve the right to quit any account and the user cannot complain at all. This is not fare because even if the service is free, the simple fact of using it, makes my using of Google services a contribution to Google business and they repaid me quitting my account with absolutely no possibility form from my side to claim or even an explanation. Well my fault, I didn’t read that “agreement”. It happened me once, and I swear, it won’t happen me twice.

So let’s see how can we live without Google and how we can just use it as one more of many of the great search engines that exist out there in the net an not as the ONLY one. Remember, Google is not Internet. It’s just a company, that’s all.

Search Engines:

There are several. They are good and many of them better than Google.

http://www.alltheweb.com/
http://www.powerset.com/
http://search.wikia.com/
http://www.ask.com/

http://www.goodsearch.com/
Interesting search engine. Its results are powered by yahoo and the 50% of its revenue are donated to charity causes.

http://www.leapfish.com/
This search engine provides results from the mayor search engines, Google, Yahoo and Msn.

Email:

I’m moving back to the email related with my domain name. In my case I make a huge use of email communication. I have a personal page and I need to have a domain name to create a presence of myself in the net. There are many services, for free and not free that offer the possibility to have some kind of “presence” on the net. But I think that a domain is one of the most powerful solutions. Think about it. A domain is a real presence, independent of companies or services. You just need to pay for it every year, domains are really cheap and you need a hosting service. The good thing is that the hosting service is something that I can change at any time in case I’m not satisfied with the service. I understand that in case you don’t have a blog or don’t make a strong use of Internet maybe buying a domain name is not worth it. But for me it is, and depending on a third party services is not a solution. So instead of having a “free” email I prefer to have an email associated with my domain. It gives me the freedom to choose the email that I need. The use of this email is a way to promote my web page too.

I pay every year for a hosting service that provides me with the infrastructure to build, not only this site, but many others, and it also provides me with many other services. I’m using BlueHost. They have a really good service and good cost-service relation.

One more convenient thing in having a domain name is that you can use an email of your own domain even without a hosting service. A .com/.org/.net domain is really cheap, just $10 per month and you can redirect all the emails coming to your domain to a specific free email. In this way you just can change the free email service whenever you want but your original email won’t change anymore in the future.

If you care about your presence in the net, you don’t want to find that someday your blog just disappears because the small letters in the contract of the free service said that X Corp. reserves the right to cancel the service at any time. That’s what happened to me with adsense and this is the reason I’m eliminating, as much as I can, all the dependence with those kind of services.

Share Documents:

I have a share disk on my hosting provider that lets me move easily files from my computer to the shared directory so other people can access them. Google provides an online Word processor, spreadsheet and so forth. Well, I use OpenOffice on all my computers so I just create the file and move it to the share folder. It’s easy and no Google dependent. I can even make a public accessible folder in case I want to share it to everybody as easy as to pass just a link to it.

Blogging:

Blogger is a really powerful tool but it’s not the only one. WordPress is one of the most powerful blogging CMS out there, it’s open source and you can easily install it on your own server. It’s not the only one, here you can find a full list of opensource CMS. Since the beginning I decided to blog independently of any free service just to have control and to be free to implement all the changes I need.

Commercial Ads:

Google adsense is one of the most popular ones but not the only one. Here you have some alternatives:

http://chitika.com/publishers.php
http://publisher.yahoo.com/
http://www.adbrite.com/
http://www.openx.org
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/

Remember that almost all of them have similar “contracts”. So be careful and don’t rely so much on these services. A better way to make money is just increasing the traffic to your site. After sometime some companies can be interested to put advertise on them. This is a more stable and profitable than all those “free” services.

So after this review, I’m not using Google as the only search engine, only blogging platform, only email service, only ads platform and so forth. I do not depend on it. I’m getting better results using different services and companies. Not just only one.

Always try to avoid dependency. I know it’s hard sometimes, but it is worth it.

Almost 50% of Dutch population are “pirates”?

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Via Slashdot I found this interesting article.

It’s pretty logic. It’s the philosophy of try it and if you like it, buy it.

People that spend the time to install a P2P program, configure it, look for movies and download them, usually are people that love to see movies and love to listen to music. These kind of people, is the one that go to a shop and buy movies too, just to have a nice envelope, have it original and with some add-ons. It’s nice to see this statistics that one more time prove that sharing movies, software and music do not damage the entertainment and media industries.

Nice video :)