A couple of months ago I looked at some initiatives for keeping a permanent record of information on the internet.

Today the Guardian reports new legal powers
being pushed through to allow the British Library and 5 other libraries
to copy every free UK-based website in an effort to preserve the
cultural content of the web for future generations.

According to
the Guardian, about a third of all published work only exists in
digital form. The powers to allow the key libraries to copy content
were originally established in 2003, but delays in putting this into
practice mean that millions of web pages have effectively been ‘lost’.
Approx 13% of internet references in scholarly articles become inactive
after only 27 months.

The
new powers would only apply to free UK websites ending with the .uk
domain (and the forthcoming .sco and .cym domain for Scotland and
Wales). However, the archiving of paid-for and restricted content has
been delayed until after this year’s election for “legal and technical
issues” according to the Culture Minister, Margaret Hodge.  Certainly
the issues relating to paid-for web content, especially around news
and  will be one of the hot topics for 2010.

Read more on Archiving the web: part 2…

There is a raft of developments that may fundamentally change the way in which consumers interact with the internet.

New media commentator Stowe Boyd believes that the next evolution of the web involves some pretty radical steps:

One of the moves away from a document structure focuses on how the web will evolve into a 3-dimensional environment.

The
technical limitations of internet speeds previously stifled the growth
in more complex visual interaction with the web – but as broadband
speeds really start to increase, due to both BT’s migration to digital
exchanges and the advent of fibre optics broadband, speeds of up to
100mb/s are only a few years away. And we need to put that into context
– only half a decade ago we were still talking about 56k dial-up
connections – a 100mb/s connection is 2000 times faster.

And with that will come a richer interactive experience. Second Life is a great pointer of the direction this will take.

But it’s not simply within the world of entertainment and leisure that these environments are being created.

3B
is a software company developing the next generation of 3D online
experiences. It has developed a platform that enables users to
socialise, shop and browse within a 3D environment. One of its current
developments is to allow users to create 3D environments for their
social networking pages across MySpace, Bebo, MetaCafe, Flickr and
YouTube. And it’s just one of many companies looking to establish a
more ‘real world’ means of shopping in the comfort of our own homes.

Whilst
the majority of online shoppers are now comfortable with the online
experience for purchasing music, DVDs and even electrical items, one of
the main sectors that’s struggled for growth has been online grocery
shopping. This is largely due to the sheer number of different items in
different grocery categories needed as part of the weekly shop. The
current online experience is extremely flat and rather unusable &
clunky. And for FMCG marketers, branding and merchandising is a
nightmare – with brands arranged alphabetically in lists.

The
advent of 3D will create an in-store environment that we’re all
familiar with – store layouts that start with the fresh produce
sections and move through to beers/wines & spirits. Each consumer’s
store layout could even be customised to match that of their local
real-world store so they feel even more familiar with where everything
is.

Merchandising and promotional activity in this environment
also begins to resemble the real-world process – but with data on the
individual consumer and an opportunity to talk to the consumer in a
1-2-1 environment, promotions can be even more compelling and finely
targeted.

So, once again, the careful use of consumer data plays a key role in the development of internet.

Read more on The virtual reality web…

Last
week Facebook rolled-out a new set of privacy settings. If you’re a
Facebook user you can’t really have missed it. You were forced to at
least review the settings when you logged-in.

It was billed as
putting the user in greater control of their data and the information
that they share with others, with advertisers and with 3rd party
applications.

However, after many months of critical speculation
and reassurance that Facebook was taking privacy seriously, it appeared
that some of the new default settings automatically made personal
information available to more, rather than fewer, people (irrespective
of one’s previous settings). For example the default setting for member
photos and birthdays used to be limited to ‘friends’ however, the new
default setting extends this to ‘friends of friends’.

It’s not
all bad news, however. Where a user wants to review and adjust their
privacy settings the new Facebook controls allow customisation of
almost every element including what information is shared by
applications.

We all understand that Facebook has to evolve its
business model. Its core asset is the data it holds on its members.
However, the fear now is that to drive advertising growth it will start
to push members into sharing more than they want (or more than they
thought they had shared) simply because most users simply won’t want to
spend the time adjusting complicated settings, or they simply don’t
understand the implications.

However, as both behavioural
targetting and social search become the new battlegrounds for both
social networking sites and the major search engines – understanding
what personal information is accessible by whom will become
increasingly important.

Read more on Facebook mishandles privacy update…

More and more data on the internet is being published in reusable and
remotely queryable formats. Some of us may be familiar with XML which
is way of structuring data so it can be interpreted by a variety of
different applications and devices – for example RSS feeds are
specified using XML

To make this really clear – here is an example:

We
all have a common understanding of the concept of “a book”. We
understand that are several elements to a book: it has an author, a
publisher, a title and so on. So we have a common shared frame of
reference for how we define a book.

However to a computer the
concept of ‘a book’ is meaningless. What structured data formats such
as XML do is to allow for the creation of common definitions so that,
say, within the publishing industry information can be specified in the
same way and shared easily between companies. So in the XML world a
book can actually be defined as having a title, author, ISBN number,
publisher etc. so that different computer systems and applications all
‘understand’ the definition of a book – and can then manipulate that
data with a common frame of reference.

What this then means is
that intelligent agents or spiders (essentially programs that crawl the
web) can scan different websites, gather data and make valid
comparisons. This is how price comparison sites such as Kelkoo and
Confused.com work.

The next evolution of this is called the
Semantic Web. “Semantics” is about the meanings of things and the
Semantic web is described as a state of the internet where computers
can not only recognise and compare structured data – but be able to
actually understand how different pieces of information relate to each
other.

“The Semantic Web describes the relationships between
things (like A is a part of B and Y is a member of Z)…and the
properties of things (like size, weight, age and price)” (source
w3schools.com)

This moves us towards the vision of the web
originally envisaged by its creator Tim Berners-Lee as a universal
medium for data, information and knowledge exchange.

Back in 1999 he said:

And
even though a statement made a decade ago appears prehistoric by
today’s fast moving standards, elements of this vision are taking shape.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
is the organisation responsible for setting technical standards on the
web. They are examining a series of standards designed to make data as
openly accessible and linkable as possible and in which automated
software can store, exchange, and use machine-readable information
distributed throughout the Web. As a result, this will enable users to
deal with the information with greater efficiency and certainty.

One
element of these standards is called RDF (Resource Description
Framework) and putting information into RDF files makes it possible for
intelligent agents and spiders to search, discover, pick-up, collect,
analyse and process information from all over the internet. In essence
the Semantic Web uses RDF to describe the content and resources on the
internet.

And as all data on the internet becomes part of this
standard format, it transforms the web from a random collection of
pages into one huge database with each piece of data connected to each
other in a way that computers can understand.

So what does that mean for marketers?

Put simply, it means that the internet is going to get organised.

As
search engines start to recognise semantically tagged data in their
pages that they crawl, structured data as per the RDF formats will
present far more compelling summaries of those pages in their search
results.

It’s basically like current search engine marketing –
but on steroids. In fact this aspect is often referred to as Search
Engine Optimisation Plus (SEO+). Search is seen as the killer
application for the Semantic Web that will finally drive its growth.

So
at the most fundamental it means that marketers will need to start
managing brands in the Semantic layer that the consumer cannot see as
actively as they manage their brands in the layers consumers can see –
that’s websites, online advertising etc.

Scott Brinker on the Chief Marketing Technologist Blog suggests that:

And having data in a more
accessible format will mean that organisations will look to build rich
data applications over the top of this data.

One example given
by Tim Berners-Lee is of being able to combine your calendar and bank
statements. If both of these talked the same language then a user would
be able to drag their digital bank statements onto their calendar and a
series of dots would appear showing the user when they spent their
money. Now imagine that you still can’t remember where a particular
transaction happened – then you could drag your photo album on top of
your calendar and be reminded that you used your credit card at the
same time you were taking pictures of your kids at a theme park.

And
if we look at comparison or price aggregation sites, with the semantic
web consumers will increasingly be able to make more accurate and
reliable comparisons not just for more complex & configurable
products such as cars, holidays etc, but also services such as
builders, accountants and solicitors because the information on those
products and services can be far richer and more structured.

Let’s
take another example of a consumer searching for a ‘holiday’ in the
future. The Semantic Web will allow people to use these ‘information
agents’ and set them tasks such as “go and find me a holiday” that’s:
• In Greece
• By a beach
• But also has some historical interest
• That fits my calendar
• And fits within my budget

The intelligent agent is then left to instantly
research the request, asking additional questions where necessary. An
early example of this is www.tripit.com. With Tripit a user can simply
forward their travel confirmation emails and the site and their Tripit “Itinerator”
takes over and combines all the related travel bookings (from flights,
car hire and hotels) into a single master itinerary. It then searches
the Web to add related information such as daily weather, local maps,
driving directions (for example to get from the airport to the hotel),
city guides and so on. You can then access your itinerary from a mobile
device or synchronise it with your PC calendar and share itineraries
within group bookings to make sure there are no date issues or overlaps.

This
will also be important to B2B marketers where our consumer habits of
online research have been transported into the workplace and where
businesses will need to create and manage their semantic data with
increasing numbers of potential customers using search engines to
research and shortlist suppliers.

Another example of the “Semantic Web” is something called ‘Friend of a Friend’ (FOAF). And this is interesting because of its impact on the future of social networking.

FOAF
allows people to describe themselves using an RDF format. You can
describe personal details, hobbies, relations to other people &
things. But what’s fascinating about FOAF is that there is no one
central database or repository of information. Your profile does not
exist only in Facebook, or Bebo or Myspace. It’s a piece of data
searchable by any computer. Computers may then use these FOAF profiles
to find and relate people to one another.

It’s the 21st Century equivalent of ’6-Degrees of Separation’.

Read more on The semantic web: the internet as a global database…

Only a matter of a year or so ago it would have been almost impossible to see the nature of Microsoft’s demise.

Sure,
Google was the new force dominating the world of search & display
advertising with the will and resources to keep pioneering:
…Maps…Earth…Docs…Analytics
…Wave. The list goes on.

Although
Microsoft has tried and failed to compete in some of these areas, most
especially in the search market with Bing, there has been no real
threat to their overall stranglehold of the desktop operating system
market with about 90% share (and with that, dominance in the office
software market).

But things are not quite as rosy in the mobile/handheld operating system market. Recent figures from Gartner
show that Microsoft’s Windows Mobile lost 28 percent of its smartphone
market share between the third quarter of 2008 and the third quarter of
2009. Microsoft is really being squeezed by open source operating
systems (such as Symbian and Google’s Android) and the core proprietary
smartphone operating systems of RIM’s Blackberry and Apple’s iPhone. To
put this in context Blackberry gained a 20% market share in Q3 this
year and the iPhone 17% (source).

However
it’s the open source platforms that Microsoft has most to worry about.
These are predicted to grow to around 62% market share by 2012,
according to Gartner – and Android proves possibly the biggest threat.
In under a year it’s grown it’s marketshare from zero to 4%. Handset
manufacturers such as Samsung are attracted to Android as there are no
software license fees – and this may ultimately limit Microsoft’s
ability to charge license fees in this market. Considering around 80%
of smartphone purchases are private, rather than corporate, Microsoft
cannot bank on revenues from the lucrative business market here.

And
it’s not only in the smartphone market that Microsoft faces a challenge
from Google. Last week Google announced the open source launch of its Chrome Operating System
(OS). Chrome OS will be based on the look & feel and architecture
of the Chrome web browser. Chrome OS is specifically designed for
notebooks and plugs into Google’s cloud computing vision – with
applications and data stored on the internet.

The beauty of
the Chrome OS is that again there are no license fees. Considering that
the hardware manufacturers largest direct cost is the the Microsoft
Windows license how long will it be before Google launches an assault
on the Windows market?

Yes, this is a long way off. There’s no
doubt about that.  But looking at the way the mobile operating system
has evolved in the last 12 months, I wouldn’t bet against it.

Image (c) Softpedia 2009

Read more on Microsoft’s Achilles heel?…

This
week is 3D Week on Channel 4. They are running a series of programmes,
including a Derren Brown Special and Friday the 13th) in glorious
3-Dimensions.

Coupled with the fact that there is not a single
kid’s movie released at the moment that doesn’t have a 3D version
(Pixar’s recent ‘Up’, Disney’s new version of “A Christmas Carol”,
“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”, “Coraline” etc) 3D is making a
comeback and will dominate technology talk in 2010.

Things have
changed since the old lo-fi red/blue lenses. Modern 3D cinema uses new
polarised ‘clear’ lenses for a greater sense of realism and depth (plus
they are infinitely easier on the eyes). A real test of the power of 3D
will be this Christmas with the launch of James Cameron’s new film
‘Avatar’. This is Cameron’s first movie since ‘Titanic’ and promises to
take 3D to a new level. Reports from early previews suggest that this
pre-billing may not simply be hype and that the audience actually feels
transported into the set.

But 3D is not going to be confined to
the big screen. Recent 3D movies are also getting their release on
Blu-Ray and DVD and next year Sky launches Europe’s first 3D service
via it’s High Definition platform and showed some demonstrations at
this year’s Edinburgh Festival. The effect is, apparently, very
effective – and initial content will cover movies, entertainment and
sport.

So what’s next for marketeers? The advent of 3D TV
clearly suggests 3D advertising – not simply 3D versions of existing
ads, but rather creating bespoke, engaging experiences that drive
consumer cut through and maximise awareness. Such executions could live
both on broadcast TV, but also more interactively on the web in
glorious 3D.

But 3D took off in both the 1950s and 1980s, in both cases, being only a short term fads. Are things different now?

Certainly
the technology is much improved both in terms of the 3D effect itself
and the comfort levels of the glasses users need to wear. Home
entertainment manufacturers, such as Samsung and Sony, are also pushing
forward even more sophisticated technology for LED/LCD televisions that
limit the amount of blur seens in 3D movies. These more modern TVs use ‘active shutter glasses‘
that essentially synchronize with the picture from TV and allow the
left hand and right hand images from the screen to be alternately
received into the users left/right eye respectively thus giving the
impression of depth.

However, 3D will only truly become
mainstream when users no longer require any form of glasses (what is
often referred to as ‘autostereoscopic’ or ‘glassless’ 3D). This
technology is available today for digital signage and advertising but
requires 50 times the number of pixels than current high-def TVs.

With
the advent of ultra high-definition TVs around 2015 this may well be
possible, however until then 3D is still some way off from being the
standard viewing experience in the home.

Read more on The future’s bright the future’s 3D…

 Anyone
visiting the Amazon website last week would have been struck by a
letter on the home page from Jeff Bezos informing UK shoppers that they
could now purchase Amazon’s e-reader, the Kindle, for shipping to the
UK.

Cue a flurry of commentary about the death of books and the demise of culture.

Inevitably
we are moving towards a world of digital content. Blu-Ray may well be
the last ever ‘physical’ entertainment media format. But as we move
away from information being stored on physical formats
(CDs/DVDs/paper/books) to data stored in the internet how, in the
future, are we going to look back and understand the state of knowledge
at a particular time in history?

The written word, stored on
parchment and paper and filling libraries and archives has always
provided historians with an evolving and largely permanent record of
human history. Digital content, in contrast, is more fluid and more
concerned with the state of information at the present time. New
content trumps old content. Older information on the web is largely
constrained to out of date blogs and websites rather than a systematic
approach to archiving.

To put this into context the journal Science has found that 13% of Internet references in scholarly articles were inactive after only 27 months.

However, since 1996 a non-profit organisation called the Internet Archive has
been archiving digital content with the goal of building an ‘internet
library’. It has archived over 150 billion web pages and hundreds of
thousands of moving images, live music files, audio and document texts. Its “Way Back Machine” is a useful tool that provides a snapshot of selected major sites over the years. Here is Apple.com back in in 1997.

The
Internet Archive has also partnered with eleven National Libraries
(Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Italy, Norway,
Sweden, The British Library & The US Library of Congress) to create
the The International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC). The
mission of the IIPC is to acquire, preserve and make accessible
knowledge and information from the Internet for future generations.

However,
no single project can ever hope to archive the entire web. The approach
to preserving digital content may not be of major concern today because
the web is simply too new. However as the internet becomes the de facto
reference point for all human knowledge: it will become of critical
importance.

Read more on Archiving the web: a record of history…

 The ‘ad funded’ model has taken a bit of a beating this year. The big
question is whether it can continue in a recession-hit media world.

Last month Blyk (the ad-funded mobile operator) withdrew their consumer offer and just this week Joost
(the online video company) announced that market conditions meant that
it too was moving away from a consumer focussed ad-funded model. These
were both businesses heralded as at the frontier of the new media world
and examples of how an ad-funded business model could be used to
deliver new services to consumers on new platforms.

But that model is under severe threat.

Recessionary-driven declines in media spends have driven massive losses and cuts at ITV
and focussed attention on the long-term viability of Channel 4.
Newpapers too are suffering. And, to put this into a digital context,
the first quarter of this year saw a 5% drop decline in online advertising.

So a new model has to be found as only the largest traffic sites can continue a purely ad-funded approach.

Surely
it’s got to focus on subscriptions. However, the print media industry
let the genie out of the bottle with free content – and I think it’s
hard to see consumers willingness to pay for something that they have
considered free for some time – unless there is an industry-wide
approach. But who will blink first?

There are some interesting
models out there. Spotify the online music service uses a blend of
ad-based revenues and a subscription model. However, many people have
asked how Spotify can actually make a profit and there is a good
interview with Daniel Ek (the Spotify CEO) on TechRadar
- although Ek does not directly answer the question as to how its
business model really works. The core question for Spotify and others
is what % of users will pay the subscription model when the free model
is pretty good. The ads aren’t really intrusive enough to make me
switch to a premium version.

An alternative option is using
micropayments for content. Here users buy premium content in return for
just a couple of pence. However will users really want to make that
‘purchase decision’ every time they want to access/read a piece of
content? And how will that work practically? The user would already
have had to buy-in to the site producing that content and lodged some
form of payment (in the same way that works for iTunes). The
micropayment model has been mooted for over a decade – but is still not
gained much traction. Perhaps the media downturn will see it dusted it
off and reconsidered.

Read more on Challenges for the ad-funded business model…

Seth Godin recently predicted that by 2012 “there will be no significant newspapers printed on newsprint in the US“.

Now
whilst that may be sensationalistic in terms of timescale – there is no
doubt that the newspaper industry is in trouble. In the six months to
March of this year the decline in US newspaper weekday circulation
almost doubled (Source: Bloomberg) and a number of historic US newspaper titles have already hit financial trouble.

Yes
the recession has hit media spend – but the core issue is that more
& more consumers are getting their news from the internet.

But that’s not really new news. What is new is how the internet is increasingly becoming the source for breaking news.

Last
Thursday night I was doing some things around the house with BBC News
24 on in the background. But rather than seeing a journalist on the
screen – there was a caption with an image of the TMZ.com
site leading with the news of Michael Jackson’s death. For the next
couple of hours the BBC’s news was simply reporting on the news from
TMZ and the LA Times. Mainstream news media reporting breaking internet
news.

In September last year, Robert Peston chose his blog to
announce the proposed Lloyds/HBOS merger before breaking the news on
BBC.

More recently, with reporting restrictions in place, the
news from Iran has been lead by blogs, Tweets and videos from people on
the streets.

In a 24-hour global news cycle no single news
organisation is going to have the coverage to capture every breaking
news story. So thanks to Twitter, blogs & the camera-phone the
power of the consumer-journalist is massive. News can be broken by
anywhere, anywhere, at any time.

Social media is increasingly driving the news agenda.

The challenge for the established media therefore becomes two-fold:

Read more on Breaking news…

It’s been a big month for ‘decision engines’.

First we had the build-up and launch of Wolfram-Alpha as mentioned a few weeks ago and now we have the launch of Microsoft’s own decision engine called ‘Bing‘.
Bing went live last week, a couple of days early. The
earlier-than-planned-launch is a strong indication of the effort
Microsoft has put behind it. Let’s not forget how important Bing is to
Microsoft. The majority of Microsoft’s recent challenges to Google’s
search and online advertising dominance have failed to make an impact
on their market share. Bing is the successor to Microsoft’s Live
Search. But what’s different? And what exactly are ‘decision engines’,
a term so new that there isn’t a Wikipedia entry to define them yet?

Decision
Engines are being positioned as the evolution of search. Whereas search
engines ‘simply’ (and I use the word advisedly) return the closest
match to a given search term, decision engines move us closer towards
the ‘semantic web’ and artificial intelligence by using contextual
information, together with the results of previous user’s searches, to
provide more accurate and more helpful results. Well that’s the theory
anyway.

But do either Wolfram Alpha or Bing live up to this?

Wolfram
Alpha has hit the 100 million query mark, but getting an answer to your
question is still quite hit and miss. It’s actually quite difficult to
think of a useful query that Wolfram Alpha has an answer for. Many
questions still get a “Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your
input”.

Bing on the other hand might well be trying to position
itself as a ‘decision engine’ but it’s not as revolutionary as its
pre-launch billing. It’s more of an evolution of search, attempting to
improve on Google’s offering.

And there are some nice features:
the image search allows you to filter images by size, style, layout
etc. A neat feature. The video shortcuts allows you to play the video
by just rolling over the image thumbnail in the search. But Bing has been
criticised for delivering poorer results than Google. For a neat way of comparing
Google and Bing, Blackdog have created a split screen site to search both sites at the same time.

Will
it be enough to make inroads into Google’s market share? Only time will
tell. But from first impressions it’s just not significantly different
or better than Google to shift consumer behaviour.

There is a danger that the term Decision Engine is being used by Microsoft in order to create some new news: as an attempt to be viewed as creating something new rather than just going head-to-head with Google.  But that’s exactly what Microsoft is doing.

Read more on Are decision engines the Emperor’s new clothes?…