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Table of Contents
Web Notes
Now that same kind of service is available for mainstream movies/box-office
hits. Go to http://www.cinemanow.com
For these movies you need Macromedia's Flash Player (version 6), which
is a free quick download. Some movies are free. Most are included in a
$9.95 monthly subscription. Some are pay per view (typically $2.99).
Today, they purportedly have a total of 397 films right now. (188 of those
are in the After Dark/adult category.) I wouldn't be surprised if they
had thousands available soon. If you are into movies, this is far cheaper
than cable pay-per-view, and you can see any of these movies starting whatever
time you want (not depending on the schedule of the provider).
A stats program (from AWStats)
that my Web-hosting ISP (us.net) just adopted
gives me new insight into how people get to my pages. Before I was aware
that 40-45% of the traffic to my site came by way of Google -- that's nice
to know, but there's nothing much you can do about it. Now I can see, day
by day, the traffic that comes from links, and exactly where those links
are. You can see too at http://samizdat.com/logs/
For yesterday, Oct. 1, 2002, I had about 2000 unique visitors (that's with
no marketing, no advertising -- just content). Scroll to near the bottom
of the page for "Connect to site from" and under that " Links from an external
page (other web sites except search engines)", and check out the links
-- including AT&T linking to my article about how to publicize Web
sites, Canada's CBC news service linking to my online shopping book, and
five people coming by way of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Feels
good! And if you click on "full list" you can explore all the links that
have brought traffic so far in October. By the way, it's gratifying to
see that dozens of people a day stay at my site for an hour or more. (Click
on a flag in the upper left corner to see the stats translated to French,
Dutch, or Spanish). (NB -- you also can learn about sites that link to
yours by way of Alexa. Search for your
domain name, then scroll down to find the link for their list of your links.
But Alexa only gives you the domain names of sites that link to you, not
the specific URL; and their info is updated at some unknown interval, while
the AWStats info is updated by simply clicking on "update now" at the top
of the page, letting you know about ephemeral but potentially very important
links, like current news stories.)
Review
at Globe Technology by Andrew Allentuck
"The metaphor of this book, the boot camp thing, suggests a grizzled
drill sergeant barking at raw recruits who are forced to do pushups for
their misdeeds. Indeed, the cover blurb for the book pushes the basic
training idea, but the "click right or die" motif
ends with the hype. This is really a gentle book of ideas and suggested
experiments.
"Author Seltzer, self-described as an "internet evangelist," preaches to those converted enough to buy his book. This book works the reader through the basic steps of e-communication from suggestions to sign up for free encryption services at hushmail.com and a site that handles files up to 50 Mbytes called whalemail.com. Next come lessons on getting some free web hosting at angelfire.com and NBCi.com. There are lessons on creating bulletin boards and chats at delphi.com, discussions of hyperlinks and web page creation. There's a discussion of combatting search engines such as AltaVista that have methods for fighting spam. Want to use a search engine as a mail delivery system? Mr. Seltzer shows how. There are techniques for improving web sites, how to improve customer relations and how to get one's message out in foreign languages via services like http://babelish.altavista.com.
"Here's the skinny on this book. In spite of the menacing title, this is really a clever little book of web exercises. It's fun, it's instructive, and it's worth the price for novice web mavens. Those who work through the exercises it should become much more fluent in the web business. (review dated Monday, January 28, 2002)
Review in AsianZ Business Chronicle (a New Zealand publication "bridging the gap between New Zealand and Asian Markets")
Getting the best out of the web
"Let’s face it. We have all become entangled in the web and willingly spend hour after hour visiting sites around the world, ‘talking to people,’ monitoring the stock market movements, may be watching a movie or just looking up the dictionary. Direct and face-to-face conversation is becoming less and less relevant.
"And yet, to many, the web is a scary phenomenon, not to touched. And yet again, these are the mortals who yearn for a quick, easy-to-read book. They would be appeased with Richard Seltzer’s ‘Web Business Boot Camp.’ It is as much for businesses as it is for individuals but the former would find it more valuable.
"There are a few pre-requisites though. Says the author: “You need to step out of the boardroom and get your hand dirty. You need to experience the Internet business environment firsthand to appreciate the challenges and recognise the opportunities, to see new ways to save money and to make money. You need to understand how web pages design affects traffic and marketing.”
"Divided into twelve, highly readable and interesting chapters, the book is one of the best attempts at bringing to the average individual the nuances of the world wide web. He lets you know the ways and means of setting up free email accounts, obtaining free web space and a lot more. With useful tips and addresses of a number of interesting websites, Seltzer keeps you glued to the book.
"But is there such a thing called a free lunch? Not really. Says the author: “Sometimes, ‘free’ is far too expensive. The provider of the free service deliberately makes the experience so annoying that you will be willing to pay to get rid of the nuisance. That’s the case with the free Internet access today.”
"Ah, do you want to masquerade while on the net? Would you like to know who is hacking into your computer? And how about setting up a fire wall so that those nasties do not reach you, your colleagues or younger members of your family? Seltzer has answers for these and many more questions that you never bothered to ask.
"‘What next?’ is a question that many ask and the author has some good explanation. The Internet is said to be still in its formative stages with vast potential for growth. How would future businesses develop and how getting online would further revolutinise our lives is still unclear but Seltzer has no doubt that some things will never change.
"'The Internet is primarily about people, rather than technology. While it does connect computers to computers, documents to documents and people to documents, its most revolutionary capability is connecting people to people. It connects people together quickly and efficiently and in ways never before possible, leading to new kinds of relationships and new kinds of businesses.'
"Believe me, you will not put the book down until you have moved from cover to cover." (review dated May 14, 2002)
Yoda typically puts the object before the subject: "What matters most, you do not know."
He also puts adverbial prepositional phrases before the subject: "Against the enemy we must fight now."
As a rough rule of thumb, take whatever words would normally come after the verb and put them at the beginning of the sentence and you have a sentence that sounds like Yoda. (This is like pig-Latin, only moving words instead of letters.)
The result often sounds pompous and profound, but once you sort out what he's really saying and put the words in the proper order it's all very ordinary.
This is a rare instance where 1) you could make a tie-in between pop
culture and diagramming and 2) diagramming can play an important role in
deciphering and demystifying what sound like complex sentences, but aren't.
Over the last couple of years, the experience of using email over the Internet has deteriorated to the point where now it is often more or a hassle than a help. We get bombarded with email-based viruses (typically in attachments), scams (temptingly worded fraudulent offers), and spam (ads that mascarade as ordinary email messages). In self-defense, we set up filters on our email, and then the spammers find new ways to by-pass the filters, using clever and plausible subject lines that people we normally correspond with might use, and even doing identity swapping, so the From: line indicates that the message is from someone we know or even from ourselves. In self-defense we filter even more. And people who have real messages to deliver find that their messages often get filtered out and/or deleted before they are ever read, while the spam keeps pouring in.
Scam messages are a subset of spam. I get at least a couple dozen copies of the Nigerian scam (in a variety of flavors) every day. For details on what that is and how it works see http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/ Basically, it's a high-tech version of frauds that have been run for many years, such as the Spanish Prisoner (which was the subject of a movie with Steve Martin.) A great-uncle of mine got one of those messages back in 1914, and thanks to the Web I uncovered half a dozen other people with similar letters dating back to that time. (For details on that see http://www.samizdat.com/solovieff.html )
Viruses have become a major hassle even when you have software that protects you against them infecting your computer. The likelihood that they are hidden in attachments prevents you from opening any attachment you are aren't sure about. And with, Norton AntiVirus 2003, now I see an annoying fix-it screen each time a new virus arrives in my mailbox and Norton automatically fixes it -- dozens of times a day.
So how can you cope? Here a a few suggestions:
1) Use a service like anonymizer (http://www.anonymizer.com/) which acts as a go-between, enabling you to send email without revealing your return address.
2) Set up multiple accounts for multiple purposes. For instance, use free accounts at hotmail and yahoo to identify yourself whenever you fill out a form at an online store; and only reveal your personal/private email address to friends and close business associates.
3) For your personal/private email address do not use your real name, rather pick some random assemblage of letters and numbers (like a password).
4) Use webmail (web-based email applications) to take a first look at your mail (from anywhere, with a browser) and eliminate all unwanted messages, before opening mail in Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, etc.
5) Use Instant Messenger for exchanges with close friends that previously you would have done with email.
6) Use p2p sites (like Kazaa) for exchanging files that you don't need to keep secret (instead of using email attachments).
7) For exchanging files you need to protect, use password-protected ftp.
8) Use personal Web pages to deliver non-secret messages.
9) Among a circle of friends or business associates, use of personal code in the subject line (one that you change each day, e.g., including today's date) so they can immediately know what messages are really from you.
10) Set your email filter so you only receive email from known addresses. (Unfortuantely, identity swapping quickly gets by that -- people pretending to be someone else with hacker tricks. I frequently get viruses purportedly sent to me by me).
11) Swtich to an ISP that pre-screens email for viruses and obvious spam, and that allows you to set your own email filter that runs on their server, before the messages arrive at your computer.
12) Use password-based email. I don't know if this exists yet. If it does, please send me email to let me know about it. If not, it's so natural, someone is sure to offer it soon. In this mode, only if you have the correct password attached to the message does it get delivered to the target mailbox.
Even if you can find a way of coping that works for you, much is lost. It is now very hard to build ommunities of common interest based on email distribution lists, and fruitful encounters with strangers are far less common on the Internet than they were a few years ago.
What can stop this madness? Certainly not laws and regulations. Certainly
not technology gimmicks. As long as people are stupid enough to click on
the links in spam and people spend money doing business with spamming companies,
spam will continue to proliferate. The perpetrators will only stop when
there's no profit in it.
Are you feeling burnt-out, frustrated, tired of everything having to do with the Internet? Then for you, Small Pieces Loosely Joined could be like a revival meeting, giving you a taste of the old-time religion.
If there were a church of the Internet, this would be one of its sacred books, celebrating the Web as a social place, rather than technology. As David Weinberger puts it, "The Web is a social place that we humans constructed voluntarily out of a passion to show how the world looks to us." p. 166
Weinberger emphasizes the human and paradoxical aspects of the Web -- how we behave and interact there and what that says about what it means to be human.
He ruminates about the implications of what we've been doing on the Web for the last nine years. The Web isn't just technology. It connects people to people in new ways, leads to new behavior, leads to new ways of thinking about what is possible in terms of human relationships. It opens the possibility for you to be a creative individual while at the same time being part of a mass crowd. He clearly articulates thoughts that many of us have probably glimpsed before in a fog, and then he digs a little deeper into what that means, and tickles our brains with intriguing conclusions.
He starts with the firmly held belief that the Internet changes everything; and then asks, over and over again, in what ways is that true?
He starts with the assumption that, in the long term, the dot-com boom and crash doesn't matter much. The Internet has affected us in far more profound ways than stock prices and get-rich-quick schemes that failed. As he puts it, "If the Internet sometimes feels like a Gold Rush, that's due more to the rush than to the gold." (p. 59)
Weinberger dares to wonder about matters that many of us have left unexamined since college -- the nature of knowledge, the destiny of man, the importance of passion. He creates a context in which he can actually say something so bizarre and outrageous as "... the Web's architecture itself is fundamentally moral," p. 183, and not only do you know what he means -- you believe him.
The subtitle -- "a Unified Theory of the Web" -- is totally irrelevant. There is no theory here, and certainly (thankfully) nothing is unified. Rather, this is an insightful meditation on the nature of the Internet, delivered with style and humor, together with religious awe at this phenomenon that brings out unexpected potential of mankind.
Now don't get the idea that this is a zealot's view through rose-colored glasses. Weinberger doesn't overlook the faults and problems. But rather he celebrates the very imperfection. For instance:
"The Web celebrates our imperfection, ludicrous creatures that we are. Its juice comes from being as many points of view as people and as many ways of talking as there are Web pages. The Web is where we can air our viewpoints, experiment, play, and fail, and then get right back on our feet and try again. It is not headed towards agreement. Ever. There isn't' one way of thinking or talking or behaving on the Web, and if there were, who'd want to go? The Web would be just a large 'information resource', a place where we find answers. But the Web is far more interesting. It will never be perfect -- complete, final, total, true without exception, good without hesitation. It is, therefore, a genuine reflection of our imperfect human nature, and a welcome relief from the anal-perfectionism imposed on so much of our real-world lives." p. 94Weinberger keeps asking, from a variety of perspectives -- what is the Web? And spiced up with some clever and very quotable turns of phrase, he arrives at some outlandish and very perceptive conclusions, which he expresses in pithy sound-bytes:
Recently a reporter in South Africa researching a story asked me a series of questions. Here are the questions and my replies.
What type of sites get the most hits?
The sites that get the most traffic are the ones backed up by well-known brand names and heavy marketing, especially when such sites provide useful free services, such as search and news and can serve as a starting point/home base for inexperienced users; also sites that are locked in (or set as the default starting point) for users of services like AOL and MSN that have millions of users.
I believe it would be much more interesting to consider what kinds of new businesses and sites without brand recognition are likely to get the most traffic, without having to make obscene marketing investments, because they provide experiences that users find not just tempting, but addictive. That's what I'll focus on in the following answers.
What are the dominant trends today with regard to traffic? What criteria are the primary motivators for online visitors?
Start with the strengths of the Internet, such as:
If a site presents an addictive experience/service such as those listed above, it should do quite well, growing by word of mouth.
If a site has other aims -- like providing useful information or services -- and wishes to reach a wide audience at low-cost, then what matters most is providing lots of good text content and designing the pages and the site to be search-engine friendly. (See my articles linked to from http://www.samizdat.com/search.html and http://www.samizdat.com/marketing.html).
Is the broadband-networking phenomenon more hype than reality?
High-speed, always-on access (as opposed to dial-up access) for individuals at home is growing at a ridiculously rapid pace in the US (cable and DSL). As a result, new business opportunities are opening up that involve heavy use of video/audio.
What is the connection between networking and broadband?
The Internet is a network -- THE network of networks. Broadband simply
means fast delivery of content (a bigger pipe so more content and more
complex content can move more quickly). At slow speeds video is less than
useless -- just an
annoyance. At high speeds, you take it for granted as an element to
be built into entertainment and business solutions.
Today, in the US, pornography sites like Hustler and mainstream sites like CinemaNow are delivering full screen streaming video. In other words, you can watch full-length movies on your PC (with a broadband connection) with the same quality as watching a video tape or watching a movie over cable television. Obvious business models in place already -- pay a month subscription fee and you can watch whatever you want, whenever you want, as many times as you want; or pay-per-view with thousands of selections, and you determine the start time, and you have access to that movie for 24 hours (as opposed to cable television where you have just a couple dozen choices, and the provider sets the start times).
Any future trends in this regard?
Just use your imagination. How can video/audio enhance the addictive experiences listed above?
For instance, consider sports sites. espn.com has enhanced its offerings
of sports-related information with "gamecasts" -- java applications that
provide live continuous updates of ongoing sports contests, like baseball
games. mlb.com (major league baseball) now offers for a "season fee" (as
opposed to a monthly fee) access to live and recorded radio broadcasts
of
every single major league baseball game.
If you have audio or video content, the growing high-bandwidth Internet
audience opens a wide variety of possible business models for delivering
that content to the home, as part of a Web-based business, and for making
money.
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