The Joy Comes In The Pursuit
The joy comes in the pursuit
the search engine was the king, now it’s social networking.
People had their own home page, now it’s grown to their own website. The blog was grown and grown, replacing webrings
to be developed
For several years the search engine was king. This was the place where everyone went to find content because all the information was so disorganised. Recently though this has changed. The way people use the world wide web has evolved. Whereas people in the past would create just one webpage with a little content people are now creating entire websites.
These websites are not websites in the sense that they were back in the late nineties, rather they are profiles. It used to be that you’d create a static HTML page that would need to be updated manually through the hot metal code. With CGI-bin and later technologies, the nature of the homepage has changed.
Remember Geocities? It’s been replaced by myspace. Remember the discussion about web portals and yahoo and google were trying to corner the market to get the highest audience. That has changed. Look at Digg, Facebook, Bebo, twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. All of these websites are about one thing. Community. They are only interesting as long as your friends are members; no friends means no way of using it. I was a member of myspace for months before anyone I knew joined and by the time had joined I re-created a profile having forgotten the other profile.
It’s the same with Facebook. I joined it a few months before anyone from my environment started using it but recently everyone has started using Facebook to communicate. Not just this, they’re also uploading their lives to the web. So am I. There are two issues that are interesting to look at. For anyone wanting to do a dissertation why not look at the changing nature of privacy with the rise of the social networking website. When I was studying for my HND privacy was key and release forms were essential. Now it’s as though everyone is a publisher and the nature of privacy has changed. It goes along the lines of “Don’t upload anything too compromising or embarrassing”. Your network of friends can see everything. Friends from your high school days can see all your university friends and vice versa.
This promotes the expansion of social circles. Whereas in the past networks of friends were mutually exclusive due to location they are joined online. Take some videos of when you’re at a party in Switzerland and those in England can see it, and so can their friends if you so choose. It’s a shame you can’t select for only one network to see videos rather than others, for example, only London friends can see the London videos and Switzerland friends can see those. It would make uploading certain videos possible.
Anyway, the web has become personal. Within the last 6 months or so I’ve seen the web go from being about avatars and nicknames to being about real names and real networks. It’s about bringing the offline world online and vice versa. This is where I believe for there to have been a shift in perception of what the web is for. Almost everyone I know and see regularly is now on Facebook. It’s amusing to see how it’s become mainstream.
It’s as though Facebook has become a portal although not in the 1998 sense of the word. There is a new part of the internet. If you imagine the web to be like drupal then imagine that Yahoo and Geocities are the old gateways to the World Wide Web whilst various social networking websites are a new ad important portal with one major difference. These portals aggregate and distribute your content to your friends around the world. You’re no longer going online for research. You’re going online because you’re socialising. It’s replaced, at least partially, socialising in the real world whilst nonetheless providing a great way of sharing content. Both “user-generated” and “interactive” have become keywords in describing what the web is today.
In summary, whereas two or three years ago the Web was somewhere people came to find information for future use the web has evolved into an interactive user-generated medium. As a result of this, I think the world wide web has added another node to what purposes it serves.
Web 1.0: static and hard to interact anonymously vs web 2.0: highly interactive user-generated content where real names are now used, especially in places like Facebook.
from Janssen Powers on Vimeo.
However, many purported Social Media experts are merely engaging in cultural voyeurism at best. They look from afar and roam the perimeters of online societies without ever becoming a true member of any society. This means, they don’t truly understand what, where, or why they’re “participating,†only jumping in because they have something to say and have access to the tools that will carry it into play. This is unfortunately a representation of the greater landscape of Social Media Marketing and it’s time to take a step back and study the sociology of Social Media in order to keep communities intact and unaffected by outsiders.
Social Media is much more than user-generated content. It’s driven by people in the communities where they communicate and congregate. They create, share, and discover new content without our help right now. They’re creating online cultures across online networks and using the Social Tools that we learn about each and every day to stay connected. And the societies that host and facilitate these conversations cultivate a tight, unswerving and mostly unforgiving community and culture. As Shel Israel describes it, people are populating Global Neighborhoods.
from Storyhunter on Vimeo.
There have been a lot of discussions between podcasters and the amount of bandwidth that is needed to serve these files. Successful podcasters shift several gigabytes of data with each episode of their podcast and since everything is automated everyone requests and receives the file at this time. This means there’s a massive peak.
I’m interested in the reception side though. I’m on a university network and I’ve used it when you would get a throughput of at least 400 kilobytes a second. That’s quite fast and pleasant. It’s changed since then. Digital village, part of Catalyst has throttled our bandwidth, offering 8 gigs a month paid for by the university but limiting to 500 megabytes a day.
What this means is simple. Anytime I leave iTunes unattended up to a gigabyte of podcasts may be downloaded at once. No problem, when you’re at home with 2 megabits per second or within uni but a big problem. I’m constantly watching over the files and their size in order to stay below the bandwidth limit. It’s frustrating.
Last night I went to have a little fun since I was having a denial of service from Digital Village as they were refreshing the database at the end of the “service month” as I will refer to it. For 8hrs they cut off my service.
In the meantime, I’m only 5 minutes’ walk from the uni library and it’s open 24hrs a day. This university has good download speeds. Using the wifi connection I downloaded 2 gigabytes worth of podcasts and videos within about one hour. The connection speed for university fiber is fast. It’s at least 600KB/s sustained. That’s a 40 meg file within 4-6 minutes when you’re downloading three at once. It’s a great feeling.
In halls, it’s disappointing and frustrating. I don’t like Catalyst. They’re behind the times. They provide a sub-standard service and I feel that people should know about it. I’ve spent at least 11 years online now. I know what to expect from an ISP. Digital village doesn’t provide it.
In a Facebook dominated world, in a world where people see Facebook and the Internet as the same thing it saddens me that Google gets a 2.7 Billion Euro fine when Google is an excellent source to search for products, reviews and the best deal.
“What Google has done is illegal under E.U. antitrust rules,” Ms. Vestager said in a statement on Tuesday. “It denied other companies the chance to compete on the merits and to innovate. And most importantly, it denied European consumers a genuine choice of services and the full benefits of innovation.”
As a geeky consumer the website that I used most frequently to shop for electronics is toppreise, a swiss price comparison website. With that site I can usually find much better prices than if I was searching on Google, and best of all the products I order via the websites they recommend are based in Switzerland. Thanks to Google Translate in the Chrome web browser I am able to order from German web stores despite their providing content only in German. It is thanks to Google that I can get the best value for money.
If Google has a monopoly then this says more about the web user than the price comparison and shopping landscape online. I hardly ever, if ever click on Google ads when I carry out a web search for the simple reason that most of them are not available in Switzerland anyway.
If people are buying from Google, Amazon, Kobo and other websites then European businesses are suffering. Fnac, Mediamarkt and other companies are based in various European countries so consumers, who are well informed do have a variety of choices if they are not lazy.
As a blogger and content creator my biggest frustration is that we no longer have people jumping from website to website like we used to when Google was dominant. With websites we would be generating income for each other. In the age of Facebook we generate content, we attract our friends, and they make money off of our backs, off of our time invested. It’s precisely for this reason that I started blogging daily. It was to try to redistribute some of that income.
Facebook deserves a bigger fine than does Google in my humble opinion and based on my experiences.