NBC/KSL—Like AOL before it, Facebook is the latest in a long line of mainstream technologies to introduce a lot of new users to the power, utility, and network effect of the Internet.

At the same time, the popular hangout has negatively impacted the number of public comments taking place online. Case in point: The number of people making online remarks has dwindled from a record 15% five years ago to an estimated 7% last year, according to market research by Nielson.

The reason: “Conversations around stories are moving off the news page and onto social networks,” says Steve Rubel, a longtime observer of social media since 2004. “With time spent on social networks like Facebook skyrocketing, it leaves little left to engage at the source of the news.”

Is that a problem? (more…)

According to Vin Cerf, any early pioneer of the internet:

Technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it. The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes that we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of access to information — and those are not necessarily bound to any particular technology at any particular time.

Do you have a hard time finding information online?

I don’t. If anything, there’s too much information online.

Which is why I scratched my head this morning after reading what the founders of YouTube are remodeling. In short, they bought an old web linking website in hopes of turning it around.

“Twitter sees something like 200 million tweets a day, but I I can’t even read 1,000 a day,” complained YouTube’s Steve Chen. Seemingly in between bouts of “Mine! Mine! Mine!” he added, “There’s a waterfall of content that you’re missing out on [and] a lot of services trying to solve the information discovery problem, but no one has got it right yet.”

Information discovery problem?

Maybe a few thousand Silicon Valley nerds have that problem. But the vast majority of us have no problem finding information online.

As I’ve said before, “Whether online or off, the cream of life always rises to the top. The best status updates and news transcend the Internet.”

What more do you non-contributing zeros want?

See also: Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy

From one of the most brilliant minds of our time comes…

• Fox News: 7 Things You Didn’t Know About Nintendo Wii U
  
• CNN: Why some dissatisfied users are shunning Facebook
• Fox News: Chromebook forecast: Cloudy with a chance of sunrise

Today, auctions represent only 31% of all Ebay sales. A decade ago, Ebay was suppose to change the way everything was bought and sold. That didn’t happen. A new article in Wired tells why:

To begin with, the experience of auctions changed over time, generally in ways that made them less appealing to both buyers and sellers. Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, which consults for ecommerce companies, points to the advent of sniping—the practice of placing winning bids at the last second—as something that has alienated ordinary shoppers…

Bargains, too, have become less common, as the market matured and people on both sides of the transaction became savvier…

Really, though, the biggest factor in the decline of the auction may simply be that the novelty of bidding wore off. “The Internet stopped being a source of wonder and became a place to do certain kinds of business,” Koehn says. “Once that happens, you start to think about things like ‘Does it make sense to spend this much time on an auction when I might not even get the item in the end?’” In econospeak, the hedonic benefits of bidding on eBay diminished.

In my opinion, I think the information age has simply normalized pricing. By that I mean you can save a buck or two on ebay, but you really have to work for it… and wait for it. Why not “buy it now” for a few bucks more elsewhere?

A year ago to the day, I quit Facebook. At the time I feared I might be committing social suicide. Today, I can happily report that didn’t happen.

Since quitting the popular online hangout, I’ve limited the number of work and out of office distractions I encounter. I no longer feel the desire to “check in” online at every waking hour. It takes me longer to discover new bands. And I don’t have to consciously decide or distinguish friends from colleagues, associates, and nobodies. I just let them happen naturally now; unannounced and evolving.

(more…)

As seen in this month’s issue of Wired.

My thoughts: Agreed that information technology isn’t always replaced by newer technology (i.e. pens, pencils, paperbacks). But to suggest that printed magazines are actually thriving is a bit of stretch. My guess is the quoted “11 percent growth” stems from that fuzzy “pass along” metric magazines still use to measure audience size. (And to suggest that magazines are the superior way of reading essays is also wrong.)

Either way, stop hard-selling yourself, magazines. We know what you’re good for: Bathrooms, waiting lobbies, and other offline environments.

Fascinating.

OMG, when did we start talking like txt msgs?
One possibility, Kiesling proposes, is that some of these acronyms actually become a whole new thought, expressing something different than the words that form them. For example: “You wouldn’t say, `OMG, that person just jumped off a cliff,’” he explains. “But you’d say, `OMG, do you see those red pants that person is wearing?’”

On Monday, BYU student Michelle Peralta accused fellow classmates of “idol worship” in a letter published in the school paper. Peralta, not to be confused with the awesome ’80s skateboards of the same name, said she was irritated by what she called “Jimmer worship,” Jimmer being the BYU point guard, 3-point killer, nation’s leading scorer, and all-around swell guy.

In all likelhood, Peralta, an admitted non-sports fan, was probably just venting her frustration over the increased volume of Jimmermania sweeping the nation, Provo very much included. That didn’t stop the Internet from having a little fun with her though.

In a virally large thread on her then-public, now-private Facebook page, hundreds of Jimmer fans came to his defense, while sticking with the comical spiritual theme Peralta had started. Here my top 10 favorites: (more…)

It’s not the biggest data center. But in terms of technology — including containment, a bajillion security checks, monitoring, and backups of backups — it has to be within the top one percent in the nation, if not the world. And it was built in itty bitty Carrollton, the rural Georgian city I spent my formative years in.

Congratulations, Brooks and Clay! More photos here.