The Internet: a Candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize
Here’s an idea RoadMAP doesn’t like: giving the Nobel Peace Prize to the Internet. One could argue that, like another recent recipient, it is too soon to assess its impact. But RoadMAP’s real objection is that the Internet is really people, and those people can use it for good or for ill. The Internet doesn’t care about anything; hopefully, its users will.
The Internet: a Candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize
The Internet has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010 – but should it be?
The nomination was proposed by the Italian version of technology magazine Wired and has so far been endorsed by 11 people including 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop Per Child.
Backers of the Internet’s candidacy for the prize cite its achievements in bridging differences and promoting dialogue among different nations. On the promotional site for the Internet’s campaign, called Internet for Peace, supporters contend that the Internet “is much more than a network of computers; it is an endless Web of people.”
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The Wall Street Journal: Digits
12 March 2010 under RoadMAP » | Read more »
FCC's Clyburn Rebukes Comcast for Broadband Rate Hike
When Mignon Cliburn was appointed to the FCC, many people in the media/telcom world assumed that she would be a mild-mannered “get along, go along” Commissioner. In fact, she has turned about to be a forceful and outspoken defender of consumer rights.
FCC’s Clyburn Rebukes Comcast for Broadband Rate Hike
Federal Communications Commission member Mignon Clyburn on Wednesday indirectly hammered Comcast for recently raising its broadband prices.
As Cyburn and other FCC commissioners discussed broadband affordability at a digital literacy summit on Tuesday, Comcast instituted a $2 rate increase on its lowest-tier customers.
That prompted Clyburn to issue a statement rebuking the company late Wednesday, though she never once mentioned Comcast by name.
11 March 2010 under RoadMAP » | Read more »
Is Cheap Wireless Broadband for Real This Time?
As the FCC reveals more and more details of the forthcoming National Broadband Plan, it is hard to keep up with the details. The hype at Tuesday’s “Digital Inclusion Summit” was mostly about the need for a “Digital Literacy Corps,” but Chairman Genachowski also suggested the Commission would propose setting aside some spectrum for free or low-cost wireless. RoadMAP’s first response was this sounded like the plan from our friends at M2Z, but GigaOm reports that it is something different. But what?
Is Cheap Wireless Broadband for Real This Time?
The FCC said today that as part of its National Broadband Plan it might allocate spectrum for a free or low-cost wireless broadband network as a means to help address the affordability of broadband for poor people. If all this sounds familiar to you, maybe you recall the efforts of M2Z Networks, a Kleiner Perkins backed venture that tried to offer filtered, low-cost broadband using WiMAX.
A source at the FCC assures me that the agency’s efforts, which will be detailed next week when the National Broadband Plan comes out, are not similar to M2Z’s plan. M2Z wanted to offer free subscribers dialup-like speeds of 768 kbps and would have provided filtered access to the web. The source said the FCC’s plan would offer speeds “that are real broadband” and would likely involve using proceeds from the Universal Service Fund reform to offset the cost of building out a network.
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GigaOm
10 March 2010 under RoadMAP » | Read more »
Why Ad Blocking is Devastating to the Sites You Love
Several of MAP’s staffers have installed ad blockers on their Internet browsers, and many readers of RoadMAP have probably done so as well. Here comes the Editor In Chief of RoadMAP’s favorite tech site, Ars Technica, begging all of us not to use our ad blockers because it threatens to kill off free content on the Internet. (By the way, Ars is hardly a hand-to-mouth startup. It is owned by Conde Nast, which also owns The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and other major magazines. This plea has forced RoadMAP to rethink its practice.
Why Ad Blocking is Devastating to the Sites You Love
Did you know that blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit? We recently learned that many of our readers did not know this, so I’m going to explain why.
There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. Because we are a technology site, we have a very large base of ad blockers. Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn’t pay. In a way, that’s what ad blocking is doing to us. Just like a restaurant, we have to pay to staff, we have to pay for resources, and we have to pay when people consume those resources. The difference, of course, is that our visitors don’t pay us directly but indirectly by viewing advertising. (Although a few thousand of you are subscribers, and we thank you all very, very much!)
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Ars Technica
9 March 2010 under RoadMAP » | Read more »
Getting Older Without Getting Old
Here is an interesting real-life discussion of the impact of Metcalfe’s Law.
Getting Older Without Getting Old
Facebook now has more than 400 million active users, up from only 50 million as recently as 2007. If social networking still resembled a young, hip downtown nightclub scene – one day a site is hot, the next it’s not – we might expect the crowds to decamp soon. Facebook would become another Friendster, still around but ghostly, forgotten by most.
Facebook, however, isn’t likely to have such a fate. For one thing, it has attracted many “olds,” and they tend to stay put. (Consider AOL.) More than 50 percent of Facebook’s members in the United States are 35 or older, and only 26.8 percent are 24 or under, according to an analysis of December visitors by comScore Media Metrix.
More than demographic stability favors Facebook. The site has shrewdly emulated the “network effects” strategy used by another brand that has long held a dominant position in the computer industry: Microsoft Windows.
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New York Times
8 March 2010 under RoadMAP » | Read more »
Patently Stupid -Apple's Multitouch Lawsuit is Both Dumb and Dangerous.
Apple has started a major war against Google by suing a third party. Slate has a great article on the litigation which places it in the broader context of the current state of high-tech patent law.
RoadMAP is also sending along a bonus link. Yesterday’s RoadMAP, about Clifford Stoll’s 1995 Newsweek essay on why the Internet was all hype has generated a good bit of positive feedback, so RoadMAP thought it would be a good idea to share another Slate post placing Stoll’s article in perspective.
Speaking of positive feedback, RoadMAP has been getting a lot lately. There’s always room for more people, so please, please, please share RoadMAP with your friends and colleagues.
Patently Stupid -Apple’s Multitouch Lawsuit is Both Dumb and Dangerous.
When Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at 2007’s Macworld conference, he began by describing the device’s groundbreaking user interface. “We have invented a new technology called ‘multi-touch’ which is phenomenal,” Jobs said. “It works like magic.” In his superlative-laden way, Jobs explained that Apple’s new touch screen was so sensitive that you could use it without a stylus, so smart that it could detect and ignore unintended touches, so elegant that it could understand elaborate multifinger gestures. And then he added five words to emphasize how special and unique this multitouch technology was: “Boy, have we patented it!”
Now Jobs is making good on that implied threat. This week, Apple filed a lawsuit against the Taiwanese electronics company HTC, alleging that HTC’s devices infringe on 20 Apple patents related to the iPhone. Because many of HTC’s phones run Google’s Android operating system-that includes the Google Nexus One, which HTC manufactures for the search company-Apple’s suit is best read as a proxy war against Google. Apple is suing HTC because suing Google would be more expensive and worse for public relations. Going after HTC achieves the same result without all the awkwardness of suing the tech world’s 800-pound gorilla.
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Slate
BONUS LINK:
5 March 2010 under RoadMAP » | Read more »
The Internet? Bah!
Clifford Stoll achieved a good bit of notoriety as a contrarian in the early days of the Internet. RoadMAP stumbled upon a piece he wrote in 1995. Among other things, he may have overlooked the fact that the Internet never forgets.
The Internet? Bah!
Hype Alert: Why Cyberspace Isn’t, and Will Never be, Nirvana
After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
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Newsweek
4 March 2010 under RoadMAP » | Read more »
The End of Analog: Blair Levin on the National Broadband Plan
RoadMAP readers may be tiring of the continuing hoopla surrounding the forthcoming release of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, but this interview with Blair Levin is well worth the read. It offers a good deal of insight into the philosophy and politics of the exercise.
The End of Analog: Blair Levin on the National Broadband Plan
His formal title at the agency is “Executive Director, Omnibus Broadband Initiative.” In non-bureaucratese, that means Levin is in charge of getting the FCC’s National Broadband Plan out the door. The plan is due before Congress on March 17 and will be unveiled at the agency’s next Open Commission meeting the day before. Levin is no stranger to the Commission, having served as FCC Chief of Staff in the mid-1990s. More recently, he worked as communications technology analyst for the Wall Street firm of Stifel Nicolaus.
So, we sat down for breakfast and chatted about the plan for about an hour. Blair was outgoing and friendly; it’s hard to imagine a more approachable government official. But there were some issues that Levin was a bit reluctant to discuss, most notably my query about whether, in retrospect, it was a good idea for the FCC to define cable ISP access as an information rather than a telecommunications service. “I’d think I’d rather wait until I’m done with this job to become a historian,” he replied with a grin.
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Ars Technica
3 March 2010 under RoadMAP » | Read more »
Understanding the Participatory News Consumer
There are a number of interesting datapoints in this new survey of Americans’ news consumption from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Several commentators have noted that the Internet has now surpassed newspapers as a source of information. However, what most interests RoadMAP is the fact that local television remains at the top. This does not appear to change any time soon.
Understanding the Participatory News Consumer
The overwhelming majority of Americans (92%) use multiple platforms to get their daily news, according to a new survey conducted jointly by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The internet is now the third most-popular news platform, behind local and national television news and ahead of national print newspapers, local print newspapers and radio. Getting news online fits into a broad pattern of news consumption by Americans; six in ten (59%) get news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day.
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Pew Internet and American Life Project
2 March 2010 under RoadMAP » | Read more »
The Wired Repo Man: He's Not 'As Seen on TV'
The New York Times rarely misses the forest for the trees, but this recent story is focused on one rather trivial application of an awesomely scary technology. The marketing and law enforcement implications, and the consequential threats to personal privacy are mind boggling.
The Wired Repo Man: He’s Not ‘As Seen on TV’
BUSINESSES of every sort have been sucker-punched by the recession, but at least one enterprise has continued to grow through the downturn: auto repossession.
More than 1.9 million cars were recovered on behalf of lenders in 2009, a jump of 90,000 over the previous year and the latest in a decadelong string of annual increases, according to Tom Webb, chief economist of the consulting arm of Manheim Auctions.
But even in this boom, recovery businesses are trying to do more with less, taking advantage of computers and digital imaging. They are improving efficiency and reducing the need for tedious legwork in tracking skips – those delinquent borrowers who are the hardest to find – using technologies like automatic license plate recognition, which allows them to troll city streets and instantly identify cars whose loans are in arrears.
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New York Times
1 March 2010 under RoadMAP » | Read more »