How Far will the internet revolution go? Where will it go? Where will it end?

In 2004 this video offers a hypothesis. However, now in 2008, almost 2009,  we question ourselves how close are we to this terrible truth?

                This post was inspired by a fellow student’s project on internet relationships. Now it is evident that the internet is a major tool in bringing people together. But what if the internet became more than just a way to meet people or even dates. In my culture, the internet is a major factors in finding a spouse. This is not similar to an online mail-order bride service but rather a group of websites that display peoples profiles. The basic principle behind these websites is that a person displays several aspects of themselves such as age, career, family background, residence, height, and interests and them and their family can determine other eligible spouses that would be compatible both personality wise and family wise. One of these websites is shadi.com and it has become a very important tool in arranged marriages.

                Can you imagine having your family or friends scope out a significant other for you solely based on information posted on an internet profile? What was your first reaction to these websited? Do you think culturally this is an example of how the internet is shaping person to person interaction?

The article talks about difficult it is to advirtise on sites like facebook .

FOR some time, Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest advertiser, has been dipping its big toes into the vast pool of Facebook, now the world’s largest social network. I recently knocked on the doors of both companies to hear how the experiment was going. Neither was inclined to say much.

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The “America’s Favorite Stains” campaign, offered on Facebook by Procter & Gamble, asks for members’ ideas. It recently displayed 18 submissions.
Independent experts on Web advertising have been watching, however, and what they see is a myriad of difficulties in making brand advertising work on social networking sites. Members of social networks want to spend time with friends, not brands.

When major brands place banner advertisements on the side of a member’s home page, they pay inexpensive prices, but the ads receive little attention. Seth Goldstein, co-founder of SocialMedia Networks, an online advertising company, wrote on his Facebook blog that a banner ad “is universally disregarded as irrelevant if it’s not ignored entirely.”

When advertisers invite members to come to pages dedicated to their products, they can attract visitors only by investing in expensive creative material or old-fashioned promotions like prize contests.

And when they try to take advantage of new “social advertising,” extending their commercial message to a member’s friends, their ads will be noticed, all right, but not necessarily favorably. Members are understandably reluctant to become shills. IDC, the technology research firm, published a study last month that reported that just 3 percent of Internet users in the United States would willingly let publishers use their friends for advertising. The report described social advertising as “stillborn.”

All Web sites that rely on ads struggle to a greater or lesser extent to convert traffic, even high traffic, into meaningful revenue. Ads that run on Google and other search engines are a profitable exception because their visitors are often in a buying mood. Other kinds of sites, however, can’t deliver similar visitors to advertisers. Google’s own YouTube, which relies heavily, like Facebook, on user-generated content, remains a costly experiment in the high-traffic, low-revenue ad business.

Financial data would show the current state of Facebook’s advertising, but none are available. Facebook is privately held and a spokesman told me that it does not disclose revenue or any information about its ad sales.

As for P.& G, the company permits Facebook to talk about the results of only a single P.& G. promotion, presumably its most successful to date: for Crest Whitestrips. The promotion began in fall 2006, when P.& G. invited Facebook members in 20 college campus networks to become Crest Whitestrips “fans” on the product’s Facebook Page. Facebook said it was a great success, attracting 14,000 fans.

One could argue, however, that with the additional enticements that Crest provided — thousands of free movie screenings, as well as sponsored Def Jam concerts — a brand of hemorrhoid cream could have attracted a similar number of nominal “fans.”

Becoming a “fan” required nothing more than a single click. When Facebook talks about its 130 million members worldwide, it’s careful to include only active members, defined as those who have logged on within the past 30 days. But when it shows the total number of “fans” on a sponsor’s page, it treats all fans as active.

Without endless investment, these sorts of promotions sputter out. More than 4,000 of the onetime 14,000 Facebook fans of Crest Whitestrips have left the fan club.

Outside of official brand pages, Facebook offers space on members’ personal pages that are viewed many billions of times monthly. I ran a small-scale test ad myself over two weeks and paid a varying rate that dropped and dropped, and on the last day would have permitted me to place the add on one million pages for only $80. But companies generally do not like the idea of their brand sharing space with unvetted material supplied by users. The IDC report said, “Brand advertisers largely consider user-generated content as low-quality, brand-unsafe inventory.”

At a conference last month sponsored by the Advertising Club of Cincinnati, Ted McConnell, manager of interactive marketing and innovation at P.& G., said, “I really don’t want to buy any more banner ads in Facebook.” His remarks were offered as his personal reflections, not the official position of his employer, and were available on the Web in a podcast of the talk. A spokeswoman for P.& G. later told me that the company “is committed to our strong relationship with Facebook” and had used the site for “roughly a dozen P.& G. brands,” either previously or currently.

Facebook’s ability to aim at particular demographic groups is impressive, Mr. McConnell told the club. As an experiment, he and a colleague set up an ad that would target all Facebook members who were 22- to 27-year old women, who worked for P.& G., were left-leaning and living in Cincinnati, and who liked sex and Cocoa Puffs. Facebook provided one person who perfectly fit the profile. Speaking not as an advertiser but as a prospective recipient of such highly personalized messaging, Mr. McConnell said, “I’m not so sure I want to be targeted like that.”

                Every watch the show gossip girls, now there is an actually website that encompasses the basic idea behind this popular show. Just log on to juicycampus.com and you can look up any interesting gossip about GW. When scanning this website I because sucked into the never-ending random information about students on campus. I was shocked to find out that student on campus were writing stories about my dorm and that blogs discussing my friends and actins on campus.

                In my opinion internet gossip sites stem from lack of stimulation within the society. Why do people turn to the internet and leave blogs discussing and often time defaming other people and their actions? I think that it is ridiculous how popular this website is and especially how expansive the information posted on it is. It ranges from gossip about main campus, the Mount Vernon campus, students, professors, and even administration. How does the internet facilitate such information and its popularization? Do you think these and other gossip sites are necessary or at the very least do they have another purpose other than mindless entertainment?

            While surfing through the web, I came across a very interesting article that combined what we were discussing in UW and the influence of the internet and a UW group 2 project. The article is written for teachers at Dartmouth College and encourages them to harness the global communication abilities of the internet along with newly developed technologies to create the perfect classroom setting. This global classroom combines internet classes with some physical class sessions to promote learning and convenience.

            This new template for classes does not only use online courses leading to a lack of student-professor interaction but also does not rely on daily classes to teach students either. It is broken down into an online classroom, an occasional face-to-face class session, a website, and online professor-student and student-student discussion.

            After learning about this model, I think that it is the best type of classroom because (as was experienced in the online class we had in UW) there is no confusion associated with online discussion classrooms, and there is the convenience of only having class occasionally. What do you think is the ideal classroom model and how does it compare to this one?

          In the new age of the internet any type of information can be displayed and accessed by users of the web. As was presented in the group projects in UW, there is no international regulation of the internet and because of this lack, there is no way to generate some type of filter towards what is posted online. It was proposed in class that there should be an international body to govern and determine what is morally and ethically appropriate to display on the web. But there are several flaws towards this argument. One is that there is in palpable way that this body can oversee all the material processed and placed on the internet and cyberspace. The regulation that is needed cannot exist at this time because in my opinion the only way regulation can occur is if the code of the internet restricts certain fowl information from being included.

          Why should regulation be important in the first place? The main highlight of the internet is that because it is not regulated, information can be freely processed and projected to the world. Well, the aspect of the internet that I think is the main support for internet regulation is the exploitation of peoples. While reading an article on internet sex trafficking, I was shocked to learn that this multimillion-dollar industry solely existed because of lack of internet regulation. I am appalled to know that the most precious aspect of the internet (it’s freedom) is funding exploitation and demoralizing our society.

Two weeks ago was this year’s “Black Friday,” also known as the busiest shopping day of the year. The monday after Black Friday is known as cyber monday- which is the online equivalent of black friday, created as online shopping became more and more popular. one many wonder which is more popular, and if cyber monday has affected the in store revenues of black friday, since the same deals are usually available online.

With the current economy, many stores extended their online sales that were designated for cyber monday. Electronic stores like circuit city made the entire weekend of black friday a “cyber monday weekend” thus offering all of the great deals of cyber monday starting on friday morning and lasting all weekend long. This year’s online sales nearly tripled the in store revenues at some stores.

this shows how the trend of shopping online as increased greatly in the past years, and how cyber monday may be  more popular than black friday, which had dominated for the past decade.

another point to bring up, is the fact that some people do not need a major sale day like black friday to get the great deals on merchandise. for many products, those prices are available on sites like amazon.com year round.

Personally, I have been looking to buy a new digital camera, and i waited to see the sales that black friday and cyber monday would offer, but ended up buying the camera i wanted off of amazon.com last week since it was cheaper normally than the black friday weekend sales.

do you think that in the future the major shopping weekend of black friday will become less popular as online shopping continues to become more popular with sites like amazon.com and ebay.com? or will the sales of the cyber monday weekend remain?

News blogs are some of the most popular blogs on the Web, and sites such as the Huffington Post have gained prominence as sources for ones news, especially in during Election 2008, when web-generated material became a synonimous with the race. Such web “news reports” can be done by actual journalists, but a lot of times they are the work of ordinary people without any professional journalistic experience. They are simply people who feel strongly about current events and decide to weigh in on them. The clear appeal to a blog-style news story is probably its casual tone.

The problem that seems to arise is the issue of bias. Since a blogger could put virtually anything online, a story that is generated may contain erroneous information for propaganda purposes. Reuters ran into such an issue when they used visuals from a Lebanese freelance photographer during the Israeli attacks.

However a positive aspect of this type of journalism is that it can provide first hand accounts on big issues anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes, as was the case for the attacks in Mumbai. Blogs from people at the center of disasters offer a much deeper, personal perspective. They can also provide information in areas where it may not be safe for reporters to go, such as provinces in Iraq where there is still fighting.

So, given the issue of bias that these citizen journalists may evoke, is this a positive trend for the way journalism is done, the media industry, and, most importantly, us.

Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times
Michael Buckley, YouTube host, at home in Connecticut.
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By BRIAN STELTER
Published: December 10, 2008
Making videos for YouTube — for three years a pastime for millions of Web surfers — is now a way to make a living.

Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times
Michael Buckley quit his day job in September. He says his online show is “silly,” but it helped pay off credit-card debt.
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One year after YouTube, the online video powerhouse, invited members to become “partners” and added advertising to their videos, the most successful users are earning six-figure incomes from the Web site. For some, like Michael Buckley, the self-taught host of a celebrity chatter show, filming funny videos is now a full-time job.

Mr. Buckley quit his day job in September after his online profits had greatly surpassed his salary as an administrative assistant for a music promotion company. His thrice-a-week online show “is silly,” he said, but it has helped him escape his credit-card debt.

Mr. Buckley, 33, was the part-time host of a weekly show on a Connecticut public access channel in the summer of 2006 when his cousin started posting snippets of the show on YouTube. The comical rants about celebrities attracted online viewers, and before long Mr. Buckley was tailoring his segments, called “What the Buck?” for the Web. Mr. Buckley knew that the show was “only going to go so far on public access.”

“But on YouTube,” he said, “I’ve had 100 million views. It’s crazy.”

All he needed was a $2,000 Canon camera, a $6 piece of fabric for a backdrop and a pair of work lights from Home Depot. Mr. Buckley is an example of the Internet’s democratizing effect on publishing. Sites like YouTube allow anyone with a high-speed connection to find a fan following, simply by posting material and promoting it online.

Granted, building an audience online takes time. “I was spending 40 hours a week on YouTube for over a year before I made a dime,” Mr. Buckley said — but, at least in some cases, it is paying off.

Mr. Buckley is one of the original members of YouTube’s partner program, which now includes thousands of participants, from basement video makers to big media companies. YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, places advertisements within and around the partner videos and splits the revenues with the creators. “We wanted to turn these hobbies into businesses,” said Hunter Walk, a director of product management for the site, who called popular users like Mr. Buckley “unintentional media companies.”

YouTube declined to comment on how much money partners earned on average, partly because advertiser demand varies for different kinds of videos. But a spokesman, Aaron Zamost, said “hundreds of YouTube partners are making thousands of dollars a month.” At least a few are making a full-time living: Mr. Buckley said he was earning over $100,000 from YouTube advertisements.

The program is a partial solution to a nagging problem for YouTube. The site records 10 times the video views as any other video-sharing Web site in the United States, yet it has proven to be hard for Google to profit from, because a vast majority of the videos are posted by anonymous users who may or may not own the copyrights to the content they upload. While YouTube has halted much of the illegal video sharing on the site, it remains wary of placing advertisements against content without explicit permission from the owners. As a result, only about 3 percent of the videos on the site are supported by advertising.

But the company has high hopes for the partner program. Executives liken it to Google AdSense, the technology that revolutionized advertising and made it possible for publishers to place text advertisements next to their content.

“Some of these people are making videos in their spare time,” said Chad Hurley, a co-founder of YouTube. “We felt that if we were able to provide them a true revenue source, they’d be able to hone their skills and create better content.”

In a time of media industry layoffs, the revenue source — and the prospect of a one-person media company — may be especially appealing to users. But video producers like Lisa Donovan, who posts sketch comedy onto YouTube and attracted attention in the fall for parodies of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, do not make it sound easy. “For new users, it’s a lot of work,” Ms. Donovan said. “Everybody’s fighting to be seen online; you have to strategize and market yourself.”

Mr. Buckley, who majored in psychology in college and lives with his husband and four dogs in Connecticut, films his show from home. Each episode of “What the Buck?” is viewed an average of 200,000 times, and the more popular ones have reached up to three million people. He said that writing and recording five minutes’ worth of jokes about Britney Spears’s comeback tour and Miley Cyrus’s dancing abilities is not as easy as it looks. “I’ve really worked hard on honing my presentation and writing skills,” he said.

As his traffic and revenues grew, Mr. Buckley had “so many opportunities online that I couldn’t work anymore.” He quit his job at Live Nation, the music promoter, to focus full-time on the Web show.

There is a symmetry to Mr. Buckley’s story. Some so-called Internet celebrities view YouTube as a stepping stone to television. But Mr. Buckley started on TV and found fame on YouTube. Three months ago, he signed a development deal with HBO, an opportunity that many media aspirants dream about. Still, “I feel YouTube is my home,” he said. “I think the biggest mistake that any of us Internet personalities can make is establish ourselves on the Internet and then abandon it.”

Cory Williams, 27, a YouTube producer in California, agrees. Mr. Williams, known as smpfilms on YouTube, has been dreaming up online videos since 2005, and he said his big break came in September 2007 with a music video parody called “The Mean Kitty Song.” The video, which introduces Mr. Williams’ evil feline companion, has been viewed more than 15 million times. On a recent day, the video included an advertisement from Coca-Cola.

Mr. Williams, who counts about 180,000 subscribers to his videos, said he was earning $17,000 to $20,000 a month via YouTube. Half of the profits come from YouTube’s advertisements, and the other half come from sponsorships and product placements within his videos, a model that he has borrowed from traditional media.

On YouTube, it is evident that established media entities and the up-and-coming users are learning from each other. The amateur users are creating narrative arcs and once-a-week videos, enticing viewers to visit regularly. Some, like Mr. Williams, are also adding product-placement spots to their videos. Meanwhile, brand-name companies are embedding their videos on other sites, taking cues from users about online promotion. Mr. Walk calls it a subtle “cross-pollination” of ideas.

Some of the partners are major media companies; the ones with the most video views include Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, CBS and Warner Brothers. But individual users are now able to compete alongside them. Mr. Buckley, who did not even have high-speed Internet access two years ago, said his YouTube hobby had changed his financial life.

“I didn’t start it to make money,” he said, “but what a lovely surprise.