How do I love thee, Internet? Let me count the ways...

*Hollow promise warning* 

One of these days I will conduct an internet ‘sit-in’ to prove that someone can now quite comfortably live without ever having to leave their computer desk. Of course by conduct I mean I will make it an official one (notify the police and all that) because of course I’ve been conducting an unofficial internet sit-in for pretty much all of my life. I could quite easily live off of eBay purchases and if I get really desperate for food my wireless modem is edible, which is one of the reasons I signed up to my current IP in the first place. Even if I never get around to an official sit in, I can fairly safely conclude that we have become increasingly dependent on the internet to live our day to day lives. Here are a few of the activities available online that have changed the way we interact with the world.

I somewhat sheepishly admit that I would be hard pressed to successfully transfer money from one of my bank accounts to the other if I physically visited a bank. I would desperately claw at the teller window, mumbling incoherently about a login number and password and trying desperately to locate F5 so I could refresh the page. At this stage I would be asked politely but firmly to please leave so that dear old Mrs Robinson behind me could just bank her weekly pension. Of course, one of the great things about internet banking is that I don’t have to deal with people or queues, and it’s interesting to think that although the internet is a great place for social networking it’s also a great place for friendless hermits to hang out, confident that they don’t have to speak to another soul unless they really want to. Even then, they can do so under the guise of a Japanese schoolgirl, but I digress.

Who uses travel agents anymore? Lots of people, I bet, but those people are idiots. Why would you risk a conversation with an unattractive, overweight and odorous travel agent when you could quite comfortably book your trip with the delightful website models on Virgin Blue? (At this point I will permit you to stop reading for a moment to open a new tab and check out Virgin’s website. P.S. Please be careful searching for ‘virgin flight attendants’; I did so with safe search firmly ‘on’.) In fact I have a theory, and it basically consists of my contention that anything which is detrimental to the internet (spyware, viruses, phishing, Internet Explorer) is actually concocted by the International Association of Travel Agents in an effort to ensure not everybody falls totally in love with the internet and puts them all out of business. Of course this theory makes absolutely no sense if you consider that a lot of travel agents now make squillions in revenue off their websites, but that’s like saying that the theory of relativity makes absolutely no sense if you don’t believe in gravity.

Two beautiful people you will never meet in the real world.

Perhaps less essential but certainly more fun than online banking and travel agents is the Web 2.0 phenomenon of user driven sites. I’ve already devoted one post to Twitter and probably will never get around to one on Facebook (it would be the same as examining your partner of forty years: if you start looking too deep you’d find too many reasons not to love it) but another site dear to my heart that deserves a serious look is YouTube.

YouTube is one of those things where I have no idea how I lived without it. Did I just wait for things I wanted to watch to appear on T.V? What a stupid waste of my time! Now I can spend these unproductive TV watching hours on YouTube, mindfully exploring the plethora of film at my fingertips. In my extensive internet sleuthing I discovered something shocking yet somehow refreshing. Watching Katy Perry’s ‘California Girls’ (for the purposes of educating the masses, of course) I noticed it had around about 40 million hits. Curiosity piqued, I headed over to see how many hits Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech had. Suffice to say YouTube is dominated by teenage girls and dirty old men. (If you really want to know, MLK’s speech had a paltry 9 million hits).

Latest YouTube sensation, MLKaty Perry. "I have a dream...a Teenage Dream."

Wikipedia is one of those websites that doesn’t work in theory. Why would a collaborative encyclopaedia, able to be edited by anyone, ever contain any useful information rather than snide and immature jokes and links to porn sites? But the beauty of Wikipedia is that it does work in practice. It has become so beloved, such a trusted source of information, that people are deeply offended if a page is vandalised and quickly change it back. The most recent example I can think of is when the Melbourne Storm salary cap cheating news story broke. Being a product of my time, I first noticed the information on my news website homepage, and for the next forty-five minutes feverishly refreshed the page, getting all the new information as it came to hand. In between reading the ‘official’ reporting of the event, I headed over to Wikipedia to gauge the reaction.  I wasn’t disappointed. I visited the page perhaps ten minutes after the press conference commenced, and the first line had been altered to ‘The Melbourne Storm is a cheating scum rugby club based in Melbourne and participating in the National Rugby league.” Slightly bemused by this hard hitting criticism, I refreshed the page. The words ‘cheating scum’ were gone. Such is the vigilance of the Wiki-police, who refuse to have Wikipedia’s good name besmirched by insolent surfers. 

**Interactive blog segment!**

This is the part where you prove to yourself that Wikipedia really does work as a font of all knowledge. Go to a Wikipedia page, and edit it. Be as outrageous (‘Nixon was an alien’) or as subtle (‘Jack Nicklaus won the 1968 US Open by four strokes') as you like; the result will be the same. Your edit will not last 24 hours. Of course there are a few guidelines: What you write must not be true, and you should do it on a page that would get a reasonable amount of hits. (Anybody can get away with having their name written in the middle of the biography section of the third son of the Bulgarian foreign affairs minister during the 1960s, nobody thinks you’re clever.) If your edit lasts longer than 24 hours, write to me, and I will go and check it out (I promise not to re-edit it). If I can find it, then you win a prize.

Meanwhile, I put my money where my mouth is, and slightly changed Australian actor John Howard’s entry, citing that he not only shared his name with a certain former Australian PM, but in fact was the same person:

A star-studded career

Needless to say, it didn't last long.

There is a point to all this online vandalism. If you had explained to George Orwell the concept of Wikipedia, I imagine he would have been quite ecstatic. You see, it’s very hard to have a domineering world-wide state governed by an omnipresent being when people have access to Wikipedia. It appears, from our above observation (and your practical experiment), that it would be incredibly difficult to change world history through Wikipedia because whoever vigorously monitors their favourite Wikipedia pages would never let a morsel of misinformation appear. So then Big Brother has to find other channels of controlling the human race, such as discovering every man’s greatest fear and using this as leverage to gain their allegiance, but I really doubt he can be bothered doing that. In short, the power of knowledge now rests with the people, and it seems that knowledge is so valuable to people that they won’t accept any tomfoolery, virtual or otherwise. When else in human history did the ‘everyday’ population have the ability to compile, compose and refine a knowledge source explored by millions every day? 

The above sites are just a small sampling of the wondrous resources the internet has given us. Life without these resources, would, I begrudgingly admit, be possible. But it would not be fun at all. How would we spend our idle hours without the magic of YouTube or add to our already questionable knowledge without Wikipedia? Perhaps we’d have to spend our time reading classic novels or plays, or even (god help us) interacting physically with other human begins. Thank god for Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee.

Lord of the Ping(s)

Apple has thrown their hat into the social networking ring with the release of Ping, a networking service firmly based in music. When I first heard about it, I was intrigued, wondering how the service would work and if it was going to knock other sites like MySpace and Facebook off their well deserved lofty perches. I also wondered why Apple had chosen such a hideous sounding name for their product, but imagined that ‘Ping’ scraped in just ahead of ‘iPing’ and ‘MySpacev2.0’ (what makes me really amused is that some high powered marketing twat got payed ~$20,000 to come up with monosyllabic drivel. ‘Ting! Zing! Bing! Xing!’ There you go Apple; I just named your next four products. That’ll be 80k thanks) However, after exploring Ping, I don’t think Apple is seriously threatening the industry leaders of social networking – yet. 

My primary issue with Ping is that it feels like a big marketing tool. From a PC you can only access Ping through iTunes 10 and so Apple have integrated Ping with their online music store. Consequently it seems that almost all the status updates from the ‘big bands’ (e.g. I’m following Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Lady Gaga, Muse, Nirvana) are simply tools to sell more records. Bob Dylan, for example - and I get the feeling if you asked him Bob would never have heard of Ping - has included all his own songs in the ‘Music I like’ pane (a spot usually reserved for artists to show which other musicians they admire), positively screaming ‘this page was made by a record company exec!’.

Subtle, Bob

 I will keep a close eye on this, but I also have a theory that a lot of artists will have links to other acts on the same record label as them, regardless if they actually ‘like’ the music. Obviously as musicians record sales are one of their primary concerns, but after people have gotten used to the intimacy of Twitter a status update on Ping that’s obviously from a PR intern is not exciting. Twitter is exciting because for a lot of personalities, their tweets have less to do with selling records and more to do with the artist’s everyday life, giving a personal connection to followers that our invasive cyber society craves. In this way Ping is more like an extension of the ‘Store’ page on a bands website rather than a social tool. 

Ping is only a few days old, and at this stage it seems rather heavily populated by the international acts that I mentioned before. Ping has the potential to become significantly better when it is utilised by smaller, local acts, in much the same way that MySpace is used now. Again, there are several barriers that I can see which would prevent smaller acts choosing Ping over MySpace. The primary one is that more people have access to the internet than they do to iTunes Ping. Not everybody uses iTunes, and even less of those people who do use it would actively use Ping. Of course the logical conclusion is for bands to set up both MySpace and Ping profiles, but I bet I know which one most bands will create first. Since Facebook took over the mantle from MySpace as the primary social networking site, MySpace has focused on the music side of social networking, and it does this admirably. It is too early to judge whether Ping will seriously challenge this, but it would have to do a few things differently before it can be considered a serious contender.

Nirvana and The Boss

 What needs to change? For a start, I’d love to see Ping move off the iTunes pane and into an actual website accessible from a normal browser. I’ve never been particularly enamoured with the iTunes store interface, and to have a whole social networking site within this theme gets very annoying. The fact that you have to download and install iTunes 10 to get access to Ping is a turn off as well, I could have started ten Twitter accounts by the time I was ready to launch Ping. Couple with the way Apple mysteriously ‘gathers information’ before starting Ping, I had the eerie feeling I wasn’t social networking but being interrogated by the virtual Gestapo. 

The actual artist pages are very bland, and it seems in the first release there is very little room for this to change. To give an example, Lady Gaga’s page looks very similar to Bruce Springsteen’s: all pages have the same drab, greyish background. I can’t understand in the era of Web 2.0 why Apple would be limiting online creativity to some sort of Orwellian conformance. Of course, one man’s drabness is another’s functionality, so what I see as boring others will see as refreshingly simple. 

Ping's "Simple" User Interface

 Ping will also increase significantly in ‘funness’ when more ordinary people join up. As far as I can tell, none of my friends are using Ping (no sniggering over my lack of friends, please. They’re just not as sophisticated as me, that’s all). Apple were planning to have some sort of built in connectivity with Facebook to facilitate bringing over large quantities of people to the new site, but Facebook pulled out at the last minute. Now I am left with sending the standard ‘You should join me on Ping’ emails provided by the site, but I don’t hold much hope for these (when was the last thing you did something that someone suggested you do via a generic email?). Ping also lacks fun-ness simply because there isn’t much to do. Sure you can look at band pictures, or get a status update from them, but there is nothing that Ping adds to social networking that wasn’t provided before by either MySpace or Twitter, apart from the ability to purchase songs directly from your Ping feed.

Therefore, at this stage, I’m inclined to think of Ping not as a social networking revolution but as the next stage in online shopping evolution. Artists can post songs via their Ping page and followers can buy those songs from Apple in one click. Ping can be seen as extension of the iTunes store, giving artists a chance to talk back to their fans and be their own salespeople instead of relying on Apple to flog their wares for them. 

Unfortunately, Ping lacks the intimacy of Twitter, the functionality and popularity of Facebook and the industry standard-ness of MySpace. In two months I will endeavour to write again about Ping, because it is slightly unfair to judge a social networking site a third of a month after it was launched. In two months time I could be saying what a fool I am, that Ping has changed the way we interact forever, but at this stage unless some massive improvements are made I think Ping will remain a fledgling product.

Check out
www.apple.com/itunes/ping

The Internet: Scamming people since 1990

Con artists the world over must have had a grand party when the internet was invented. No  longer did prospective peddlers have to drive around in a beat up station wagon, selling their wares to whatever small town sucker happened to be bamboozled by the fast talking sales pitch. The simplicity of the internet (when it comes down to it, its point and click) and the extent of its reach mean that more shysters can connect to more suckers twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, all with the wonderfully intimate anonymity that only the World Wide Web could possibly provide.

Now, there are far too many dodgy internet scams going on out there to cover in one blog post, but in my daily perusal of the world’s best resource I came across the wonderfully vague technology of the hologram infused ‘Powerband’ (generic term, the different makers have different product names). I’d love to tell you what these things actually do but I don’t have much of an idea myself. Essentially marketed towards athletes, the bands claim to use a hologram to tune into your body’s natural frequency, thereby assisting with balance, power, fitness and general good looks.

Now you may be thinking, ‘well of course it’s going to sound stupid, simplistic and faux when you boil it down into a sentence. I bet they can explain their product a lot better.’ Well I’m afraid that I have simplified a little bit, but not much. One of the makers of these powerbands, ‘Power Balance’, have summed up their product in two succinct paragraphs:

Ahh, now I get it.

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I see that a company can explain something that claims to increase your body’s core strength by 500% in two generously formatted paragraphs, I conclude that they’re either making more money than Nike, Coke, and Microsoft put together and therefore don’t need a long-winded explanation of their product, or bullshitting. Since after a quick perusal of the share market pages I didn’t find Power Balance on the ‘startling improvers’ list, I was forced to conclude that maybe Power Balance were stretching the truth a bit. Of course the amazing thing on the internet is that nobody really minds if you stretch the truth a bit. In fact, it’s expected. If everyone on the internet was honest then why would we visit?

The fast talking sales pitch might not have much of a place on the internet but con artists realized that the internet is such a magnificent place that your virtual headquarters can look as dazzling as the big boys. This just isn’t true in real life, where selling products out of your shed or the back of your car doesn’t compete with a flashy, edgy Apple store. But, thanks to the wonders of the digital age, for a relatively small fee your digital home can look as good as any. Compare the Eken power band website (another powerband marketer) with the Apple:

www.apple.com

www.ekenpowerbands.com.au

Both are pretty slick interfaces. Now, compare the digital headquarters with the real life buildings:

Apple, Inc.

'Poweband' HQ

Ok, so I made that last pic up, but you can see the point I’m trying to make: on the internet, as long as you have a budget of around 200 bucks, nobody knows if you’re based in canary wharf or on a rusty houseboat at the end of a wharf. Gone are the days when you had to outlay millions of dollars for some prime office real estate. Now, with the advent of cheap web-hosting and a lot of quality free web design products, you have absolutely no reason to have an unprofessional online presence.

So why not give selling a make-believe product online a go? You'll be surprised how stupid people are.