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As Long As There Are Links, The Web Will Live

Chris Crum — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:30:27 +0000

An article from Wired caught a lot of attention this week when it proclaimed that the Web is dead. Obviously, this is a sensational headline and a perfect example of linkbait, but it worked. It received the attention it was looking for, and it is still an interesting and thought-provoking read, though the web is far from dead.

Do you think the web is dead? Share your thoughts.

A lot of the criticism over the article deals with a traffic chart it presents, and how misleading it is, but I don’t want to focus on that. That’s been ripped apart enough. look at some of the things author Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff say.

The article says, "Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting."

This to me is more a declaration that search is dead or dying, which it is not. There will never be enough "getting" to eliminate all searching. There will always be specific needs that arise, which will require searching, and while the apps we use to do that search may be becoming more diversified, there will still be a need for that one all-encompassing gateway to search (which happens to currently be Google for the majority of people). Not to mention the fact that we’ll need to search for the apps themselves.

I’ve talked about this diversification of search numerous times. What it boils down to is that people will not stop using search engines, they will just use them less for certain kinds of searches if they have an app that they like for that particular kind of information. This is already happening.

The article says, "Ecommerce continues to thrive on the Web, and no company is going to shut its Web site as an information resource. More important, the great virtue of today’s Web is that so much of it is noncommercial. The wide-open Web of peer production, the so-called generative Web where everyone is free to create what they want, continues to thrive, driven by the nonmonetary incentives of expression, attention, reputation, and the like. But the notion of the Web as the ultimate marketplace for digital delivery is now in doubt."

I would say, not really. How long has search been that "ultimate marketplace"? Isn’t this again, basically saying that search (not the web) is dying (which again it’s not)?

It comes down to access points and how we get our information, which threatens to reduce time spent with search, but will not eliminate it. That reduced time, is perhaps why Google really needs this "Google Me" thing to work (though we still don’t really know what this will consist of). The more apps or access points that connect you to a Google profile, the more Google can make up for that reduced time you spend searching It makes a case for that newfound interest in social games), and it certainly makes a case for why Google provides mobile ads across third-party apps.

This is all something that businesses really need to consider. If all of your eggs are in the search marketing basket, you better really start thinking about mobile and apps. Google is still a major factor here. In fact, this is very connected to Google’s recent emphasis on Places, which it has effectively turned into its own mobile app. Notice that other Google features have their own apps as well.

All of that said, search itself will always be an app. In fact it’s usually more than that. Search is its own hard key on your phone – maybe as important an app as the browser.

A Web of Links

Clearly apps are becoming a bigger part of our lives, and may continue to dominate more of our web access, but we’re still connecting with the greater web, and the browser is certainly far from dead.

Many of the apps we use are just different ways of presenting the web’s information, and ultimately utilize links to other parts of the web. Sometimes, they even take us out of the apps and into the browser. Think about links from feed readers, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc. If you read a blog post, starting from some feed-reading app, and you click on a link to another post from that original post, you’re clicking through one of the web’s many paths. As long as content is connected to other content through links, the web will remain alive and well. Many of the most popular apps strongly depend on links to outside content to keep user interest. How popular do you think Facebook or Twitter would be if you couldn’t link to outside content?

We will see more convergence of the browser and the OS (iOS, Android, Chrome OS, etc.), particularly as data moves more into the cloud, but this is all just the evolution of browsing the web. Never mind the fact that the majority of PCs are far from coming with a web-based operating system at this point. This could change one day, but even then, see the above points. Desktop versions (aka: websites) of many of the apps we use are far more efficient and feature-rich than their mobile app counterparts, which is why people will continue to use those as well.

The article says, "Openness is a wonderful thing in the nonmonetary economy of peer production. But eventually our tolerance for the delirious chaos of infinite competition finds its limits. Much as we love freedom and choice, we also love things that just work, reliably and seamlessly. And if we have to pay for what we love, well, that increasingly seems OK." To that same point, it also says, "As much as we intellectually appreciate openness, at the end of the day we favor the easiest path. We’ll pay for convenience and reliability, which is why iTunes can sell songs for 99 cents despite the fact that they are out there, somewhere, in some form, for free."

There is some truth to this, which certainly lends to the fact that apps are indeed popular channels for accessing content. However, that by no means eliminates the web browser for accessing content that apps simply don’t cater to. The web browser is an app, and probably the app that trumps all other apps because of that openness and freedom of choice. When you don’t want to pay for convenience, the web browser will often come through. When there isn’t a known app for what you want, the web browser will often come through.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch makes another great point: "Apps are great on mobile phones with small screens. But they are a pain to install and keep synchronized. Eventually having less local software will make sense on phones, too. All you really need is that browser virtual machine and you can pull everything else from the cloud. This is obvious."

In fact, the article itself says, "If a standard Web browser can act like an app, offering the sort of clean interface and seamless interactivity that iPad users want, perhaps users will resist the trend to the paid, closed, and proprietary."

It’s entirely possible that these mobile apps are the "shiny objects" of the moment, and eventually users will find that they just have too many of them to keep track of on their phones, and rather than fill up their storage, will just access more of them through their web versions via the web browser.

Is the web dying? Is search? You tell us.

Should You Stop Blogging?

Chris Crum — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 21:05:10 +0000

Wired has posted an already-controversial article about how blogs are “so 2004″, and how services like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr even are here to replace them. Writer Paul Boutin says:

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

Update: Now that this article has had some time to circulate around and collect more discussion and more thought, I have to come right out and say, the notion that blogs are obsolete is a ridiculous one. There have certainly been some valuable points made about the problems with blogs, but just because there is room for improvement, does not mean that they’re dead or dying.

I would even go so far as to say that they’re just getting started. Yes, there is plenty of worthless content out there. I would personally say the same thing about television, but do I think television is dead as a medium? No (Granted, I do think there is some big change coming for TV courtesy of the online video revolution, but that’s another discussion entirely).

One reason why blogs are in no danger of extinction, is that their content is entirely “on demand” – meaning if you don’t like a blog, you don’t have to read it, and you can move on to another one that you do like. You can subscribe to the ones you enjoy and get all the content you want, and if you don’t like the content from one of those at any point, you can simply unsubscribe and stop reading it. If you have any complaints about a blog, then you have the choice to go elsewhere. Why is that a problem? Why would that signal the extinction? Because “elsewhere” could be Twitter or Facebook? I don’t think so.

Back to my original article:

Obviously, people have some things to say about that. So let’s look at some responses from bloggers:

At PureBlogging, I personally said: “Blogs are not obsolete. You know why? Because I still read them everyday. I still write for them nearly everyday. And so do countless others (that probably includes you). If you ask me, blogs are more relevant than they’ve ever been, because they are more mainstream than they have ever been.”

Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration says: “The advice published in the Wired story is equivalent to asking mom and pop stores to close shop as there’s a new Wal-Mart store in the neighborhood. True, the competition increases but both entities can still peacefully co-exist and survive well.”

Eclectic Bill writes: “First, even though there are thousands of professional magazines out there, this has not stopped beginning and amateur writers from publishing their own magazines. And given the long tail of topics out there, there is plenty of room for both the professionals and amateurs in the blogosphere. And I find it a bit ironic that someone who claims that “text-based Web sites aren’t where the buzz is anymore” is writing for Wired.com which is largely text-based.”

Not everyone disagrees with Boutin’s article though.

Canadian blogger Mark Evans says: “It’s been about five years since blogs emerged on the media landscape. There are more than 175 million blogs – many of them well written, insightful and/or interesting but you have to wonder if blogs as we know them have had their day.”

Some commenting on the Wired post itself say things like:

“I agree the blogging community is choked with too much commercialism and too many people trying to be the next big thing. Sometimes I wonder if people wish to have a little advertisements with their blog or a little blog with their advertisements. …”

and

“Yes, you are right, if your goal is to be seen, to build a personal brand, to surf a hype wave, then blogging is passé and it is time to move to other forms of social communication. In fact, and for most people, having a blog was the modern equivale…”

Wired and Boutin no doubt knew that this article would cause an uproar from bloggers, and you have to give them credit for some interesting linkbait. It certainly provokes discussion, and I’m all for that. So let’s continue that discussion. What do you think? After reading Boutin’s article, do you agree with him?

Danny Apologizes to Wired and SEO Community

Dave Davies — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 02:07:27 +0000

Danny Sullivan (a.k.a. The Godfather to those of us in the SEO realm) messed up, kind of.

In a post he OK’s for the Search Engine Land a couple days ago titled, "Get A Free Link From Wired" they basically outline how to get yourself a free link on the wired.com site. I especially love the "don’t be too evil" note which implies that some amount of evil is OK.

Now I’m going to note here before I go on that WIRED IS MODERATED – that’s why they don’t use the rel=nofollow. It shouldn’t and can’t really be sp@mmed and you’re only wasting your time and everyone else’s trying to. This was an oversight in the first article.

Danny today published an apology to wired and to the SEO community. It appears that the post got quite the attention from a number of SEO’s including (of course) Doug Heil (Mr. My-White-Hat’s-Whiter-Than-Yours-Except-When-I’m-Trying-To-Get-My-Way). It’s true the post is a but questionable (as I said … the "don’t be too evil" quote leaves some room) but let’s be honest – we all make errors in judgement. I posted a blog about rel=nofollow carrying weight. To me it was an interesting test. The next thing I knew I read a blog on another site, "Blogspam works but only in large amounts" written about the test. Not really what I had in mind.

So let’s all forgive Danny the oversight and remember, at worst is was some great unintentional (?) link baiting. At best, it got us all talking and pointed out to Wired an issue wither their system that should probably be addressed (maybe rel=nofollow until it’s moderated?)

Good luck to both parties.

You can read more about the hoop-la here.

Wired Dubs Search Engine Land A Spammer

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 23:17:29 +0000

Ross Mayfield took umbrage to Barry Schwartz creating a page on Wired’s How To Wiki and pointing the page to Search Engine Land.

Shooting the messenger is a favorite pasttime for people who don’t really understand the impact of their actions. Mayfield proved pretty quick on the draw today after Schwartz demonstrated something that Wired should have thought of in the first place.

Schwartz said on Search Engine Land he created a page on the Wired How To Wiki to show how easily one could get link love from Wired:

(1) Register at How To Wired
(2) Add a new page or edit an old page on the site (don’t be too evil)
(3) Then add your link to that page

His sample page, a proof of concept, linked externally. Schwartz noted the links appeared to pass weight, an unusual occurrence and one that would draw plenty of grifters seeking the same link benefit. Where was the nofollow Schwartz expected to find?

Mayfield seemed to recognize this as well. Schwartz’s original page soon received an edit, replacing the content with this message:

deleting this page, 'its spam

on the comment about nofollow -- nofollow works for blogs, but not for wikis where everyone is an editor

Obviously, Mayfield missed the whole Wikipedia and nofollow discussion from earlier in 2007. Wikipedia slaps nofollow on outbound links to foil the kind of mischief Schwartz demonstrated.

Calling the Search Engine Land entry spam soon drew a response from Sullivan, rebuking Mayfield for his spam comment:

Now we come to find that you

In 3 Years Spam Will Decrease To More

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 21:57:44 +0000

This year, you’ll get about 4,351 spam messages, and by 2010, aggressive spam filtering technology from email providers will have that down to about 4,403.

Your math is right; that is more. But according to experts, it’s a good kind of more, if you’re stretching to remain positive about spam.

After all, that is 4,403 more spam messages than you’d like to have.

But if you deal in numbers and stats, that projected extra 50 or so represents a leveling out, or potentially a decline in the number of spam messages sent. Wired, after talking with Google and Jupiter Research, suggests that could mean spammers are getting discouraged.

Spam fighters take a lot of the credit, as do law enforcement in many countries, but I think also as people get savvier to spam, the less effective it is at drawing customers.

But if Gmail would like drop that number (or increase it by fewer), they might come up with a way to notice that all my messages are in English, and if the filter can’t differentiate between Roman letter-based languages, then at least, with all the sophistication they say they have, maybe they could find a way to block messages in Russian, Greek, or Chinese.

Much appreciated.

Open Source vs. Walled Gardens

Barry Welford — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 16:03:05 +0000

Open vs. Walled – let the best win.

Recently in Boston, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, was pushing a theme that is dear to many of us. The Mobile Web should grow with open standards. The Walled Garden approach should be abandoned.

The mobile Internet needs to be fully and completely the Internet, nothing more and nothing less. It needs to be free of central control, universal, and embodied in open standards.

The “walled garden” is the metaphor that describes today’s cable TV and cellular data networks, where subscribers can only use devices authorized by the carrier, and can only access content and services authorized by the carrier, the exact opposite of the World Wide Web running over the IP-based Internet, which cell phone users can access from their home and work PCs.

Exhortations are fine but surprisingly he did not mention Google’s initiative with the Open Handset Alliance. Google’s Android project, based as it is on the Open Source approach, should be a powerful de-stabilizer of those walled gardens. Michael Mace, like many others, seems to be excited by what the Android project offers. The $10 million Android challenge announced by Steve Horowitz, Google’s Engineering Director, should be an additional incentive.

Rob Domanski is also excited. He quotes a Wired article that states, “Lockdowns on hardware functionality, demanded by service providers and enforced by the manufacturers, have resulted in a marketplace filled with crippled devices that are only minimally configurable or expandable”. This means that innovation suffers and both the consumer and the mobile industry itself miss out on some serious Mobile Web opportunities. He is concerned that Google’s initiative uses the more restrictive version of open-source as adopted by Apache, rather than the more open GPL, which covers Linux and GNU software. However this is unlikely to save the walled gardens to any great extent.

It would be surprising if everyone welcomed Android. There is perhaps no surprise that Microsoft and Yahoo! are at this point somewhat cool to the project. Frank Pasquale has a different concern about Google’s Open-Source initiatives. Given that the associated ad revenues could be enormous, Google and others will try to make their applications so attractive that no one will want to try anything else. Who could quibble with success? Those wouldn’t be walled gardens.

Comment…

Banner Ads Used as Hacker Tools

Dan Morrill — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 17:30:59 +0000

Legitimate sites and their users have been dealing with a rash of malware being spread by banner ads, from Monster to MLB (Major League Baseball) NHL (National Hockey League) and other sites that are delivering malware.

While the Monster dot com exploit is well known news, the MLB and NHL sites are not well known, but used a similar way of purchasing advertising on a web site, and then using that advertising to deliver malware to customers as shown in the video below.

What makes this interesting is that users are going to be easily confused by the whole hacking process, and may not even realize that they have been hacked. Rather they are going to believe the good name of MBL, NHL, Canada.com, Monster.com and others, and do what the web site suggests they do. Wired also points out that:

Publishers may be somewhat culpable, too. The distributor of the malware-infected ads is believed to be AdTraff, an online-marketing company with reported ties to the Russian Business Network, a secretive internet service provider that, security firms say, hosts some of the internet’s most egregious scams. AdTraff is believed to have posed as a legitimate advertiser, using its partners as references. The ads were almost always paid for with credit cards or wire transfers, according to Alex Eckelberry, CEO of Sunbelt Software, a provider of security software. Source: Wired

In all if you have a good AV at the gateway this might be spotted, the only real option really is to use some form of ad blocking software at the browser level, which is also going to cause problems, because then you end up with the whole "theft of content" issue if your users use ad blocking software. Unfortunately this is one of the more effective ways of protecting the corporate network, or the home network. This has some serious economic implications to it, and with advertisers not paying attention to quality, and then we end up in another hacker, hacking, user, consumer, company stalemate.

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Woops, Bloggers Give Nissan Too Much Credit

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:40:02 +0000

Did you know that Nissan has developed a new kind of paint that can change colors on command? It was news to Nissan, too.

Nissan’s come up with some pretty impressive things over the years, but color-changing paint isn’t one of them. But if you’re a loyal reader of Wired, Gizmodo, Engadget, Jalopnik, Mobile Magazine, or Daily Tech, you’d have your source to believe they did invent the next generation "paramagnetic" paint.

And so far, only readers of Gizmodo and Engadget are treated to a correction.

Every publication, no matter how careful, makes mistakes. It’s part of the business. Traditionally, newspapers like to bury them a few pages in, placing corrections in a bottom corner somewhere.

But at least they’re there. This incident, though, is more of a case of piggybacking gone awry. Not that piggybacking isn’t standard fare in the news industry. It is, and it happens with the best of publications. Compare these two articles, for instance.

See, happens all the time.

Credit for unraveling the Nissan paint mystery goes to Darius at YoungGoGetter.com, who painstakingly traced the "news" back to its origin after receiving comment from Nissan that they’d only heard of the new technology.

Sure enough, it was one misinterpreted and slightly altered sentence at NextEnergyNews that started it all:

This revolutionary new paramagnetic paint is a technical wonder and is viewed by Nissan and other auto companies as an amazing innovation that would draw huge traffic to dealerships and will make it easier for consumers to get the exact option level they want on a car without the sacrifice of their favorite color.

Which, by the time it reached Wired, became:

Nissan Developing Color-Changing Auto Paint

With similar so-far uncorrected variations at Daily Tech and MobileMag.com.

But what’s most humorous about Darius’s investigative blogging is the publications’ use of the same image of a Nissan car with only the colors altered. Your choice: black, white and red; black and red; silver and black; or green and black.

More time was spent fiddling with the image than actually researching the blog posts, it appears.

So what’s the moral to this humorous tale? Darius nails it:

Bloggers and readers should do more to research the facts and original sources before jumping to the publish button. How else will we establish blogging as a credible, journalistic endeavor?

Yes, indeed. The salty, veteran journalists out there are laughing their butts off.

Wal-Mart’s Little Linux PC That Could

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 17:14:50 +0000

Could what, one might wonder? Unless the Wal-Mart shopping public that bought out the first run of 10,000 Everex, Ubuntu-powered, $199 PCs returns them in droves, maybe it’s time for Microsoft to become concerned.

Or possibly not. Windows resides on millions of PCs globally, with Office occupying plenty of those machines in corporate and other environments. Ten thousand PCs doesn’t register as a seismic event; Apple has a small percentage share of PC ownership, but that counts in the millions.

Not to mention, the biggest Apple software development house not located in Cupertino resides at Microsoft’s headquarters, as the company likes to remind the Mac faithful.

With ZDNet citing the sold out status of those Wal-Mart Linux boxes, it seems people don’t mind having the ability to browse the Internet and do all kinds of mundane computer tasks like blogging and word processing for just a couple of Benjamins.

Ubuntu has gained a lot of attention for its capabilities as a desktop Linux distribution for the masses. But it probably took a Wal-Mart to get it attention for the right reason: an affordable OS that can do what people need it to do.

Even though Wired cited research that sneered at the "unsophisticated" Wal-Mart shopper buying the Everex machine because it’s crammed inside a big case, Everex seems ready to keep those buyers using an OS not called Windows, by providing 24-hour tech support via a toll-free call.

That’s an important piece of the puzzle. If Everex can keep buyers happy and returns out of the initial batch to a minimum, they can push another 10,000 out to shoppers. Maybe more. We have to wonder what the magic number will be that prompts some kind of response from Microsoft.

Could Wal-Mart be the vehicle that drives the computing public away from Windows, $200 at a time?

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Wired Editor-In-Chief Posts Blocked PR Emails

Rich Ord — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:33:00 +0000

Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired, has decided that offensive is a better defense when it comes to PR emails. He has published 329 of them in his blog for everyone to see … and email scrapers to grab!

Chris writes…

"I’ve had it. I get more than 300 emails a day and my problem isn’t spam, it’s PR people. Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can’t be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they’re pitching."

And not only that Chris states, "There is no getting off this list. If you’re on it and have something appropriate to say to me, use a different email address."

Chris also doesn’t care whether he is offering your PR email address to spammers on a silver platter …

"If their address gets harvested by spammers by being published here, so be it–turnabout is fair play."

WebProNews will not re-publish theses email addresses out of common sense, but you can view Chris Anderson’s entire list on his blog.