Web 3.0: A Locked Down, “Secured” Web 2.0?
While a lot of different people have attempted to deploy the term Web 3.0 to mean pretty much anything they like, I’ve read more and more reports in the last couple of weeks that seem to be positioning Web 3.0 as the locking down of all of the socially shared information that has been the core of Web 2.0. Here’s an example from Australia’s The Age:
WEB 2.0 is well established, and sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Digg have turned the internet from a static source of information into a huge, interactive digital playground. But where to next? What will the next stage of web culture – which some people call Web 3.0 – be like? The expectation seems to be that profound changes are on the way. If Web 2.0 is about generating and sharing your own content, Web 3.0 will make information less free.Privacy fears, new forms of advertising, and restrictions imposed by media companies will mean more digital walls, leading to a web that’s safer but without its freewheeling edge. […]This openness is one of the defining features of Web 2.0. But software specialist Nat Torkington, of high-tech publishing house O’Reilly Media, predicts a backlash. He argues that one serious leak or theft of private data could change opinions overnight.”It could be a Three Mile Island of the net,” he says, referring to the 1979 accident that turned the US public against nuclear power.
While this story is more about a more locked-down web being forthcoming rather than present, it’s been noteworthy that the same paper has since run stories about the ease of hacking computers via browsers thanks to Web 2.0 technologies, the fact that stolen identities are being sold cheap by criminals since they’re so easy to obtain thanks to poor web security, and one more nasty tale about 6 teenage girls who lured another girl to one of their homes and then beat her viciously before posting a video of the beating online (or, as The Age called it “an ‘animalistic’ YouTube attack”).
So, the two broad possibilities you’d garner from reading The Age this week are either that Web 2.0 is the root of great evil and needs to be secured immediately, or that someone editing the technology sections of The Age is trying to push for a dramatic change in online culture. (Or, possibly, some middle ground between the two.) What do you think: are the freedoms of Web 2.0 going to be curtailed due to rampant misuse?
Photo by Darwin Bell (CC BY NC)
Nine Promotes Canal Road By Allowing Free Downloading of Episodes
After the recent debacle with Nine’s Underbelly series becoming a star of the peer-to-peer downloading circuit, the network have taken an entirely different approach with their new offering Canal Road, making the initial episodes available as free downloads. From NineMSN:
After battling illegal internet downloads of its hit program Underbelly, the Nine Network will offer up free online access to its new series Canal Road. Viewers will have the opportunity to download the first four episodes of the new Aussie drama for free before it debuts on national television on April 16. […] Ninemsn will make the first two episodes available for download on April 7, with episodes three and four following on April 14. Every other episode will be available to download immediately after it airs on the Nine Network.
Nine said in February it was considering taking legal action after thousands of people started downloading leaked episodes of its controversial gangland drama Underbelly, which was banned in Victoria. This time around the network is keen to stress that viewers will be able to get a preview of Canal Road legally. “All downloaded episodes of Canal Road can also be legally shared with family and friends by saving them onto a DVD or through the existing peer-to-peer file sharing programs,” ninemsn said in a statement.
Kudos to Nine: while streaming video of episodes and the occasional downloadable-but-expires-within-a-week episodes have been tried by Australian broadcasters in the past, Nine’s Canal Road episodes can be downloaded, kept, played offline and won’t “expire”. Indeed, this new ‘Catch-Up TV’ service sports the following message regarding Canal Road:
You can also copy, share and burn each episode to DVD or even distribute the files via file-sharing applications, such as Bit Torrent.
In actually encouraging Australia TV watchers to use Bit Torrent, Nine is finally trying to build on what they know a reasonable segment of their audience are already up to. However, that notice is a little disingenuous: yes, users can download and redistribute the episodes, BUT in order to play the episodes back, you must have the Hiro Video Player Plugin (which works with Windows Media Player on PCs and Quicktime on Macs) and Hiro inserts advertisements into the downloaded episodes. So, in order to play the episode, each computer must have Hiro installed. More to the point, “burn each episode to DVD” sounds like the file can be either converted to a DVD format or can be played in DivX compatible DVD players but this simply isn’t true.
So, while Nine have made leaps and bounds in providing downloadable episodes for their viewers (and certainly Canal Road will be benefiting from the press surrounding such an experiment), they’ve still made claims (such as the episodes being burnable to DVD) which, while not completely untrue, are a little deceptive. That said, if you are willing to put up with a few ads you can’t fast forward to rewind — Hiro doesn’t seem to insert that many ads (I got three single ads, all around 30 seconds in the 45 minutes playback of the first episode of Canal Road) — then the episodes are of a very decent quality (720×576) although for some reason they did play back on my PC in 4:3 when it was clearly shot in 16:9.
A few solid steps in the right direction here, but still a few more steps worth taking to get legal downloads right!
Links for April 6th 2008
Interesting links for April 6th 2008:
- Study: Violent Games Relax Players [Next Generation – Interactive Entertainment Today, Video Game and Industry News – Home of Edge Online] – “People who play violent videogames online generally feel more relaxed and less angry after they have played, according to a new study by psychologists at Middlesex University” (Lets see if this one gets mainstream news coverage!)
- Battlestar Galactica: Join the Fight | Battlestar Galactica Social Network [SCIFI.COM] – The SciFi network have launched the “Battlestar Galactica social gaming experience” … you can be either human or Cylon (oddly enough). The “game” seems a little clunky in the layout and interface, but I’ll have to give it a try…
- The art of the teleprompter [Presentation Zen] – Some interesting thinking about the art of using teleprompters (esp looking at US politicians). John McCain doesn’t fare very well!
- How does the new, free online Photoshop match up with its free competition? [OJR] – “In summary, I didn’t find any functionality in Photoshop Express that Web users didn’t already have available to them in Picasa, Picnik and Splashup.”
Links for April 2nd 2008
Interesting links for April 2nd 2008:
- Bringing the cloud with you [Official Google Docs Blog] – Google edges even further in Microsoft’s heartland as Google Docs becomes available offline!
- Google April Fool’s Jokes Galore [Google Blogscoped} – A round-up of Google’s extensive April Foos offerings. The best one, of course, was the Australian based: “gDay with MATE technology to ?search content on the internet before it?s created,?.”
- YouTube’s Video Identification in Action [Google Operating System] – What options go content owners now get if YouTube detects others using their copyrighted material? They can either “block (no exposure and no money) or track (exposure, but no money) or monetize (exposure and money).”
Links for April 1st 2008
Interesting links for March 31st 2008 through April 1st 2008:
- Police take a tip from YouTube [Australian IT] – “Call it BlueTube. Citizen-supplied video evidence of crimes appears set to take off with police forces around Australia.”
- Embracing the torrent of online video [BBC NEWS | Technology] – Very positive piece from Michael Geist on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s decision to make one of their shows available for free, without DRM, via peer to peer Bittorrent networks.
- Decline Of US Newspapers Accelerating [Tech Crunch] – “Figures released by the Newspaper Association of America show that the decline of newspapers is more rapid than previously thought, with total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunging 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006…”
Microsoft Patents Ones and Zeroes!
From the LAMP Watercooler:
In a stunning revelation today Bill Gates announced that Microsoft has won exclusive rights to the use of 0’s and 1’s in perpetuitity. In a statement released earlier today Gates was quoted as saying: “Yeah… all that Anti-Trust hoo-hah was just a furphy while we were sneaking this one under the radar…” Not content with owning virtually everything in the known world, Microsoft has now, effectively bought up the rights to all software, hardware “wetware” and in fact, the entire universe including black holes and stars.
And that’s not all! Yes, in Australia it’s already April 1st!
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