The Disneyfication of Tech
Truth is this — users are caught between tech and media. Neither of them is looking out for our interest. Each of them own politicians each owns tech. The tech industry is better at tech (no surprise) and the media industry is better at a lot of other things, including getting Congress to do their bidding.
I’ve been warning the news publishers to be careful about viewing Twitter and Facebook as if they were equivalent to the web. This would be like Kodak trusting Apple to handle its digital photography strategy. We know now how that turned out.
Twitter and Facebook are rich and getting richer. Either of them could easily buy a struggling but independent news organization. Then where would you be if you were dependent on them to distribute news? It would be like the Times depending on Murdoch to print their daily paper. Instead the Times invested in their own printing plant, presumably so they could have better control of the product, both from a creative and tactical standpoint. If Murdoch owned the presses and the trucks, who do you think would deliver the most timely news? They have to think about Twitter that way. At some point they will come to see themselves as a media company, if they don’t already.
Caught in the middle is the original idea of the Internet and the web, that people could be media instead of just consuming it. For that to continue, enough people have to see their future as publishing independently, and enough people have to read independently of corporate media, neither originating from Silicon Valley or Hollywood, to keep the flame alive.
I still hope that there’s a remnant of the idealism of tech. That there was value in the personal-ness of PCs. The net is the same way. We need to make it ever-easier for people to own and run their own infrastructure. People think it’s hard, but it doesn’t have to be! Each of us can have the equivalent of a printing plant, that’s the magic of tech. No harder to keep running than a laptop. To those people in tech who still hold to the ideal of free communication unrestricted by government or corporations, please use some of your profits to help guarantee the future of an independent Internet.
Otherwise, I think we can all see this clearly now, the net will be a single amorphous Disneyfied mess, not too far down the road.
This post first appeared on Scripting News.
Dave Winer, a visiting scholar at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software. A former contributing editor at Wired magazine, Dave won the Wired Tech Renegade award in 2001.Follow @davewiner on Twitter.
Google Tweaks Search Results to Punish Ad-Heavy Websites
Google has tweaked its search algorithm to punish websites with excessive advertising “above-the-fold,” that is, websites that stack the top of the page with nothing but advertisements.
According to Google, “rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away.” To help users get to that content, Google may drop ad-heavy websites from its search results.
Google says that the change will only affect about one in 100 searches, and emphasizes that websites using what Google’s Distinguished Engineer and SEO guru Matt Cutts calls “ads above-the-fold to a normal degree” will not be affected.
Instead the change is designed to punish sites that “go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page.” In other words, if a site is so packed with ads that people can’t find what they’re looking for then Google isn’t going to send them to that site anymore.
While the distinction seems clear at first glance, digging deeper reveals some potential confusion for webmasters — for example, what role does screen size play? On a netbook, for instance, Google’s own search results page is almost entirely taken over by advertisements, not the actual search results (i.e., the content).
Google on a netbook screen: Ads are in red, search results in green
At small screen resolutions, Google’s own search results page is one of the worst offenders when it comes to advertising clutter obscuring content. That seeming hypocrisy may leave some webmasters wondering what constitutes “a normal degree of ads” and how screen size affects what is defined as “normal.” Sticking simply with what Google has written about the change, copying Google’s search results page is probably not a good idea in this case.
Cutts does encourage webmasters view their websites at different screen resolutions, suggesting that screen size does play a role, but unfortunately he doesn’t offer any details about what that role is or how it affects the algorithm’s new layout ranking scheme.
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