Everything on the Internet is Free!

Brian Keith Whalen rocking out at the Starr Gennett Walk of FameAfter my post this past weekend about why I think paying for access to local news reporting is worth it, I checked out some of the reasons that people who were complaining about said fees were giving for not wanting to pay.  Chief among them was the argument that "if it's on the Internet, it should be free!"

I hadn't previously thought about how mainstream that line of thinking probably is right now.  But it makes sense.  The dominant business model for so many Internet resources over the last several years has been to give away access to tools, content or other things and then either sell advertising or sell a "premium" version (Wired magazine had a good story on this trend back in February of 2008 if you want to see how much it's taken hold even in that short time).

People are used to learning of some new service or app, putting in their e-mail address and picking a password (if that much), and they're off and running to use the shiny new thing.  Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Google let users spend all day using up their resources at no charge.  You can download high quality web browsers and entire office software suites for free.  Pandora lets you listen to and discover great music all day long for free.  There are paid apps in mobile app stores, but the free or $0.99 ones get most of the attention.

Continue reading "Everything on the Internet is Free!"

Total Information Awareness

Typical Saturday Morning in ChicagoPeople sometimes ask me how much I think "The Government" is really listening in on our phone calls, e-mail messages, web browsing, text messages, and other forms of communication. I still apparently surprise people with my answer: for the purposes of my day-to-day life, I assume that every communication I send or receive using an electronic medium is monitored and recorded by someone else. And I'm not just talking about watching some rough meta-information go by and trying to deduce what we're up to - I'm talking about full access to the content of every single communication, in real time.

Recent media reports, including a March 10th article in the Wall Street Journal, show us how much information spy agencies are allowed to legally collect and monitor:

  • Recipient and sender address, subject line, timestamp of e-mail messages
  • Internet sites visited and searches conducted
  • Incoming and outgoing numbers dialed on cell and regular phones, length of calls, where you physically were when a cell phone call happened
  • Pretty much everything about your financial transactions

Makes you wonder what's actually happening beyond the law's provisions. Again, I'll generally assume the worst.

Is this really all that del.icio.us?

Brushed With OilAnother stop along the journey of trying to organize all the information in my life, without adding complexity:

I've been ignoring del.icio.us for a while now. I've seen little icons for it popping up on weblogs I read, seen references to it in articles on software and productivity (including one on my own company's weblog), and heard people using it in everyday conversation. But I really didn't understand it, or what it really did, or why anyone would use it. (Plus, it seems like a waste of a perfectly good domain name, icio.us.)

I'm still not sure I do, even after reading the site's own description of what it's for. This is a strange and disorienting place to be for someone whose job it is to have my finger on the pulse of web tech trends. But I'm trying out using it anway, and you can see my Chris Hardie del.icio.us page at http://del.icio.us/ChrisHardie. I guess it's just a list of web pages I've marked for...me? people in my "network"? the world?...to see, with various keywords associated so that I can...have keywords. Ummm, yeah, I think that's it. I kind of like it, but I don't know why.

Do you use del.icio.us? How? Why?