Stumbling through the web

Spent a lot of time last night browsing the web. well, OK, most of it was just stumbling along really. A few blogs ago I commented on Stumbler, and had downloaded and installed the toolbar into Firefox. I have occasionally stumbled, but last night my wife was watching a murder drama (Blue Murder if you watch Irish/UK TV), so I decided this was boring and I would browse the web, but then I kind of deviated and started to stumble. It was a lot more interesting once I got into it.

I found that they had recommended some 'friends' to me that shared similar interests. A number of them were from Canada, some from the US of A and a surprising number were from Ireland. I then discovered they had groups you could join. Sort of like Yahoo! Groups. So I decided to join the Ireland and Photography groups. This is real community web stuff if you want to meet like minded people. It shows who are online, what their preferences are and you can contact them if you wish. With your Stumbler registration it creates an Inbox for you so that when you log on you can see from the mailbox flag whether you have mail or not. It does not come to your personal mail address, unless you obviously choose to provide that to people. However, I think it is safer keeping it insulated from the rest of your life. I browsed some categories under photography, and found some really excellent pages with absolutely magnificent photos, which I gave the thumbs up, meaning I like it. You can send pages to friends, rate them, add them to your favourites, or just stumble around. Curiously I found that the Photography Group has been around since 2004. So, that means Stumbler has been around since then at least, so not nearly that new. Anyhow, I spent a delighful evening stumbling around.

So much so that I forgot to update my podcasts on my Sandisk, so I ended up listening to music coming into the office. The podcasts for the last week had been from the BBC Archives, entitled Rice Bowl, and it dealt with rice production in China, Bangladesh and Japan. It featured discussions with farmers for their views, ordinary young people about what they eat and how much rice they consume and why, and then a general view of life in the area and the crops. For someone born and bred in a city and who eats rice maybe once or twice a week, it is fascinating, particularly as I had only been to Bangladesh, and had seen what the monsoon does to that country, and had never been to either Japan or China. I also listed to part 1 and 2 on the history of slavery and the period leading up to the emancipation of the slaves with the abolition of slavery. Eyewitness Iraq dealt with the effects the war has had on the lifes of ordinary people in Iraq. The news always focuses on the soldiers that have died and the carbombs, but we tend to forget about the humanitarian aspect of it - how it affects the ordinary people who are simply trying to live their lives and survive. I guess that is what I like about the BBC Archives - it helps me maintain a balanced outlook on the rest of the world that is out there, so that I do not just immerse myself into the wonders of technology and the Internet, but that I remember that the world is more than just me and my computerised view of it.

Anyhow, enough philosophy for today. I also browsed through some of CNN Moneys other start-ups to watch. The next on the list was Revision3. The overview said it was a production studio for geek oriented online shows. Well, I couldn't have said it better myself. They produce a series of video podcasts (or vodcasts as some would have it be) which you can download to your MP3 player or iTunes. Some names: Diggnation (Revision3 was started by the Digg founder Kevin Rose...), Geekdrome, Ctrl-Alt-Chicken, NotMTV, The Totally Rad Show etc. As you can see by the names, very geeky and cheeky. They also have individual sites for the shows, where you can browse the backlog, read the discussions etc. iFanBoy does some book reviews - this week is Michael Moore. From my own experience I suggest you download the show and not try to watch it online. I have a great connection that I work from, yet using Qtime, which it requires, I found it very intermittent. They make their money by selling sponsorships for each episode to companies like Sony, Microsoft and Go Daddy. Well, I guess I finally found where the production house is!

It is very interesting, being part of a business that sells broadband connections off its own network. The payments made by users are declining in real terms (prices staying static) and the bandwidth provided is increasing each year. Therefore for the operator of the network, costs are increasing by inflation, prices are fixed and the only way to make money is to increase the subscriber base. The big debate is net neutrality and how to monetise traffic across the Internet and increase ARPU (Average Revenue Per Unit - that is right, we are all measured as units...). The problem for carriers is that the traffic originates at one point and terminates at the other, and flows across their networks, using the bandwidth they sell for very little money at a fixed price, to generate money at either of the end points for someone else. And, to add insult to injury, one of the end points would be a services server, delivering content from any number of the sites we have been looking at. And, although many fail, and more slide into oblivion, the question for these sites too has been how to monitise their services. And the answer generally is that if you generate enough traffic, you can use advertising. Advertising on the Internet as a marketing medium is growing rapidly again after the lull caused by the Dot.com bust around the millenium. Led obviously by Internet advertising giants, Google, this moves revenues around the Internet across multiple sites in small amounts at a time. Now, if your site gets enough footfall, you generate revenue and survive, or, you may be lucky and become one of the giants, like YouTube, MySpace, Flickr etc. And still the network operators are left wondering how they can make some of those cents moving across their pipes sticky, so they can trap some.

And the answer is they can't. WebTV and video is made possible by broadband and bandwidth. Operators have chosen to move away from charging for usage to flat rate for as much as you can eat as a competitive advantage. Now they are complaining that people are starting to eat too much, and the original 'competitive advantage' is becoming a revenue restrictor. Not really. It is simply the nature of the beast. Operators will need to find ways of layering services on top of their operations, or find ways of partnering with content and service providers to try to get some pennies per connection to stick. And it will only be the bigger ones with scale that will survive in the long run, unless the broadband business moves back to charging for usage, by selling consumption in chunks.

Reality TV showed the way, Social networks then became the next big thing with taking reality TV to the Web. And now WebTV is adding content to it for the Internet to become the entertainment channel of choice for many already and more in time to come. Parental allowances of total screen time per day for young people will increasingly move to the Internet, and old fashioned TV will have to change to survive and compete with WebTV to capture the audiences and the advertising money in time to come. The evolution is taking place, and it can't be stopped.