As a minor side note, one thing did get smaller: the “i” in “Internet.”  Whether it was an editor’s choice or his own style, that word was never capitalized in Cerf’s article for The Guardian.

However, he did point out, “Today, barely one in five people around the world has access to the internet.  Yet around three-quarters of the world’s population lives within reach of a mobile network.  In the decade ahead, many people, especially in developing countries, will have their first contact with the internet via a mobile phone.”

It’s hard to imagine what will occur as a result of all those new users, and in this article, Cerf didn’t waste much of his time by trying.  He merely concluded by stating, “Regardless of the medium, there will always be demand for high-quality content.”

Also, Cerf seemed to feel that the Internet (or “internet,” if you like) is more than ready to handle whatever comes its way.  For those of you who have read about predicted slowdowns and such, that should come as a relief.

Google is often able to pay publishers in their choice of the American dollar or a local currency.  Yet that second option is based on the exchange rate, and as an article in the Guardian Unlimited reported, “The dollar edged lower against the euro and a basket of major currencies on Monday as renewed credit market worries reinforced expectations that more Federal Reserve interest rate cuts are imminent.”

So in a very real sense, the tanking U.S. economy is causing publishers to receive less and less money.  And this is having a very real effect; although some people use the money as extra income, others depend on it to support themselves.

Betsy Schiffman uncovered a whole thread’s worth of folks who have, one way or the other, been affected by the dollar’s fall and AdSense.  Also, a full month ago (before many of these problems became worse), Everton Blair wrote, “If I do ever quit my day job and use [the] blog earnings to put food on the table, I might have to move back to America.”

This trend will definitely bear watching, although there’s probably little that the publishers, Google, or anybody else can do about it.

Israeli Journalists Insult Dutch Via Translation

An incident between Israel and Holland could have been much worse. Imagine if American journalists sent a message to Russian or Chinese government officials that came across like the ones noted by The Guardian – diplomatic incident would be putting it mildly.

"Helloh bud, enclosed five of the questions in honor of the foreign minister: The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian," started off the mess. It got worse with subsequent questions, all plugged in online for translation according to the Jerusalem Post:

It continued with five nearly incomprehensible questions, and several other mentions of "mother."

"How could this e-mail possibly have been sent? These journalists have sparked a major, major incident," said an official from Israel’s Foreign Ministry. "Sure he can’t understand many of the questions, because the English is so bad. But he is being asked about the sleeping arrangements of his mother!"

The journalist who set up the trip was away from the newspaper, leaving someone with no practical knowledge of English plugging words into an online translator and sending email to the Dutch Foreign Ministry. The Jerusalem Post identified the site as babelfish.com, but that is a parked domain; the real translation would have been done on another site, possibly one linked from a page of results for "Dutch Translation Service" appearing on babelfish.com.

Neelie Kroes, EU Commissioner, said in The Guardian they would look at the competition aspects of the deal, not the privacy related concerns that have been brought up about the deal in America:

The commissioner, who has until October 26 to decide, has said: “We are looking at the influence on competition and that’s it.”

Google has tried to define the DoubleClick deal as a complementary one, where its existing paid search revenue stream would be paired with DoubleClick’s display ad model.

However, the pairing also brings a multitude of personal information together about web surfers, should the deal take place. The Electronic Privacy Information Center EPIC has complained for months about the proposed merger on privacy grounds, and recently petitioned the FTC to block it.

Well, that may depend on your motivation for publishing in the first place.

The discussion begins at the Guardian, set in motion by Bobbie Johnson’s musing on the release of last week’s TechMeme Leaderboard, which shows the top 100 online publications appearing on the site. Johnson noted that TechMeme didn’t generate near the traffic of the aforementioned buzz-networks, among others.

He writes:

But for the people who jostle for position on the site’s top 100, what’s the use of being part of an aggregator that aggregates but doesn’t send readers your way?

And so begins the discussion as to whether TechMeme is worth its hype among the A-listers. Robert Scoble calls it "an echo chamber" that sends a fraction of the traffic that Digg sends, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, if you lean Aristotelian in your world view:

I don’t want a big audience. I want a smart audience. So far I’ve gotten exactly that from TechMeme.

Christopher Coulter, who, according to a quick Google search, may be a frequent antagonist to Scoble’s ideas, had no trouble articulating how both sides of the traffic game can be spun:

When traffic low, claim "superior" audiences or "community", when traffic high, claim the trend has finally taken hold, you of course, being the first to know. It’s a great shell con-game — you never lose.

Well, that would be the cynic’s viewpoint. Whether or not bigger is better (and that’s a debate that can go on – crassly – all night), said echo-chamber extended beyond TechMeme as reports of similar trickle-down-traffic experiences came to light.

Nick Carr says:

Techmeme seems a lot bigger than it really is, at least to some of us.

And at TechWag:

We have been on techmeme twice now, and it has driven less than 1% of all traffic to the web site. We may be user generated content web 2.0 heaven, but we are still increasingly reliant on web 1.0 search engines, and the very few top social networking sites. The top referrers to the web site, Google, yahoo, msn, live, and direct, long before we get to Digg, Slashdot, or other sites that tend to send spiky traffic.

Louis Gray qualifies the traffic question at least a little by mentioning how the primary readership following TechMeme are RSS subscribers, thus naturally reducing the traffic.

So, at least among this small niche crew, there seems to be a general agreement that traffic is not the motivator for headlining at TechMeme, reducing it down the aforementioned intimate-gathering versus drunken-massive-orgy debate.

Then what is the value of TechMeme? Well, it could be a case of credibility by association. Dan Blank, Director of Content Strategy & Development for Reed Business Information, comments that TechMeme has a PageRank of 7, therefore passing along some nice authority with its links.

Dave Winer, always the contrarian, adds a little game theory to the mix, by noting TechCrunch’s overwhelming presence on the site:

Since Arrington’s pieces tend to rise to the top of the page, pieces that link to them become more visible (they show up in the Discussion links), and the chances that another blogger is going to point to them go up. All it takes is one or two of those pointers to promote your piece to the top level, and that really boosts your visibility, and now that the Leaderboard is there, it could make that status semi-permanent, creating an even greater incentive to point.

As to whether a bigger audience is better than a smaller audience, that all depends on if you’re publishing for money or for conversation – if it’s the conversation you want, it doesn’t really matter.

Today would have been Dahl’s 91st birthday, which explains the timing, and on the Roald Dahl Day Blog, a post states, “After all the months and days and hours of party planning and preparation, Dahl Day is here.  There will be quizzes and games galore and it’s the perfect excuse to eat chocolate for breakfast, lunch and supper, it is Roald Dahl Day, after all.  Let’s get the party started . . .”

Given that it’s nearly my lunchtime, I’ll be quite happy to oblige.  But Dahl deserves a bit more attention before I break out the Hershey’s.  Judging from the results of a recent survey, he probably deserves even more attention than J.K. Rowling, Dr. Seuss, or just about any other children’s author you can think of.

The survey involved 16-to-34-year-olds, and as reported by the Guardian Unlimited, “Roald Dahl remains the most popular children’s author among young adults.”

That’s nice.  I’ll now tip my hat to Philipp Lenssen and settle down with some chocolate and a good book.

Google Ready To Seduce Corporate World

Throughout the assembly of Google Apps, many have speculated breathlessly that Google would threaten Microsoft’s near-eternal dominance of the desktop during the age of the PC.

That theory will take a small step toward reality today, but the fight for corporate desktop share looks like it will start in Europe. The Guardian reported IT consulting giant CapGemini will promote Google Apps to its customers:

“Microsoft is an important partner to us as is IBM,” said the head of partnerships at CapGemini’s outsourcing business, Richard Payling. “In our client base we have a mix of Microsoft users and Lotus Notes users and we now have our first Google Apps user. But CapGemini is all about freedom, giving clients choice of the most appropriate technology that is going to fit their business environment.”

“If you look at the traditional desktop it is very focused on personal productivity,” said Robert Whiteside, Google enterprise manager, UK and Ireland. “What Google Apps brings is team productivity.”

Google Apps also removes something from those environments: the Microsoft (or IBM/Lotus) “tax” in the form of expensive licensing fees. Participating firms will pay CapGemini the $50 per-person annual license fee, which should be a significant savings over Office upgrades and Microsoft client licenses.

Google won’t wipe Microsoft away from the desktop entirely. Microsoft’s applications have become too standardized, and Google lacks an integrated calendar within Gmail. Outlook’s calendar has always been a bright spot in Microsoft’s suite, but not every employee needs it.

Instead, we think Google Apps will find a place on the desktops of cubicle workers rather than the sales and executive types who live and die on Microsoft applications. Imagine removing Office from a hundred cubicles and replacing it with Google.

That’s the kind of cost savings that makes corporate accountants salivate into their spreadsheets.

There’s a bit more to the story than that, however; while some irresponsible “young‘uns” will indeed get away without paying interest, their bank appears to have been acting in an underhanded manner.

“In previous years HSBC, like other high street banks, had allowed students an interest-free overdraft typically up to £1,500-£2,000 for the first few years after graduation,” report Hilary Osborne and Harriet Meyer for the Guardian Unlimited.  “But in July it said it was scrapping free overdrafts and would charge interest at 9.9%.”

The policy went into effect just one month later, and a “Stop the Great HSBC Graduate Rip-Off!!!” group was created on Facebook in response; there are currently almost 6,000 members.  In the, uh, face of this and other protests, the bank eventually backed down.

“Following the feedback from our graduate account holders, both directly and through the NUS [National Student Union], we have taken the decision to freeze interest charging on 2007 graduates’ overdrafts up to £1,500, and refund any interest charged in August,” Andy Ripley, head of product development at HSBC, stated in a press release.

Say, Facebook . . . I’m buying a house.  Wanna protest mortgage rates?

The exact amount of the agreed-upon flat fee remains unknown – heck, even an official ballpark is unavailable – so it’s hard to know how to treat this news.  The development may stave off a copyright infringement lawsuit or two, which would certainly be valuable to YouTube.  Then again, so would keeping cash in its pocket, and the company’s lawyers are quite good.

Another unclear issue is the matter of what will happen from this point forward.  “All four major record labels have now made licensing deals which mean they take a share of the advertising revenue when YouTube carries their music,” notes Jonathan Richards for the Times Online, “but this is the first deal which ensures that revenue will also be collected on behalf of song-writers and publishers.”

Ah, well.  We can at least return to safe ground by describing the MCPS-PRS Alliance’s membership; an article in The Guardian names Sir Paul McCartney and Eric Idle (AKA “Sir Robin”), in addition to Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen, as standing among the ranks.  And anything that benefits a Beatle and a Python can’t be all bad.

“There are 93 Bring Back Wispa groups on Facebook with approaching 14,000 members and the rival directories MySpace and Bebo are catching up,” according to The Guardian’s Martin Wainwright.  And the Wispa, which was produced between 1981 and 2003, will return to shelves in Britain in October.

This is no coincidence – Cadbury’s spokesman, Tony Bilsborough, told The Guardian, “We had noticed the web interest for some time.  It reveals a consumer passion which swayed our opinion about relaunching Wispa.”

Bilsborough’s observations seem to be backed by media coverage; from the Chocablog to the BBC, British sources are taking note of social networking’s win.  Granted, “more chocolate” might not be quite as desirable as “world peace,” but it’s something.  And that’s assuming, of course, that this wasn’t a planned marketing campaign, as Branwell Johnson suspects. 

In any case, Cadbury has hinted that the permanence of the Wispa’s comeback will depend on sales.  Hat tip to Andy Beal.