Posted by Marshall on January 20, 2008 |
Link It
When I was in France last month for LeWeb3 I was having a real hard time finding good internet connectivity - even at the LeWeb3 conference. When I went around Paris trying to connect, even the god dammed Starbucks was charging me 4 euros an hour (~7.20 USD) for connectivity that was only half good (and I had to put in a series of long hexadecimal numbers BY HAND in order to activate the connectivity).
That's how far behind Internet Connectivity was in Paris; earlier last year I was also in France, part of the time in Paris and the rest in Aix-en-Provence - where the connectivity was even worse.
Not only that - but everyone I met seemed to be using computers and connecting to the internet much as we'd have done here 10-15 years ago. Perhaps the best use of the Internets in French pubs and bistros - where I'm told, most have internet connectivity for free, but it's kinda slow (not perfect for Seesmic, if you know what I mean, Loic).
But now that Time Warner is plotting to start metering our internet usage and charge us for it - starting first in Texas, Jeff Jarvis - getting ready to attend Davos (where I wish I could go - dream on) complains on how he's being stiffed in Munich, today, the same way Time Warner is going to try to stiff us all, in a few years:
"…I’m getting a preview of Time Warner’s doomed idea to charge internet access based on usage.
At the hotel here in Munich, I’m getting criminally overcharged for internet access by the hotel and Swiss: They’re charging me 27 euros for 24 hours to get supposedly unlimited speed (ha! I tested and it’s slow; I can’t even watch a YouTube video worth a damn and it almost took longer to download On the Media than to listen to it) and downloading. They’d charge me a bit less if I agreed to getting lower priority for my packets — the hint is that at the slower speed, I couldn’t be able to use Skype or watch videos — and an unspecified limit on my bandwidth. Being forced to pay a premium to get acceptable service makes me mad enough; not getting acceptable service makes me resent them even more."
I'm not sure if Jeff is complaining about not getting what he's paying for or pissed that he's being charged the equivalent of $43.00 USD a day, being screwed for it.
One of the things I've maintained, all along, is, you can't go back - if your giving people unlimited internet now, and then….. suddenly you want to revoke that an put a taxi meter on a cable subscribers internet - all while upping their bills - your going to have blood on the streets.
People live the internet now - they're on all the time.
However, I do see this as a pattern - that internet providers will try to put the meter on us, whenever they can.
And that gets me to investigate the conflicts that are inherit here. For example, aren't the cable and media companies producing all this rich media to download that is clogging up our bandwidth now? And aren't people making free use of the internet to follow their favorite stars and celebrities? And doesn't media, who also, in many cases own the cable companies and have interests in telecoms, the very suppliers of the cholesterol of the internet?
And they are the ones that are now wanting to charge us for downloading too much of what they are producing - it's perverse.
Posted by Marshall on August 03, 2007 |
Link It
I came across the review of a new book titled The Internet Imaginaire, by Patrice Flichy; the review was written by Robert Blinn and looks interesting - perhaps The Internet Imaginaire is worth reading for a couple reasons:
- semiotics - I don't know anything much about semiotics but the book has a lot about it:
"…work of Paul Ricoeur, one of the originators of the semiotics. For those unfamiliar, it is a discipline concerned with exploring the deeper meaning of signs and symbols, and is a staple of communications studies."
I could get into studying symbols.
2. Internet Imaginaire attempts to explain the origin and evolution of the Internet (and the reviewer suggests it succeeds at this goal):
".. I was even more amazed to discover that Flichy had succeeded notably in one aspect: explaining from a historical standpoint the foundation and origins of an extremely complex and globally interrelated phenomenon, the Internet. So if you've ever wondered quite where Al Gore is coming from when he proclaims that he "invented" the Internet, or what TCP has to do you’re your outgoing mail or precisely what IP implies, perhaps this is the book for you. Because once you jettison the baggage of semiotics, Flichy has written a very thorough historical expose on the originations and causes of one of the major paradigm shifts of our day, the Internet.
3. The Internet is explained in the context of popular culture:
"..In its second section The Internet Imaginaire examines the role of the Internet in popular culture. Here Flichy actually does begin to pull his initial (if confounding) argument together. Connecting futurists like Alvin Toffler, Cyberpunk authors such as William Gibson, and even open-source innovators like Linus Torvalds he describes the interaction between the Internet, politics and economics, going so far as to cite Canadian Marxist Arthur Kroker's announcement of the arrival of a "virtual class," where computer access and knowledge of "netiquette" would provide the foundations for a digital elite that would benefit from its connection to the worldwide knowledge base, leaving the unplugged disenfranchised. As our culture moves toward a knowledge economy, such prognostications may well be accurate, but I would view a knowledge-elite as far preferable to landed aristocracy and primogeniture."
I'll have to see when I have time to read such a book, but it looks interesting - perhaps worth the effort.
Posted by Marshall on April 14, 2007 |
Link It
I was just thinking about this today as I watched my statmeter and it showed lower than normal traffic for Webmetricsguru.com; I found it took over a minute to load my blog in a browser when I could connect to it (every other or third time).
I've already contacted Know More Media about it and I'm sure it will be cleared up but it got me thinking about how web traffic numbers (visitors, uniques, pageviews even time spent per visitor) are influenced by the site being available in the first place.
And the problem for blog networks like Know More Media - who are probably pushing the limit on advertising they can fit on a page, and the additional slowdown in page loading that delays in Ad Servers can serve up - may make the whole blog monetization issue a toss up. If you put so many ads on a page, with different advertisers - you run the risk of holding up part of the page that needs to load, waiting on that element of page - and increase the possibilities that the site will load slowly thereby working against having the advertising on the site in the first place - which seems to be what's happening on Webmetricsguru.com today. I won't speak about any of the other blogs on our network as I haven't tried them, but usually a delay in my blog is symptomatic of an overall delay in all of them.
And it's also true that changes, if they are making some on the backend, are usually best done on the weekend -when people are less likely to be reading blogs quite as much.
What I'd like to see, in situations like this, is a seporate blog that records all work being done on the network, or in a blog template, or anything that might help explain why there are slowdowns and what steps are being taken to work on restoring service.
I've also noticed my Technorati listings seem to show, as of today, that the last time my site was crawled for content was 3 weeks ago - even though they list having seen content in the last 8 hours. That makes me wonder how much of what we use to rank blogs is dependant on network infrastructure and middle-ware being up to snuff and working properly.
And finally, consider the case of Google. Google's search results were better early on, but they're not much to brag about now, 10 years later, yet the ability for Google to deliver a simple search interface quickly is what, at the end of the day, might have won out over everyone else - who tended to clutter up their interfaces with portal experiences that many people did not want or need.
So just because you can serve more ads, squeeze out a couple more cents a visit, by showing something - I think all networks ought to balance out growth with quality of visit, quality of service. In the case of my blog network, it's possible they may be serving too many ads, too much in one page to load quickly enough - and that's turning some people off. I have no control over that and I'm sorry about it, I just provide the content.
