UPEI - BUS442.0

I think this is one of the coolest things i’ve ever seen.

Well this semester, I have become well familiar with blogs. They have been around a while and I don’t think they are going to go anywhere soon. However, last weekend while browsing Youtube I found something kind of cool.

It looks as though many people are turning to Youtube to broadcast their thoughts. Heres an example:

I think this is really cool. This guy goes on here all the time and just makes videos telling stories and his random thoughts. If you check his profile, he has over 110,000 views and over 1,100 subscribers (much how we subscribe to RSS feeds)

It is pretty neat the interaction that goes on in these videos. In our blogs, when people post responses it is just their name and they are more or less anonymous. In this case, people are personally responding (some people wear masks though). I think the amount of interaction is really cool. Take the “Should I buy my son a beer” guy. He has 90 video responses to his simple question.

I think this is an aspect of Youtube that many people fail to recognize. People don’t use it to just post some dumb videos or music videos, they are beginning to use it as a blogging platform. This is the beauty of Youtube. Anyone with a $10 dollar webcam can create and share unique content with anyone for free.

I am not sure if this method of “vlogging” will catch on and become the next blogging, since there really isn’t much anonymity and privacy is such a huge issue these days but I think it is cool none the less.

For those who don’t know me, I am a news junkie. I spend quite a bit of time every day reading news feeds from Yahoo! and Google. Anyways, I came across this article and well here are my thoughts.

For those too lazy to read it, i’ll give you the “sparknotes” run down of it. A guy goes out and when he comes home dozens of strangers are taking all his stuff! Why you may ask? Well someone played a (cruel) prank on this poor man, and posted an ad on Craigslist saying he suddenly had to move out of town and he was giving away all his belongings. This part of the article really got to me….

“I informed them I was the owner, but they refused to give the stuff back,” Salisbury said. “They showed me the Craigslist printout and told me they had the right to do what they did.”

And here is a video explaining everything:

So is it that these people are naive and believe that everything on the Internet is true? or is this actually a growing problem on the Internet, that it is become so powerful that people have no reason to believe what they read isn’t true?

I think this situation is a real wake up call for this Web 2.0 age. It is a prime example of why anonymity online can be a bad thing. Anyone can post anything about anyone. When you’re online you can be whoever you want to be, and that is scary in my opinion. Identity theft is a major problem these days anyways, but this just proves it is not always for financial reasons. This man’s identity was stolen, as he was false represented on Craigslist. There was no real financial reward for whoever did this, rather he did it to play a cruel prank.

The problem is that I cannot see any way of stopping this sort of thing from happening. Along as the web stays the way it is, there is no way of actually confirming your identity. I do feel bad for this guy. Craigslist pretty much ruined his life, but in a way it is good (as sick as that sounds) because it brings a very important flaw in privacy and anonymity into the public eye.

Hopefully adjustments will be made to prevent this from happening again in the future.

-dc

Apple (AAPL.O) is in talks with major music companies to offer customers free access to its entire iTunes music library in exchange for paying a premium for its iPods and iPhones, the Financial Times said.

Citing people familiar with the talks, the paper said the negotiations hinged on a dispute over the price Apple would be willing to pay for access to the labels’ libraries.

One industry executive said research showed consumers would pay a premium of up to $100 for unlimited access to music for the lifetime of a device, or a monthly fee of $7-$8 for a subscription model.

Apple was not immediately available for comment.

Source: Yahoo! News

Well, Just thought i’d post this. Definitely sounds interesting, but im not sure how this would work exactly. It only says iPods and iPhones…. would it be streaming via wifi sort of like how services like Rhapsody work? or would it be unlimited downloads to a PC or Mac? The article is kind of vague. I would pay $100 for access to iTunes library. It is so convenient and it downloads very fast.

Chris Andersen’s Wired post really made me think. What exactly these days constitutes free? In my honest opinion, everything has a price, whether are not you are paying it directly or not.

It cannot be denied, the web is in a sense a commercialized gateway to the entire world. If you take the ability to make money off the world wide web, it falls apart. While many of us use services like Google or Gmail daily for free, SOMEONE out there in cyberspace is paying for our usage. It is the advertisers on Google that make it successful. If there are no advertisements, there is no income, and if there is no income, there is no money. If they have no money they can’t operate, and Google is dead. It isn’t free to run that company, their computing and intellectual resources cost millions of dollars yearly.

Google is a fantastic example. Likely millions of people use it daily, yet no one pays for the right to use it. For us, it is free, but that is just a benefit most of us take for granted in this Web 2.0 world we live in. We as a society need online commerce and business just as much as the companies who run the sites need it to reach their financial goals, because really these sites MAKE the world wide web what it is today.

In terms of consumer products available for free online, I am still sticking by my title of this post: Nothing is free these days. Personally, I think you can think of it in two ways:

1. You are either paying shipping costs or some membership fee of some sort.
2. Even in the case like the free ebook from Oprah, many are likely to continue buying this authors works.

Those are two examples I can think of. I think in 90% of all cases, if you get something “free” you really are paying for it someway or somehow.

My personal favorite example of this are the “pyramid” free iPod deals. Sure at the end of the day you may get an iPod you didn’t pay for, but at what cost? You likely had to sign up for a few offers that had to pay for, then you had to recruit friends to do the same. The companies who you signed up for paid for it. Like my previous Google example, “It’s not free, someone else paid for it.”

The Internet is intriguing in that sense. Overall, it seems free. You could entertain yourself for days and not pay for it, but like i’ve said countless times in this post “Nothing is really free.”

-dc

I was just going through Google’s site and I came across some interesting stuff. Most notably I think their 411 service is very impressive. All these years I kind of always wondered what the point was to have such a thorough index of companies in their Google Maps system. If you ever noticed in Google Maps, you can search for places such as Pizza places and it will find you the closest one.

I think Google does a very good job at using their existing technologies to implement new ones. While Google 411 (1-800-GOOG-411) still has some bugs to work out (No canadian service, business listings only) I think it is a really intriguing concept. For the first time, Google has developed a service that doesn’t compete with traditional online companies. If they can perfect this, it will pose a major threat to telephone company directory assistance because it is free and it’s more intelligent than the 411 that we have today. Google’s service lets you find companies by category as well. In the future they could also integrate this with the GPS that is in cell phones already to make the service even better, but I doubt this will happen since privacy is a major issue here.

I think Google has already conquered the online world, not many people can deny that. I think that since they have done mostly everything there is to do online, they will move to more “offline” products and services. They already have the brand recognition, resources to develop new products and services and not to mention a team of the worlds best engineers at their disposal. I believe they are moving now towards Mobile technologies. One example is their Mobile Product search, which allows you to search products for sale on your cell. They are also developing their own open source mobile OS called Android, which I have previously made a post about .

I’ve gotten about 15 emails in the last hour from the UPEI School of Business “Mailing List.” It is driving me insane.

To opt out it says type your password, which I assumed is your UPEI password but its not.

Note to UPEI: If I wanted on your garbage mailing list I would sign up for it myself

Thats my rant for the night, I just hate email spam.

As most of you all may recall, a couple of days ago I posted a video that my friend made for a contest he is in. The contest is for the University of New Brunswick, and to sum it up quickly the person with the best Facebook group which promotes UNB wins a years worth (or $5000) in tuition.

Since the contest began, my friend has recruited over 800 people to his group and has even gotten interviewed by the Fredericton newspaper.

Ever since the whole thing began it really got me thinking. With the number of universities and colleges in Canada these days, there is immense competition for student enrollment across the country. Will other universities try to establish themselves with an online presence in order to recruit new students? With the way technology trends are these days, I can’t help but think this is the way things are going to go.

I think UNB’s contest is pretty genius. While they are paying a year’s tuition (as the prize) and some television and print promotion for the contest, they are getting far more promotion than they would get in a 30-second TV spot. In these groups the students create all the content to promote the school, and then they must recruit their friends to support them. Take my friend Ryan’s group for example. His group is full of useful UNB information, and with 800 members he has 800 people thinking about UNB by just seeing the title of his group. It is pretty effective marketing, as it is essentially free for the university.

I think that UNB has created an interesting marketing model that will be adapted by many more universities in the future.

Well just thought i’d post this here. In Chapter 5 we made references to Youtube, Creating Content, Remixes, etc etc. Well my friend is in a contest to win his tuition at UNB next year, and he needs to make a Facebook group and the person with the best content and most members wins. We decided to make a re-make/parody of the popular internet video “My New Haircut” (if you haven’t seen it it is all over Youtube) I think it turned out a bit better then Tasia’s Daft Hands. (No Offense Tasia ) Here it is: 

While reading through the TechCrunch blog, I found an interesting post regarding Youtube. For a few years now Youtube has pretty much been the leader in online video content. It is really an exceptional model, as mostly all the content is created by the users, who upload their videos to the site. However, one thing that Youtube is currently lacking is live streaming video. It looks as though that this will change sometime this year, and that they will begin to offer live streaming videos on their site.

I think that this will open up a whole new world of online media. I can think of a few uses for this technology which will be very beneficial…. For example, I know a few years ago when they were just launching PantherRadio, a web radio station for UPEI Panther sports, they had streaming video on their minds but the cost of bandwidth made it very expensive. (They do have live streaming video now through Aliant). If Youtube were to offer live streaming video, what is stopping even smaller schools who can’t afford what UPEI has done to stream their games as well? Youtube is providing the platform, they just need the users to provide the content.

It could also mean a whole new form of blogging for people. Take a guy like Seth Godin, his audience is already there and he has a following, so what would be stopping a guy like him from creating his own live “show” weekly?

When this is implemented, everyone could be a talk show star if they wanted. I think this is long past due on Youtube’s part, and it will be very interesting to see how it pans out.

 -dc