Monthly Archive for February, 2008

The truth is out there

Published
by
Zohar
on 12 February, 2008
in Freedom, Links and Technology
. 1 Comment

The truth about social networks and webmails is starting to come out.

Few days ago Zephoria (aka Danah Boyd) wrote about her friend Bob who had bad encounters with Google:

Earlier this week, Bob received a notice that there was a spam problem in his Orkut community. The message was in English and it looked legitimate and so he clicked on it. He didn’t realize that he’d fallen into a phisher’s net until it was too late. His account was hijacked for god-knows-what-purposes until his account was blocked and deleted. He contacted Google’s customer service and their response basically boiled down to “that sucks, we can’t restore anything, sign up for a new account.” Boom! No more email, no more calendar, no more Orkut, no more gChat history, no more Blogger, no more anything connected to his Google account.

Yesterday an article in the NY-Times told us that Facbook

…offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.

Here is a video that tell us the truth about Facebook, from the research I did myself, most of it is true. Frightening.

and here is one that tell the truth about Google. Scary!

Corporate Connection (2003) is now here

Published
by
Zohar
on 11 February, 2008
in Creativity
. 1 Comment

Corporate Connection

Corporate Connection (2003) is now part of my blog, and not only on Flickr. You are welcome to visit it, interact with it, and leave some comments too.

With the help of MapLib, I was able to mash my image with the technology of Google Maps. But this is only semi-interactive.

Lately I’ve started to think about the next version of this creation. I believe (and hope) its going to be very interesting and not so far from now.

Free literature, now available at your nearest website

Published
by
Zohar
on 11 February, 2008
in Freedom, Links and Technology
. 0 Comments
“I didn’t grow up buying every book I read,” said the English born Mr. [Nick] Gaiman, 47. “I read books at libraries, I read books at friend’s houses, I read books that I found on people’s window sills.”Eventually, he said, he bought his own books and he believes other readers will, too.

Neil Gaiman decided to give away one of his books free online (initially for a month), as a “celebratory birthday thing” for his blog’s 7th birthday.

You can vote and help him choose which one its going to be on his site.

The Book ShopAt the same time, NYT publishes an article on how HarperCollins Publishers will begin offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its Web site.

About a month ago Lawrence Lessig announced that the last of his books is now free to download (and remix).

After a productive and valuable conversation with my publisher, Random House, they’ve agreed to permit The Future of Ideas to be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

On January 1st, Charles Sheehan-Miles decided to give the electronic version of his book, Republic, for free.

No more sample chapters, partial books that end in the middle, none of that. You can download and read the complete book. Share it with your friends, email it, do anything you want with it except sell it.

Here’s why: the biggest challenge most authors face isn’t online piracy. It’s not people out there diabolically copying their works and distributing them for free. In fact most authors (including yours truly) suffer from a different problem entirely — no one has ever heard of them. After all, literally hundreds of thousands of new titles come out every year, and only a few hundred writers in the entire United States (if that many) actually live off their books full time. So, by giving away the book, I hope more people actually read it.

Chris Anderson wrote about it at the time:

For the vast majority of authors, being read is actually reward enough. How to turn that recognition into a living is a whole other process, and not necessarily one that depends on the traditional book industry to deliver. Good thing, too, since it so rarely does.

I think 2008 is a good year for electronic book publishing. Let’s see what it’ll do for other media publishing..

BTW, a nice feature is that you can search in most of these books (and many more) in Google Book Search.

Breaking News: Series Of Concentric Circles Emanating From Glowing Red Dot

Published
by
Zohar
on 10 February, 2008
in Tlog and Video
. 0 Comments

 

 

The Onions are getting better any day…

[Via Tal Galili's Hitchhikers Guide to Statistics (Hebrew)]

Thoughts on web-advertising

Published
by
Zohar
on 8 February, 2008
in Advertising and Thoughts
. 1 Comment

According to FOXNews.com, Facebook has unveiled plans to target advertisements by injecting them into its members’ conversations.

Facebook is giving users some control over whether to share information on their buying habits and other online activities with friends.

For the program announced Tuesday to work, enough users must actually say “yes” so advertisers can show users their pitches in the guise of friends’ endorsements.

It seems that Facebook is trying to make money out of its sudden success, but not exactly know how. It feels that its creators are shooting to all the directions, without success…

To tell the truth, web-advertising is a just another form of spam. If my Firefox plugin would have been only slightly better, I wouldn’t have any adverts on at all when browsing. Its a great spam filter.

But like with spam mails, I learned to ignore the adverts, and just mark them as spam, without even readin the content. I hardly ever go to advertised links, and it only happens by mistake, or because Google placed them in a strategic location at the top of my search results.

The major problem with spamdvertising is when heavy, loud, video adverts are appearing on certain news sites, jamming my bandwidth and crashing my browser. But I’m not sure that Google Adwords are doing any better.

I think web based companies should find other ways to make money than spam their users with advertising. Of course they might make good money of adverts, but the users don’t appreciate it a s good-will gesture, will not press on the proposed link (or doing it unknowingly), and will not remember the name of the brand. Slowly, we will just learn to ignore it.

Companies need to find a better way to advertise their products (examples 1 and 2). An simple ideas is that a marketing person will post the link on his (Facebook) page and will share it with his friends. If its good, his friends will share it with their friends and so on. This is lovable unspammed advertising (unless if its done excessively)

But how will the site (Facebook) will generate money of it?

Maybe the advertised company should donate money to the site after a succesful campaign? Maybe the site should create a pro version for their site (works for Flickr)? And maybe the site should sell T shirts and other products…

I know its difficult to generate money online, but can you please move on from web spamdverising and leave our reading space alone?