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Wall Street Journal – Charging for Free Content?

Remember when the Wall Street Journal’s online content was free? And then they decided to start charging for it? And then it was free again? But sometimes it’s not?

As it turns out, the Wall Street Journal has implemented a rather unique, some may even say bizarre, online access policy. If you go to their website and click on an article, you have to login with a paid subscription. But if you Google a particular topic and the same article comes back as a search result, you can click through and read the entire article for free. So, in other words, you can’t read the entire Wall Street Journal on their website without paying for it, but if you were curious enough to enquire about everything in it, they will gladly share their content with you for free.

Perhaps an example would be useful. Follow along in a separate browser instance if you like:
Read the rest of this entry »

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On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog . . . but it helps if they do!

A colleague of mine just informed me that he joined Twitter. After weeding out the obvious spammers who would follow him if he would just please click this one link, he seems to have settled in at around ten followers.

On a lark, he also created a Twitter account for his daschund, Logan. Again, after weeding out the obvious spammers, Logan seems to have settled in at approximately seventy followers. Mostly women, he says, as well as a random assortment of dog lovers, kennels, and other seemingly legitimate dog-related vendors.

So, it would appear, that in the sixteen years since Peter Steiner first pointed out in The New Yorker magazine the anonymity that the Internet can provide, this very anonymity has turned out to reduce your audience size by a factor of roughly seven-to-one. Not only that, but it’s a pretty good bet that sometime in the next sixteen years, sociologists and linguists will come together to discover that the previous sentence actually does makes sense…

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Why Are We Still Arguing About Keyboards?

Speculist

Categories: Tech Talk | 3 Comments »

Microsoft Tablet Looks Awesome…

WANT!

There’s a very cool video on the gizmodo site, but it doesn’t have an embedding option. Go check it out – trust me…

(Hat tip: Jeff Porten)
 

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Cold-War Era Search Service?

There’s been a lot of political talk on my blog of late, and there’s sure to be more, so I thought I’d take a quick break and discuss something a little more frivolous – like Soviet intelligence agencies.

Seriously, who in their right minds decided to name a search service KGB? Were they assuming that they’d have absolutely zero customers over the age of 30? Makes me think the service is going to text me answers to questions before I even ask them…

And not only that, it’s entirely phone-based. I can’t even type a question into their website and get an answer on screen. I need to type in my 10-digit mobile telephone number and receive the answer on my phone. Even though they know I’m currently using a web browser. Really, folks? In an era where almost every phone can access Google almost as easily as a text message, and Google (especially with its excellent mobile version) can provide multiple responses (from multiple sources) to the same question at once? Why, this technology seems like something that was built when, well…when the original KGB was still around.

Congratulations, KGB! You’ve created an inferior product that inherently limits my interaction with it, and you expect to use it to compete with one of the largest and most successful technology companies in existence today. Oh, and you appear to be spending millions of dollars advertising it on television. How many TV ads do you see for Google? That’s right, none. You know why? Anyone who uses the web already knows about it.

Enjoy your fifteen minutes of fame, KGB…

Categories: Tech Talk | 5 Comments »

Tech Talk

A few interesting stories today from the world of technology…

1) Apple Blocks Palm Pre’s iTunes Compatibility

One of the features the Palm Pre boasted upon launch was the ability to synch with Apple’s popular iTunes software, so that songs purchased at iTunes would appear and play automatically on the Pre. Yesterday, Apple release iTunes, version 8.2.1 which addressed “an issue with verification of Apple devices.” In other words, they modified their software to prevent it from synching with the Palm Pre.

This is both disheartening and ineffective. Disheartening because Apple has long been after firms like Microsoft to publish open, standards-based specs in order to allow all software, devices, etc. to make use of all technology infrastructure. Seems we don’t “think different” so much when the monopoly shoe is on the other foot, huh? Furthermore, it’s ineffective because Palm Pre users can simply choose not to upgrade iTunes, and continue to enjoy automatic music synching. That is, until Apple adds a feature to iTunes that they really want. Oh, and by the way – according to the above-linked article, Palm sold about 55,000 Pre’s during it’s launch weekend, compared with Apple’s one million units sold when the iPhone 3GS debuted.

2) Twitter’s Google apps Hacked

It seems someone correctly guessed the answer to a Twitter employee’s password security question, then changed the employee’s password, then logged into his/her account, giving the hacker access to the entire suite of Google apps – documents, spreadsheets, calendar entries, e-mail, etc.. Twitter’s co-founder and creative director, Biz Stone, was quick to point out that this was not a security flaw in Google’s applications, but a broader issue of security for the cloud computing model. In response, thousands of Google app users around the world said, “what’s the difference, exactly?” At least the incident led to a priceless quote like this one: “Just putting a pet’s name on a Facebook page could allow hackers to obtain your password.”

3) Michael Jackson Music is #1 for Third Straight Week

While it’s interesting in itself that Michael Jackson’s music is topping the charts now that he’s dead (I thought that only worked for painters?), the fascinating technical angle here is the sales channel choice. It seems that in the hours after his death, online sales of his music spiked dramatically. Now, three weeks later, online sales have stabilized, and fans are rushing to music stores to buy CD’s. I have two theories here: first, that online sales are more immediate, so the group of people that wanted his music immediately upon his death grabbed it online, and the people who weren’t in as much of a rush waited until they were in stores. Second, the physical CD probably contains pictures, liner notes, etc. related to Jackson, and the fans saw these as more valuable now that he’s gone. In any case, I’m sure music retailers everywhere are learning from this interesting trend.

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Apple: We didn’t know there would be sun…

It seems the new iPhone 3GS is not a big fan of direct, prolonged sunlight:

Apple says in a support article that “if the interior temperature of the device exceeds normal operating temperatures, you may experience the following as it attempts to regulate its temperature: the device stops charging, display dims, and/or weak cellular signal”.

In its message, Apple says that the iPhone has a safety feature which warns users that the device is becoming too hot. As well as leaving the handset in a car, it says that the phone may overheat when left in direct sunlight for prolonged periods, when GPS tracking is used in a car on a hot day or when its iPod function is used in direct sunlight.

If the warning appears, Apple says that users of the iPhone should turn the device off and allow it to cool before using it.

Oops.

It’s one thing for a phone to have trouble in a car on a summer day, but if you’re going to tout your device as a GPS replacement, then it better be able to sit on the dashboard for hours at a time.

Users on forums are also claiming problems outside of cars – phones too hot to put to their ears, phones that get hot when they use the video capture feature, etc., etc.

This reminds me of the first round of iPods, who’s screen would scratch if you looked at it funny. Apple spent the first few months claiming it was a “user issue,” but was eventually pressured into replacing damaged iPods and, ultimately, fixed the problem in a future version of the product. Look for iPhones with cooling technology in the near future…

Categories: Tech Talk | 13 Comments »

Scaling the Internet for really big news

According to CNN, when Michael Jackson died, he almost took significant parts of the Internet with him. Sites that experienced slowness or outright downtime included Google News, TMZ, Perez Hilton’s blog, CNN, Twitter, Wikipedia, the LA Times’ site, AOL Instant Messenger, and MJFanClub.net (a Michael Jackson fan site).

The article calls it the biggest mobile event in history:

AOL consumer adviser Regina Lewis . . .told CNN that, although the numbers weren’t in yet, the day should prove an historic milestone for mobile internet traffic. “It could go down as the biggest mobile event in history,” Lewis said. She felt that was down in part to people checking news headlines from work. “People wanted to keep tabs on this story, but if you’re an accountant you’re supposed to be working on your spreadsheet. So they were using their personal cellphones to do so,” she explained.

While the scale of response to Jackson’s death might be unprecedented, the pattern of it was not, Lewis added. “With the advent of social networking, we saw a sequence that we traditionally see around the death of celebrities,” she said. “One, people clamour for the latest news; two, they share it; three, they react; and then the next stage, which we’re seeing alive and well on video sites … are tributes. In the case of Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett, (people have) a lot to work with in terms of images and video,” she said.

A similar event that comes to mind (purely from an infromation technology point of view) is September 11, 2001. On that day, cell phones and web sites had huge outages as well, with some web sites reverting to plain text feeds in order to maximize their use of bandwidth to get information disseminated.

What’s different here, is that almost eight years later, the number of mobile devices in the world has dramatically increased, as has the breadth and depth of bandwidth-hogging rich media, like video clips. So, while scaling to handle another 9/11 involved adding more web servers and IP bandwidth, solving this problem is going to be a bit more complex. Network infrastructure folks, responding to Michael Jackson’s death, will have to respond to a wider variety of devices, protocols, and data objects moving around concurrently.

Yet another way Michael Jackson inadvertently changed the world…

Categories: Tech Talk, Words about Music | 1 Comment »