Thursday, February 25, 2010

Freedom of Speech vs Privacy

There has been a conflict between internet based free speech and privacy legislation since the beginning. nowhere does this conflict become more obvious that in the area of social media. Do we really have the right to say those things about other people publicly? Should we?

Freedom of speech has been a central mantra of democratic countries for centuries, well at least a couple. However, the internet has brought in important changes that haven't been digested yet by our institutions. While freedom of expression will hopefully remain a central tenet of our society, we may have to redefine it somewhat. At one time, freedom of speech would have been tempered by traditional courtesy and respect for others, those aspects of society have dissipated considerably. As with so much else, the moderation may have to be legislated.

See here a writeup on a recent case in Italy which may change the situation a lot.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Has Social Networking Run Its Course?

A recent poll - unscientific and all - has resulted in some 400 readers of Internet Evolution to call for the elimination of Facebook, Myspace and Twitter. The poll asked the question: "If you could eliminate one Web service, which one would it be?" Biased, for sure, but nevertheless food for thought.

There are plenty of reasons why social networking could run out of steam. It started with teenagers, notorious for social interaction but - - between themselves. Now that it has gone mainstream, it loses its appeal to them. Also, the privacy and security implications of social networking are becoming increasingly evident to everyone. That will turn off many people - as it already has employers and other organizations.

That said, people are inherently social and it could be that social networking is just going through a fine tuning stage. Stay tuned.

For a write-up on the survey, follow this link.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Faster Wireless Downloads

Mobile units are the future of the internet, or at least a very important part of it. But one of the problems constantly experienced by those downloading data is slowness and dropped packets. A new protocol, fasp-Air by Aspera promises to fix this problem by addressing some of the shortcomings of TCP, the standard protocol used to date. The new protocol was used when making the movie Avatar, to speed up data transmissions from New Zealand to the US. Fast data transmission is critical to the future development of e-business, as transmissions become larger and more frequent. Read up on fasp-Air in this article.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

ROBO Shoppers

Research Online Buy Offline, has been a phenomenon almost since the web started to be used for commercial purposes. Initially, it happened because people found useful information about products on websites but were reluctant to buy online. Now, many people are more comfortable buying online, but the amount and quality of information about the products they might be interested in has grown exponentially. Now online research has become routine for most consumers.

The importance of ROBO shopping is something that companies should recognize in their website design. They need to work in features that will encourage the customer to stay and buy or else come back when they do buy, whether it be incentives, necessary local information, etc. For a good article on this aspect of e-commerce, see this article in E-Commerce News.

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

The Pricing Struggle over E-Books

In a recent move in the ongoing chess game between Amazon, maker of the Kindle, and the Publishing industry, Amazon has agreed to a scheme under which the publishers would have a say in the price of the e-books and retain 70% of the proceeds. That's a major shift. The publishing industry is under pressure to prove it deserves a piece of this pie and in the long term it will be the consumers who decide. E-books are not going to go away, and should be cheaper because they do not have the production costs, such as binding and printing.

One major thing that the publishers do bring to the table, however, is quality control. While self-publishing is big, there is not yet a good mechanism to screen out the good from the bad, other than the open market, which is not good enough. There is quite a lot of shake-out yet to come in the publishing industry and its relationship with ebooks. Here's an article on the topic.